Progressive legislation may generate a climate encouraging general improvements in quality of life that benefit a wide range of people, but, in some cases, policies improve conditions for some at the expense of others. Social movements promoting gender equality and sustainable lifestyles aim to transform patterns of daily activities. We consider whether policies which aim to reduce work and family life conflict and elevate the economic status of women and policies promoting the reduction of human impact on the environment are associated with complimentary, contradictory or unrelated adjustments in daily behaviours. We focus on the USA as this country offers natural experimental conditions as states share broad cultural and economic contexts, but have the political freedom to adopt a wide variety policy approaches to gender and environmental regulations. We use the 1992-1995 National Human Activity Pattern Survey and 2003-2010 American Time Use Study to profile daily behaviours of people aged 15 and older in the United States. Time diaries reveal the range of activities in which people engage on an average day. We pool the diary data with state-level environmental regulation data available on the Environmental Protection Agency website, and state-level gender and work-family legislation to test how daily life varies across different policy regimes.