MUMTIME · Understanding gender inequality through time-use research: Mothers’ daily lives and time poverty in Cyprus and beyond

MUMTIME explores mothers’ time-use in Cyprus and beyond, addressing the often-overlooked problem of time poverty among working women with children. While gender inequality research in Europe has tended to prioritise income and employment-based measures, MUMTIME argues that time-use offers an important lens for understanding persistent inequalities and seeks to contribute by examining not only the amount, but also the quality of free time, including mothers’ experiences of leisure activities. MUMTIME will be answering the following research questions: (1) How do mothers in Cyprus allocate their time across paid work, unpaid work, personal care, and leisure activities, and what does this reveal about their experience of time poverty in daily life? (2) To what extent do patterns of time-use among working mothers reflect and reinforce the motherhood penalty beyond its economic dimensions? (3) How do these time-use patterns inform gender equality policies? An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design will be employed, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a comprehensive understanding of working mothers’ time-use and experiences of time poverty. Using an adapted, open-access time-use diary data collection tool and semi-structured interviews, MUMTIME aims to better understand the complexity of mothers’ daily lives, to offer insights that survey questionnaires often fail to capture, such as multitasking and co-presence. Time-use is positioned as a fundamental dimension of gender inequality in MUMTIME to offer a nuanced perspective on mothers’ realities, as well as a practical foundation for shaping gender equality policies. The findings will inform policy interventions aimed at addressing persistent gender inequalities and improving mothers’ wellbeing, grounded in empirical findings that integrate time-use research with feminist theory on care, while advocating the importance of nationally representative time-use data collection.