In spite of the centrality of time use studies, and of the respective political acknowledgement, particularly in the Beijing Platform for Action, statistical (and scientific) production in Portugal has not been able to fully match the need for these studies, in a consistent and timely way.
As an attempt to provide evidence to this need, a first section of this paper presents a short reflexive history of how, fifteen years after the Beijing Platform for Action, time use has been constituted, in Portugal, as a research topic and as a concern for statistical data collection, namely in the 1999 Time Use Survey.
Some of the main outcomes of a qualitative approach on time use, focusing on the articulation between paid work and care work among women and men in science careers, thus facing specific space-time challenges, are then presented and discussed.

keywords: Gender, time use, paid work, care work, science careers.