This is a book about couples at work. By work I mean the paid work that couples do to earn a living, and its varying demands, the unpaid work that goes into running a household, its physical, mental, and emotional dimensions, and the work couples do when negotiating and deciding how to combine the two: the interactions, negotiations, and relationalities involved in deciding who does what, when, and why. Further, in the context of the couple interview, the book concerns the work that partners do in presenting an account of their labour to me, the interviewer, and to each other. Theoretically the book is situated in and informed by several theoretical debates including ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987), moral values and responsibilities (Duncan et al, 2003; Doucet, 2017), ‘good mothering’ (Hays, 1996), and ethics of care (Fisher and Tronto, 1990), with a focus on relational negotiations of decisions and practices (Twamley, 2021; Doucet, 2023). The book explores these elements of work and their relationalities, examining the complexity of gender differences in household divisions and the mechanisms through which the influence of employment on domestic divisions of labour works.

As Chapter 2 elaborates, the book is situated in the context of debates on the relationship between welfare state models (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Lewis, 1992; Esping-Anderson et al, 2002), workplace structures and social policies (Gornick and Meyers, 2003; Hantrais, 2004; Ellingsæter and Leira, 2006; Grunow, 2019), and domestic divisions of labour. It focuses on the UK as an anglophone country (Baird and O’Brien, 2015) with a liberal welfare regime (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Esping-Anderson et al, 2002) characterized by low levels of welfare support, and a ‘modified, weak breadwinner model’.