The funds have paid for honorarium for interpreters to accompany myself and one other collaborative researcher as we interview French dual-earner families about their work/life balance and well-being, focusing on issues of the household division of labor, carework by and for the older generations, the social welfare network that supports work-life balance, the corporate or other work environment that supports or detracts from work/life balance, as well as couple's attitudes toward bearing and rearing children, and the meaning of family today.  

I first discussed with my collaborator, Dr. Hiroko Umegaki of Sciences Po in Paris, about her interest in carrying this out as a joint project. She has done a Ph.D. dissertation from Cambridge University on the role of grandparents in the family.  Hence she was interested in pursuing especially the question of intergenerational care in families of dual earners in Paris. We began the project in December by finding the interpreters ard readying the resume and fiche in both languages for the interviews.  We began the interviews in January 2018 and had finished 18 by the end of February. We are continuing the project until we reach thirty informants, but Dr. Umegaki's funds will cover the rest of the interviews.  

To date we have found that the French have far more flexibility in achieving work and life balance than their Japanese counterparts.This is not particularly surprising, given the high level of government support for childbearing and rearing, and the lower working hours.  We find the range of how they think about family, and how women think about work and their own sense of liberation and independence, to be quite striking..  It is too early to give definitive findings, but we will be doing fieldwork on the project until the end of April 2018 and expect to carry out analyes over the coming two years.