Abstract

In both the policy literature, including that from a feminist perspective, and in policy making, the issue of the persistent unbalance in the gender division of unpaid work has been addressed mainly with regard to care, generally further limited to caring for a pre-school child. Yet, unpaid family work includes many more tasks. On the basis of an overview of the most recent studies on the division of unpaid family work, the article discusses the partiality - in empirical and theoretical terms - of existing explanations and of their focus on women's labor force participation as the main road towards a better gender division of unpaid labor.