Silbaugh on “Women’s Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, and Work-Family Balance”

FeministLawProf Katharine Baird Silbaugh (Boston University) has posted to ssrn her article “Women’s Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, and Work-Family Balance.”   Here is the abstract:

In the past decade a substantial literature has emerged analyzing the role of work-family conflict in hampering women’s economic, social, and civil equality. Many of the issues we routinely discuss as work family balance problems have distinct spatial dimensions. “Place” is by no means the main factor in work-family balance difficulties, but amongst work-family policy-makers it is perhaps the least appreciated. This article examines the role of urban planning and housing design in frustrating the effective balance of work and family responsibilities. Nothing in the literature on work-family balance reform addresses this aspect of the problem. That literature focuses instead on employer mandates and family law reforms. This article fills the gap by evaluating the effect of “Ëœplace” on work-family balance and the role law plays in creating our challenging geography. I argue that effective work-family balance requires attention to the spatial dimensions of the work-family conflict.

The full article is available here.   Silbaugh has been a leading scholar in the field of women and work for over 10 years now, starting back in 1996 with “Turning Labor Into Love: Housework and the Law,” 91 Northwestern University Law Review 1.   If you haven’t read that one yet, do.

-Bridget Crawford