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The double burden is a term describing the gendered everyday life in Western Europe/ United States of America and refers to the workload of women and men who work to earn money, but also have responsibility for unpaid, persons-related domestic labor. Double burden is a phenomenon, men statistically are showing a gender specific deviance and ideologically being an exception. This becomes understandable by considering male gender role doesn't include responsibility for unpaid unspectacular everyday caring work, but availability of its results, and by recognizing the feminist economics' corrections of mainstream economics like Neoclassical economics and by being aware of societal androcentrism making mainstream analysis of economic systems often failing to take into account the value of the unpaid respective caring work being performed by men and women in a domestic setting.

In heterosexual couples where two opposite-gender partners have paid jobs, the woman often spends significantly more time on household chore and caring work, such as child rearing or care for the sick, than the male partner. This phenomenon is also known as the "second shift," as in Arlie Hochschild's book of the same name.

Gender studies (and actual in gender environmental studies) elaborated beside the workload in terms of time double burden includes additional the difficult individualized tasks (and societally advanced ability) of economical integrating, synchronising and acting within controverse economical rationalities: Switching between monetary profit and personal competitive orientation of working in the business economy in one part of the day, and orientation to the needs-orientated "uneconomical" service for the benefit of others, loved ones like partners, relatives, children etc. of working in the caring economy in the other part of the same working-day.

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