Broadening the Intersectional Path: Revealing Organizational Practices through ‘Working Mothers’ Narratives about Time

This article is concerned with the complex inequality experienced by mothers in employment, and applies ‘strong intersectionality’ to women's narratives about time to reveal the intersecting inequalities women experience and gendered organizational practices. Drawing on empirical research with 30 Irish ‘working mothers’, this article explores the way time is ordered and managed to create gendered inequalities for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work. By conceptualizing gender, maternity and class as simultaneous processes of identity practice, institutional practice and social practice, following Holvino, women's narratives reveal that organizations manage and order time to fit with notions of ‘ideal workers’, which perpetrate older hierarchies and gendered inequalities, and which create regimes of inequality for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work.