Visualizing the Prevalence of Couples’ Work-Family Arrangements across Countries

Cross-national differences in individual patterns of paid and unpaid work are well documented, yet how couples jointly allocate time across both remains comparatively understudied. Where couple-level work-family arrangements have been studied, research has relied on qualitative or single-country designs, leaving open whether a singular typology generalizes cross-nationally and how its prevalence varies across countries. Using multigroup latent class analysis applied to data from the International Social Survey Programme 2012 and 2022 for 37 countries, we derive a cross-national typology of eight couple-level work-family arrangements. We then present a visualization of how these arrangements vary across countries, organized by country groups based on welfare regime or shared political and cultural histories. We find that a single typology of couple-level arrangements holds across different countries, but what varies is the prevalence of couples following each arrangement. Nordic countries show the highest prevalence of egalitarian arrangements, and East Asian and Latin American countries are dominated by traditional specialization. Conservative and liberal countries overlap considerably, both characterized by substantial her-second-shift arrangements. Eastern Europe and postsocialist countries are the most internally heterogeneous country group.