Events

You are warmly invited to join us for a hybrid seminar:

Couples at Work: Negotiating Paid Employment, Housework, and Childcare

• Wednesday, February 4th 2026
• 15.00 – 17.00 (UK time; to convert to your own timezone, click here) 
• Hybrid event taking place

• in person in R0.03 (Ramphal Building, University of Warwick)
• online via Teams through this link

• (Meeting ID: 383 114 966 802 45; Passcode: tc682Ps3)

This event celebrates the publication of Dr Emily Christopher’s book, Couples at Work: Negotiating Paid Employment, Housework and Childcare. It will consist of a presentation by Emily and a panel discussion featuring Professor Katherine Twamley (UCL) and Dr Emma Casey (University of York).

About the Book:

Couples at Work offers a unique look into how couples manage paid employment, housework, and childcare. It explores how employment structures, policies, and practices intersect with individual attitudes to either reinforce or challenge gender inequalities in the domestic sphere through the ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ of gender. The book introduces a new typology of fathering as a key mechanism through which policies affect domestic divisions of labour, demonstrating how this typology shapes the tasks men undertake and the impact of this on women’s ability to act on their ‘preferences’ about how to combine paid work and home. By examining couples' negotiations of housework and childcare, the book highlights the disparity between men’s and women’s reports on household duties, revealing distinct gendered differences in how tasks are both conceptualized and measured.

Speaker Bios:

Dr Emily Christopher is a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy in the Department of Society and Politics at Aston University. Emily's research primarily focuses on the reproduction of gendered inequalities in paid and unpaid work, social policy and families. Her current research examines the role of UK childcare policy in bringing about change in gender relations within families.

Dr Emma Casey is Reader in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York. Emma’s research broadly seeks to redress the relative lack of prominence of sociological studies of domestic life and experiences. Her recent book The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up explores the ways that women's unpaid labour is currently being glamourised and repositioned as empowering 'self-care' within social media cultures and, with a focus on cleaninfluencers, why the burden of housework still falls on women.

Professor Katherine Twamley is a Sociologist at the Social Research Institute, University College London. Katherine’s research focuses on gender, love and intimacy, social policy, and families. Her recent book Caring is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood explores why and how mixed-sex couples make decisions around parental leave at the transition to parenthood, and how these decisions shape their work and family care practices during and after the leave period, contributing to debates over the efficacy of UK parental leave policy.

This event is free and open to all, but advance registration is required. To register for a place, CLICK HERE.

Refreshments will be provided.

If you have any questions about the event, please email cswg-events@warwick.ac.uk

If you have accessibility requirements or there are any adjustments we can make to support your full participation, you can let us know through the booking page above.

This event is organised by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick.
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