The Future is Familiar - Young Swedes Imagining Work-life Balance in Their Future Adulthood

Abstract: This thesis explores the imagined futures of young Swedes with a focus on how they envision creating work-life balance and how they aim to divide their time between paid and unpaid work. This is done by analyzing written accounts of 168 upper secondary students from both university preparatory schools (UP) and vocational schools (VO) in a middle-sized town in Sweden. Three top-level strategies for creating work-life balance are identified in the study: The Domestic Strategy, The Individualized Strategy, and The Having-it-all Strategy. A feminist, intersectional lens is applied when analyzing how categories of class and gender intersect in imagined futures. Arlie Hochschild’s (2012) concept of ‘the second shift’ is used to understand the gendered patterns of division of time between paid and unpaid work that prevails in the empirical material. Female participants illustrate more awareness of the future responsibility of the second shift than the male participants and appear more torn between the choice of a family or a career than the men do. Additionally, the concept of ‘respectability’ from Beverley Skeggs (2002) is used when understanding classed differences in future work-life balance. The VO-women more often imagine themselves in traditional marriages doing the larger part of the second shift than the UP-women. The thesis concludes that the men appear to be in a position where they have better access to create WLB than the women do, furthermore the UP-men have a better position than the VO-men. UP-women wish to a greater extent for more gender equality in future families than VO-women do, meaning that VO-women are the group who will have the hardest time creating WLB in the future.