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In Dividing the Domestic, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of "who does what" needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.
Exploring how family life has radically changed in recent decades, this comprehensive Research Handbook tracks the latest developments and trends in scholarly work on the family. With a particular focus on the European context, it addresses current debates and offers insights into key topics including: the division of housework, family forms and living arrangements, intergenerational relationships, partner choice, divorce and fertility behaviour.
A real-world solution for parental leave that promotes gender equality at work and at home What do Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and the United States have in common? These three nations are the only ones that do not offer some form of parental leave to new parents. The US lags far behind the rest of the world on this important issue, raising questions about our commitment to gender equality and the welfare of our families. In Fixing Parental Leave, Gayle Kaufman takes an in-depth look at parental leave policies in the US, the UK, and Sweden, and evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of leave policies in each country. She finds that there is more to parental leave policies than whether a country provides time off around the birth or adoption of a child. While most policies are designed to help women return to work, this is only half of the puzzle. The second half requires men to be meaningful partners by encouraging them to take equal time at home. Ultimately, Kaufman arrives at a rational solution that will promote gender equity through a policy that enables parents at companies of all sizes to spend six months with their new child.
Written by eminent scholar Chiara Saraceno, this Advanced Introduction offers a synthetic overview of the core theoretical and policy issues involved in family policy, currently the most dynamic sector of social policies in both developed and developing countries. It discusses the three primary areas of family policy in contemporary society: financial support for the cost of children, short and long term care for children and dependent people, and work-family conciliation.
"This engaging collection gathers theoretical and empirical insights from leading family policy experts. The authors - representing diverse countries, disciplines, and methods - bring to life the volume's innovative conceptual framework, which is organized around policy institutions, both public and private. The volume closes with a call for new lines of research that should inform family policy scholars for years to come."--Janet Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA "Featuring exciting contributors from a range of often-siloed scholarly disciplines, countrie...
For much of the twentieth century, women lagged considerably behind men in their educational attainment. However, in recent decades, young women have become an important source of human capital for labor markets in modern societies, as well as potential competitors to the male workforce. This book asks whether or not women have been able to convert their educational success into gains on the labor market. The expert contributors address the topic on a comparative level with discussions centred on gendered school-to-work transitions and gendered labor market outcomes. Thereafter they analyze the country-specific implications of the gender redress from a wide range of countries including the USA, Russia and Australia. This enlightening book will appeal to graduates and postgraduates studying social policy, education, the labor market, inequality and gender. It will also be of interest to experts in the fields of sociology, education, political science and economics and those interested in educational research.
Gender is widely recognized as an important and useful lens for the study of International Relations. However, there are few books that specifically investigate masculinity/ies in relation to world politics. Taking a feminist-inspired understanding of gender as its starting point, the book: • explains that gender is both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy; • shows how masculinization works via ‘nested hierarchies’ of domination and subordination; • explores the imbrication of masculinities with the nation-state and great-power politics; • develops an understanding of the arms trade with commercial processes of militarization. Written in an accessible style, with suggestions for further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students and teachers applying ‘the gender lens’ to global politics.
This volume explores the causes and consequences of family inequality in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Recognising that social change over recent decades has strengthened the need for early childhood education and care, this book seeks to answer what role this plays in creating and compensating for social inequalities in educational attainment.
One of the fundamental challenges facing modern welfare states is the question of work-family reconciliation. An increasing share of mothers work, but many European welfare states do not adequately support the dual-earner model, especially in southern Europe. After 2005, German policy-makers transformed the nature of Germany’s family policy regime through a number of legislative measures, whilst Italy, a country with many similarities, witnessed little change. Using a multi-methods approach, this book addresses the puzzle of why Germany was able to implement far-reaching reforms in this policy area after a long impasse and Italy was not. As such, it delivers a broad, systematic account of these reforms and sheds light on why similar reforms were not also adopted in other similar welfare states at the same time. More generally, it contributes to understanding the determinants of welfare policy change in modern European welfare states. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and professionals working on topics linked to European politics, welfare and work-family policies, comparative politics, social policy, and more broadly to political science and gender studies.