School of Law

Living with science: time for care and career progression - a gendered balance?

Completion Date: 30 September 2009

My research considers the issue of work-life balance, focusing on the gendered time use patterns of mobile scientists in the private and domestic sphere, and, especially, on the way how their unpaid work and caring responsibilities impact on their paid work, job opportunities, working time organisation, and career progression.

My thesis builds on previous knowledge and on the central hypothesis that a sociological diversity of work-life balance arrangements is to be found among mobile scientists in Portugal, given the multiplicity of specific combinations of a complex set of variables linked both to the personal and family life cycle and to the scientific career cycle, as well as to the gendered interplay between the two.

These core research questions lie at the heart of my study.