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One of the professorship's research areas looks at the question of who does the everyday work in private households. To this end, Nina Klünder developed the Gender Care Gap as a counterpart to the Gender Pay Gap, Gender Pension Gap and Gender Lifetime Earning Gap for the German government's Second Gender Equality Report. The latter primarily represent economic inequalities and thus testify to the exclusion of care work from the economy.

The Gender Care Gap records the relative difference in the time spent daily on care work between men and women. It indicates the percentage by which the average time women spend on care work per day exceeds the average duration of men's daily care work.

The gender care gap is currently 52.4% (representative time use survey 2012/13 by the Federal Statistical Office). This means that adult women perform one and a half times more unpaid care work than men. This corresponds to an average of 87 minutes more care work per day.

Klünder, Nina; Meier-Gräwe, Uta (2018): Caring, Cooking, Cleaning - representative time use patterns of parents in couple relationships. In: Journal of Family Research 30 (1), pp. 9-29. DOI: 10.3224/zff.v30i1.02.

Klünder, Nina (2017): Differentiated determination of the gender care gap on the basis of representative time use data 2012/13. Expertise as part of the Federal Government's Second Gender Equality Report. Available online at www.gleichstellungsbericht.de/de/article/51.expertisen.html, last checked on 24.03.2019.

Klünder, Nina; Meier-Gräwe, Uta (2017): Gender equality and intra-family division of labour. Meal patterns and catering work in families compared over time. In: Federal Statistical Office (ed.): How time passes. Analyses on the use of time in Germany. Contributions to the results conference of the Time Use Survey 2012/13 on 05/06 October 2016 in Wiesbaden. Wiesbaden, pp. 65-90.

Due to the increasing employment of mothers, childcare and all-day schools, including lunch catering, have been expanded throughout Germany in recent years, which tends to be accompanied by higher out-of-home consumption. The guiding questions in this field of research are to analyse how working parents in couple relationships organise and shape the provision of food in their families.

To this end, three types of couples with different levels of employment are constructed that reflect typical working time patterns in Germany: Two-earner couples, couples with a female supplementary earner and couples with a male sole breadwinner.

The quantitative analysis shows: The higher the mothers' level of employment, the less time they spend on daily nutritional care. Mothers in the two-earner couple spend half an hour less per day on nutritional care than mothers in the female additional earner couple (03:32 hours) and one hour less compared to mothers who are not employed (04:01 hours). Overall, however, mothers spend more than twice as much time each day on catering work as their partners, regardless of their level of employment. Fathers are more involved in preparing meals at the weekend, but mothers also spend significantly more time on Saturdays and Sundays, so that it can still be said that women are responsible for providing food in families. Nevertheless, since 2001/2002 mothers have reduced the amount of time they spend each day on both catering work and eating and drinking, with the greatest savings being made by mothers in two-earner couples. Despite this reduction in time, typical meal patterns with breakfast, lunch and dinner still dominate everyday family life. Family meals often take the form of an extended breakfast on weekdays, especially in the evening and at weekends. In addition, the various activities involved in providing food contribute significantly to the making of family (doing family), although meals on weekdays are no longer only eaten in private.

The qualitative study investigated the question of why mothers continue to take on the organisation of everyday eating. There are various reasons for this, which operate on different levels: On the one hand, the responsibility arises from historically evolved structures and inscribed gender role stereotypes, which means that the dichotomous category of gender plays a central role. This is because mothers reproduce their social gender (doing gender), particularly when they take on the task of providing food. On the other hand, the women interviewed justify their responsibility with their higher standards, their efficiency or their greater availability of time (if they work part-time) - without questioning which social structures lead to this. In some cases, the partners tend to take on auxiliary tasks in the kitchen.

Overall, food provision is a very important field in the private household for the women interviewed, especially for mothers with vocational training in rural areas. These mothers report feeling guilty if - due to their employment - they do not prepare meals for their children themselves. It becomes clear that meal preparation is perceived by the mothers as extremely important care work and that, under the given conditions, they are constantly caught between the social demands of the child-centred/"good" mother and the career-oriented woman.

Klünder, Nina (2020): Nutritional care in families between time, everyday life and household management. A mixed methods study. With online materials. Weinheim: Beltz. Available online at http://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:31-epflicht-1625900.

