Background Juggling work and family is a significant challenge for many contemporary households, and women continue to perform the majority of housework. Organisations and policymakers are increasingly developing interventions, policies and programmes to give workers better rights to work flexibly. In the UK, the ‘right to request’ flexible work policy has gradually been extended over the past decade and as of June 2014 is available to all employees who have been employed for at least 26 weeks. It is less clear how such policy reforms and the uptake of flexible working have influenced worker’s life from a gendered perspective. Using a large longitudinal study, we aim to assess how the use of flexible working has influenced men’s and women’s housework and well-being and whether the 2014 policy reform has been effective in increasing the uptake of flexible working.

Methods Data come from waves 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2010-2020). Using fixed effects models (82,259 person wave observations), we investigated the relationship between the uptake of flexible working and hours spent on housework, sharing of housework (within couples), psychological distress (measured by GHQ-12) and mental health functioning (measured by the mental component summary of SF-12), overall life satisfaction and satisfaction of leisure time, for men and women separately. We also applied a difference-in-differences (DiD) method by inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) to estimate the average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) of the 2014 policy reform on the uptake of flexible working (sample N=6846).

Results Among couples, women shared about 70% of the housework. Fixed effect model showed that the use of flexible working was associated with increased hours of housework for both men (0.15h/w, p=0.007) and women (0.31 h/w, p<0.001) as well as women’s share of housework within couples (0.81%, p<0.001). The uptake of flexible working was associated with decreased psychological distress and improved mental health functioning for both men and women. It did not influence overall life satisfaction but improved satisfaction with leisure time for both men and women. DiD methods show that the 2014 policy reform only slightly increased the use of flexible working for women but not for men.

Conclusion Working men and women may benefit from flexible working on mental health and satisfaction with leisure time. However, gender natural flexible working policy may increase gender inequalities in divisions of housework.