A Feminist Political Economy Analysis of Temporal Inequalities

Studies of inequality have become more popular in recent decades as the incidence of inequality and its consequences have become problematised. Alongside these studies, an interest in time use and temporal inequalities have also grown. Time use studies have primarily focussed on women’s unpaid work, specifically as debates about the care economy, and the growing care crisis accompanied by population ageing have entered policy debates. Time and its availability is embedded in every process of our lives, having important implications for economic outcomes, social interactions, health status, and the resources we have with which to mediate these outcomes. Time thus acts as a master variable that connects phenomena usually treated as separate, such as health, fertility, wealth, accumulation and environmental degradation. This paper develops a multidimensional framework for analysing temporal inequality built around three dimensions: temporal resources (time poverty), temporal autonomy (time dispossession), and temporal horizons (time foreshortening). While existing concepts such as time poverty capture important aspects of temporal inequality they provide only a partial understanding of how temporal resources, autonomy and future horizons are structured. The framework is illustrated through examples drawn from social reproduction and the care economy, demonstrating how temporal inequalities shape outcomes across health, work and wellbeing. The paper highlights that understanding temporal inequalities requires attention not only to how much time individuals possess, but also to who controls that time and whose present time can be converted into future security, wellbeing and accumulation.