The winner doesn’t need to take it all: Unravelling the gendered value of work time

How people understand, negotiate and use time at work shapes their daily experiences. Yet, when work time is divided, allocated and valued in workplaces, women often lose out. Despite pervasive empirical evidence of gender gaps, research has largely overlooked the deeper role of time in shaping inequality. Our integrative review introduces a novel temporal lens by examining the value of time in workplace contexts. We reveal that the value of time is complex, subjective and socially constructed. The tangible and symbolic value of time are intertwined, and ‘having’ and ‘using’ time are imbued with social interpretation and meanings that are reflected back onto the individuals who are allocated and ‘use’ it. We integrate our synthesis into a heuristic framework for understanding the gendered implications of the value of work time, which we illustrate with exemplars from mainstream research that has identified gendered issues in the ways time is understood, negotiated and used in the workplace. Our review challenges research assumptions about why gender differences may be found in the workplace but are rarely tested and instead argues for integrating the value of time to understand why inequalities persist. In doing so, we offer a conceptual tool to support future research into the temporal dynamics of workplace inequality.