Publications

Employer attitudes towards maternity leave are often framed as a tension between opposition based on costs or ideal worker norms, versus normative or ethical support. How do employers combine and prioritise these justifications in practice? Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven British managers, this article develops a typology of employers– risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven– distinguishing the nature of support and underlying blends of economic, normative, and moral justifications. It shows how moral reasoning– often assumed to align only with a supportive stance– is also mobilised to justify exclusionary attitudes and even overt discrimination against maternity leave-takers. Further, against assumptions that shifting cultural norms and expanding rights foster greater employer support, discomfort with these changes can reinforce resistance. Relational dynamics also shape attitudes, with positive affective–personal ties between managers and staff prompting greater support. These findings offer a new lens on how family leave rights are interpreted in everyday managerial practice.

Globally, women perform the lion’s share of domestic labor. Research indicates that gender disparities in cognitive labor—the “thinking work” required to anticipate and monitor household needs—are even more pronounced than in physical household labor. Although traditional theories explain the gender division of physical household labor in terms of time, money, or gender performance, the applicability of these frameworks to the mental load is unclear. The authors address that gap using survey data from 2,133 partnered, heterosexual U.S. parents. Exposing the limits of time-availability and resource-based models, the authors find that women’s employment and earnings reduce their physical household labor, but not their cognitive burden. To explain this persistence, the authors introduce the concept of gendered cognitive stickiness: once assigned on the basis of gendered expectations (often implicitly), cognitive tasks “stick” to women and resist negotiation, regardless of their employment or resources. This concept extends doing gender theory by showing how inequality is reproduced even without visible performance and identifying a dimension of domestic labor that is less situational and more internal. This hidden constraint on domestic gender equality represents an additional measure to explain the stalled gender revolution.

This article examines the relationship between female breadwinning and life satisfaction in heterosexual couples. We extend previous research by treating the man’s employment status as a variable that helps to explain rather than confounds this relationship, and by comparing multiple countries through regression analyses of European Social Survey data (Rounds 2–9). Results provide evidence of a female-breadwinner well-being ‘penalty’: men and women are less satisfied with their lives under the female-breadwinner arrangement versus the dual-earner and male-breadwinner alternatives. The penalty is marginal when the male partner is part-time employed but sizeable when he is jobless. However, there are gender differences: after controls for composition, gender-role attitudes, and partners’ relative incomes, the penalty becomes negligible for women while remaining large for men. Analyses suggest these gender differences are linked to high male unemployment among female-breadwinner couples: whereas women appear roughly equally adversely affected by a male partner’s unemployment as by their own, men report substantially higher well-being when she is unemployed instead of him. Country comparisons indicate that while this female-breadwinner well-being penalty is largest in more conservative contexts, especially Germany, it is fairly universal across Europe. So, even in countries where women’s employment is more widespread and cultural and institutional support for the male-breadwinner model is weaker, unemployed men with breadwinner wives are not immune from the social stigma and psychological difficulties associated with their gender non-conformity.

An accepted framework for ‘gendering’ the analysis of welfare regimes compares countries by degrees of ‘defamilialization’ or how far their family policies support or undermine women’s employment participation. This article develops an alternative framework that explicitly spotlights women’s labour market outcomes rather than policies. Using hierarchical clustering on principal components, it groups 24 industrialized countries by their simultaneous performance across multiple gendered employment outcomes spanning segregation and inequalities in employment participation, intensity, and pay, with further differences by class. The three core ‘worlds’ of welfare (social-democratic, corporatist, liberal) each displays a distinctive pattern of gendered employment outcomes. Only France diverges from expectations, as large gender pay gaps across the educational divide – likely due to fragmented wage-bargaining – place it with Anglophone countries. Nevertheless, the outcome-based clustering fails to support the idea of a homogeneous Mediterranean grouping or a singular Eastern European cluster. Furthermore, results underscore the complexity and idiosyncrasy of gender inequality: while certain groups of countries are ‘better’ overall performers, all have their flaws. Even the Nordics fall behind on some measures of segregation, despite narrow participatory and pay gaps for lower- and high-skilled groups. Accordingly, separately monitoring multiple measures of gender inequality, rather than relying on ‘headline’ indicators or gender equality indices, matters.

