The image of engineering as a masculine profession has reproduced the perception that engineering is unsuitable for women. While various strategies have been used to try to increase the number of women entering engineering education and employment, their success has been limited. At the same time it has been argued that the way gender is ‘done’ in work can help diminish or increase inequality between the sexes. Using empirical research exploring women engineering students’ workplace experiences, this article considers how gender performance explains their behaviour and attitudes. Butler implied that doing gender can result in our being ‘undone’. This was specifically found to be the case for the women students in this study, who performed their gender in a particular way in order to gain male acceptance. In doing this they utilized certain coping strategies: acting like one of the boys, accepting gender discrimination, achieving a reputation, seeing the advantages over the disadvantages and adopting an ‘anti‐woman’ approach. These strategies are part of women's enculturation and professionalization in engineering, yet they also fail to value femaleness. In ‘doing’ engineering, women often ‘undo’ their gender. Such gender performance does nothing to challenge the gendered culture of engineering, and in many ways contributes to maintaining an environment that is hostile to women.

Contemporary expectations of good parenting hold that focused, intensive parental attention is essential to children's development. Parental input is viewed as a key determinant in children's social, psychological and educational outcomes, with the early years particularly crucial. However, increased rates of maternal employment mean that more parents are juggling work and family commitments and have less non-work time available to devote to children. Yet studies find that parental childcare time has increased over recent decades. In this paper, we explore the detail of this trend using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS), 1992 and 2006. To investigate whether discourses on intensive parenting are reflected in behaviour, we examine a greater range of parent-child activities than has been undertaken to date, looking at trends in active childcare time (disaggregated into talk-based, physical and accompanying care activities); time in childcare as a secondary activity; time spent in the company of children in leisure activities; and time spent in the company of children in total. We also investigate whether the influence of factors known to predict parental time with children (gender, education, employment status and the age of children) have changed over time. We contextualize our analyses within social and economic trends in Australia and find a compositional change in parental time, with more active childcare occurring within less overall time, which suggests more intensive, child-centred parenting. Fathers' parent-child time, particularly in physical care, increased more than mothers' (from a much lower base), and tertiary education no longer predicts significantly higher childcare time.

What effect do non-standard work schedules have on how parents of young children can meet the combined and growing demands of work and family? This article uses the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 2006 to explore the relationship between parents' non-standard work hours, and the time they and their spouse spend in paid work, housework, childcare (subdivided into routine tasks and talk-based interaction) and in their children's company. Parents who work non-standard hours spend significantly longer in paid work and less time on housework and childcare than those who work standard hours. Spouses' schedules impact much more on mothers' than on fathers' time. When fathers work non-standard hours, mothers do more housework and routine childcare, so the gendered division of household labour intensifies. Mothers' non-standard hours allow them to schedule their own paid work and family responsibilities around each other, with little effect upon fathers' unpaid work.

The construction industry remains the most male dominated sector in Australia. Several decades of formal gender equality initiatives by government and business have failed to bring about any meaningful change to the hierarchical and numerical representation of women in the sector. Drawing on new institutionalism, particularly the concepts of 'robustness' and 'revisability', the nature and intent of formal policies and programs that impact on gender equality are analysed in two large Australian multinational construction firms. Through in-depth interviews with senior management and a document analysis of formal policies, it is concluded that gender equality initiatives and broader policies are primarily focused on increasing the numbers of women in construction rather than addressing gender practices and outcomes. These policies lack many of the qualities of robustness and revisability, which impacts on their capacity to genuinely challenge the gendered norms, practices and narratives of the sector.

The deregulation of working time has been occurring over recent decades. Academia is one of the many industries that can be characterised by a long hours work culture and intensification of work. This is significant given the negative effects of such a work culture on the physical and mental health and well-being of workers. Using evidence from two UK-based qualitative studies, this paper begins to explore the causes and effects of academic long hours work culture further. It has a particular focus on the extent to which the long hours culture is a result of cultural and structural changes in higher education, which have led to an increased focus on performance and outcome measures. It queries whether this is also shaped by more personal factors, such as the desire to excel and blurred boundaries between work and leisure, whereby the pursuit of knowledge may be a source of leisure for academics. It finds that while individual factors contribute to the long hours culture, these factors are shaped by cultural norms and pressures to cultivate a perception of the 'ideal academic' within an increasingly target-driven and neoliberal environment.