Project description
Understanding time poverty among working mothers
Working mothers often face a hidden form of inequality known as ‘time poverty’, where long hours of paid and unpaid work leave little or no meaningful free time, shaping everyday life in ways that traditional economic measures of inequality fail to capture. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MUMTIME project focuses on working mothers in Cyprus and beyond. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines time-use diaries and interviews, the project will generate evidence on mothers’ daily lived realities, including multitasking and hidden workloads, to inform more effective gender equality policies and support improved wellbeing for working mothers. Ultimately, the project intends to provide the evidence needed to design more effective policies that improve working mothers’ wellbeing and reduce time poverty.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology social issues social inequalities gender inequality
- social sciences sociology gender studies women’s studies
- social sciences sociology gender studies gender equality
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.