Klünder, Nina (2018a): Meal patterns of parents in couple relationships. In: Angela Häußler, Christine Küster, Sandra Ohrem and Inga Wagenknecht (eds.): Care and the science of the household. News perspectives on household science. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 73-88.

Klünder, Nina (2018b): Between home-cooked food, Thermomix and school meals - inside views of the nutritional care of families with working parents. In: Home economics and science 66, pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.23782/HUW_21_2018.

Klünder, Nina; Meier-Gräwe, Uta (2017): Everyday eating and division of labour of parents in couple relationships. An analysis based on representative time-use data from 2012/13 and 2001/02. In: Journal of Family Research 29 (2), 179-201. DOI: 10.3224/zff.v29i2.03.

Klünder, Nina (2022): Private households in the field of tension between precarious time prosperity and time poverty. In: HiBiFo 11 (1), pp. 55-67. DOI: 10.3224/hibifo.v11i1.04.

Klünder, Nina (2021): Time. In: Ralph Christian Amthor, Brigitta U. Goldberg, Peter Hansbauer, Benjamin Landes and Theresia Wintergerst (eds.): Wörterbuch Soziale Arbeit. Tasks, fields of practice, terms and methods of social work and social pedagogy. In collaboration with Pia Theil, Dieter Kreft and Ingrid Mielenz. 9th, completely revised and updated edition. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz Juventa, pp. 997-999.

The everyday management of private households, especially family households, has changed in recent years due to structural change in society. Everyday management encompasses the planning, implementation, management and control of actions and decisions relating to private services of general interest in interaction with the household environment (micro level: living and threshold area; meso level: local area and infrastructure; macro level: history and culture of the state). This includes the provision of care services, care and education services and dispositive activities that take into account the needs and requirements of household members. In this way, the aim is to maintain life, personal development and a culture of coexistence in the private household (Meier-Gräwe 2015; Thiele-Wittig 2003; V. Schweitzer 1991, p. 134 ff.).

In the rush hour of life, families face a variety of challenges and problems in order to organise a "good" life according to their own ideas and wishes. This is because it is during this time (between the ages of 25 and 40) that key life decisions are made, such as career paths, choosing a partner, setting up a joint household, marriage and starting a family. Coping with these transitional phases requires different everyday life and household management skills in order to enable adequate family provision (Bujard/Panova 2014; DGH 2017; Häußler 2015, p. 23). These skills also include making use of needs-based support services in new phases of life in order to protect themselves from overload and excessive demands (Thiele-Wittig 2000, p. 83).

As part of the research on everyday life management and everyday life skills, family life situations and the challenges of everyday life are analysed and information and support needs are identified. The central question relates to the success structures of a "good" life for young families.

Bujard, M.; Panova, R. (2014): Rush hour of life. www.bpb.de/politik/innenpolitik/familienpolitik/197927/rushhour-des-lebens. Accessed on 20/10/2019.

DGH (DEUTSCHE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR HAUSWIRTSCHAFT E.V.) (ed.) (2017): Empowerment for private households as basic units of our society - Memorandum of the expert committee "Structural change of the household" of the German Society for Home Economics. Giessen and Rheine.

Häußler, A. (2015): Fokus Haushalt- Überlegungen zu einer sozioökonomischen Fundierung der Verbraucherbildung. HiBiFo 3: p. 19 - 30.

Meier-Gräwe, U. (2015): The work of everyday life - Why we need to reorganise it socially and distribute it in a gender-equitable way. In: Meier-Gräwe, U. (ed.): The work of everyday life. Wiesbaden, pp. 1 - 36.

Schweitzer, R. von (1991): Einführung in die Wirtschaftslehre des privaten Haushalts. Stuttgart.

Thiele-Wittig, M. (2000): Everyday competences - educational needs in a more complex world. Education as a prerequisite for self-learning processes. In: Kettschau, I.; Methfessel, B.; Piorkowsky, M.-B. (eds.): Familie 2000. Bildung für Familie und Haushalte. European perspectives. Hohengehren, pp. 83 - 95.

Voß, G. G. (2001): One's own and the other's everyday life. In: Voß, G. G.; Weihrich, M. (eds.): tagaus - tagein. New contributions to the sociology of everyday life. Work and life in transition. Series on the subject-oriented sociology of work and labour society. Munich, pp. 203 - 218.