Gendered time poverty: rethinking teaching as a ‘family friendly’ profession

Teaching is often framed as a ‘family-friendly’ profession, aligned with women's caring roles. This paper challenges that assumption by examining how contemporary teaching produces gendered forms of time poverty. Drawing on 43 interviews, we develop a theoretically informed analysis that brings together Rosa's concept of social acceleration and Wajcman's account of time pressure. We argue that shifts in workload and work intensity which produce time poverty must be understood as emerging through the intersection of historically gendered expectations of care and increasingly accelerated work conditions. These dynamics generate cascading temporal pressures that extend beyond paid work, disproportionately shaping women's experiences of teaching, caregiving, and career decision-making. By reconceptualising feminization as a temporal condition rather than a demographic fact, the paper offers a new account of how gendered inequalities are sustained within the profession and highlights the need to rethink how time and care are organized in teachers’ work.