Many works on sustainable development stress the part played by reduced working hours in the promotion of a model for alternative development. The direct link between working hours and the environment, however, still deserves to be supported. This is the issue we would like to discuss through an analysis of the relationships between consumption and working hours. We use surveys on French household expenses to highlight the environmental consequences of long hours: they encourage goods and energy-intensive consumptions and favour conspicuous expenditure and nonsustainable lifestyles.

Domestic services, and notably house-cleaning, are a growing sector of employment in many European countries. There has also been a shift from individualized ‘master-servant’ relations to the mediation of service companies. Does this improve the status and conditions of employees? Drawing on experience in France, this article compares the quality of employment under the two systems.

The aim of the article is to examine differences in work time from a gender perspective. To this end, a concept broader than mere duration of work time is constructed. This concept, which we call time availability, encompasses not only the volume of hours worked but also the scheduling and predictability of those hours. It is measured by a synthetic indicator showing the extent to which a given group of workers exceeds the societal time norm. After a presentation of the French context, we show that women seem to have less time availability, particularly at the ages that are most decisive in career terms. But these differences do not concern the same aspects of time availability. Thus the time constraints experienced mainly by women are less socially visible and hence undervalued by employers. This lower visibility comes, for a large part, from the social perception of women professionals.M uch attention has been paid to gender differences in working time. 1 Two topics attract most of this attention, namely, the use of part-time employment and inequalities in terms of time restrictions. Both lead to the outcome that women have less time available than men for wage-earning work. One of the most frequent explanations is based on the constraining impact of the domestic sphere on women's availability for paid work.However, gender differences concern not only the duration but also more qualitative dimensions of working time. In order to investigate these differences we developed a synthetic indicator to measure time availability, because any attempt to better understand gender inequalities must take into account the multidimensional nature of working time.Studies rooted in the sociology of time (Mercure, 1988), such as those of working time and its impact on life styles, have underlined the importance of qualitative aspects of time in respect of the predictability and scheduling of

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