Sociologica, 1/2011 - Copyright © 2011 by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. 1 Symposium / Gender and Welfare State. A Feminist Debate Beyond Care The Persistent Invisibility of Unpaid Family Work by Chiara Saraceno doi: 10.2383/34628 x Introduction The stalled, or unfinished, gender revolution literature [Esping Andersen 2009; Gerson 2010] suggests that decreases in gender specialization in paid work, follow- ing the increased women’s labor market participation, have not caused substantial decreases in specialization in unpaid family work, which in turn leads to a lower in- vestment by women in paid work. In both the policy literature, including that from a feminist perspective, and in policy making, this issue has been addressed mainly with regard to the issue of care, generally further limited to caring for a pre-school child. After having been thematized as a special dimension of unpaid family work, not to be simply conflated with housework, 1 in policy discourses and analyses, (child) care now seems to have absorbed, or rather hidden, all other unpaid family work. This focus is too restricted, however, for several reasons. First, it implicitly denies that caring demands may con- cern also different life phases. School age children also need care and supervision, although less time intensely than younger children. School schedules, however, are rarely included in family policy analyses and in work-family reconciliation debates and research. 2 A care focus restricted on pre-school children also overlooks both x 1 For an overview of this development see Leira and Saraceno 2002. 2 For a rare exception see Gornick, Meyers, and Ross 1997.