Off‐Scheduling within Dual‐Earner Couples: An Unequal and Negative Externality for Family Time

International audienceUsing couples' time-diary data from two French time-use surveys (1986, 1999), this article explores the extent to which off-scheduling within dual-earner couples is an unequal and negative externality for family time. An empirical typology of family workdays is built using a variant of optimal matching, and three kinds of family time are taken into account: conjugal time, father- and mother-child time, and parents-child time. The results indicate that off-scheduling is an unintentional by-product of employers' economic interests and that, since it reduces conjugal and parents-child time but fails to foster temporal complementarity between parents, it is a negative factor for family solidarity