Paid work and care work are fundamental to the lives of adult family members and it has become increasingly difficult and onerous to manage successfully a job alongside care for dependants in the context of rapid and dramatic family and labour market change. Men and women must juggle the competing demands of work and family and many commentators have documented the overspill of stress due to work–family imbalance into both the workplace and, more often, the family. The problems of balancing responsibilities are not the same for both sexes. Women and, during recent decades, mothers in particular, have increased their participation in the labour market greatly, but men have not increased their participation in unpaid household work to a matching degree. The issue underlying work– family balance is that of the gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work, which has also long been a fundamental source of gender inequalities.