An influential body of work has identified a ‘welfare-state paradox’: work–family policies that bring women into the workforce also undermine women’s access to the top jobs. Missing from this literature is a consideration of how welfare-state interventions impact on women’s representation at the board-level specifically, rather than managerial and lucrative positions more generally. This article contributes to addressing this ‘gap’. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 22 industrialised countries reveals how welfare-state interventions combine with gender boardroom quotas and targets in (not) bringing a ‘critical mass’ of women onto private-sector corporate boards. Overall, the analysis finds limited evidence in support of a welfare-state paradox; in fact, countries are unlikely to achieve a critical mass of women on boards in the absence of adequate childcare services. The results further suggest that ‘hard’, mandatory gender boardroom quotas are not necessary for achieving more women on boards; ‘soft’, voluntary recommendations can also work under certain family policy constellations.

In analysing heterosexual couples’ work–family arrangements over time and space, the comparative social policy literature has settled on the framework of the ‘male-breadwinner’ versus ‘dual-earner’ family. Yet, in assuming men in couple-families are (full-time) employed, this framework overlooks another work–family arrangement, which is the ‘female-breadwinner’ couple. Including female-breadwinner couples matters because of their growing prevalence and, as our analysis shows, greater economic vulnerability. We perform descriptive and regression analyses of Luxembourg Income Study microdata to compare household incomes for female-breadwinner couples and other couple-types across 20 industrialized countries. We then consider how labour earnings and benefit incomes vary for ‘pure’ breadwinner couples comprising one wage-earner and one inactive/unemployed partner according to the gender of the breadwinner. We find that pure female breadwinners have lower average individual earnings than male breadwinners, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and occupational and working-time differences. Furthermore, welfare systems across most countries are not working hard enough to compensate for the female breadwinner earnings penalty, including in social-democratic countries. Once controls are included in our regression models, it never happens that pure female breadwinners have higher disposable household incomes than pure male breadwinners. Thus, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that female-breadwinner families sit at the intersection of multiple disadvantages. In turn, these couples offer comparative scholars of the welfare state an ‘acid test’ case study for how effectively families are protected from social risk. Our results additionally highlight how cross-national differences in the female breadwinner income disadvantage do not fit neatly with established welfare typologies, suggesting that other factors – in particular, labour market characteristics and the economic cycle – are also at play.

This paper argues that analyses of the gendered character of welfare states should be broadened to include women’s share of board and executive roles, as well as the affirmative-action policies (e.g. gender boardroom quotas) that help to overcome the gender stereotypes (e.g. women are ‘nice’, men are ‘assertive’) and opaque selection procedures at the root of this. Such indicators may seem beyond the remit of social policy analysis, which is concerned foremost with the analysis of ‘social risk’. However, drawing on evidence from across multiple disciplines, this paper argues that achieving a ‘critical mass’ of women in board and executive positions can bring women’s issues onto companies’ agendas and lead to the adoption of female-friendly practices, policies, and cultures at the firm level. Crucially, these practices, policies, and cultures can help to reduce the incidence of gendered social risks (employment/care conflicts, economic dependence on a partner) and sexual harassment among women at lower levels of the labour market. Thus, the paper highlights another dimension to the social-regulatory function of welfare states which has to date been overlooked, namely legislative requirements on companies to achieve gender diversity in their leadership structures.

In analysing heterosexual couples’ work-family arrangements over time and space, the comparative social policy literature has settled on the framework of the ‘male-breadwinner’ versus ‘dual-earner’ family. Yet, in assuming men in couplefamilies are (full-time) employed, this framework overlooks another work-family arrangement, which is the ‘female-breadwinner’ couple. Including femalebreadwinner couples matters because of their growing prevalence and, as our analysis shows, greater economic vulnerability. We perform descriptive and regression analyses of Luxembourg Income Study microdata to compare household incomes for female-breadwinner couples and other couple-types across 20 industrialised countries. We then consider how labour earnings and benefit incomes vary for ‘pure’ breadwinner couples comprising one wage-earner and one inactive/unemployed partner according to the gender of the breadwinner. We find that pure female breadwinners have lower average individual earnings than male breadwinners, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and occupational and working-time differences. Furthermore, welfare systems across most countries are not working hard enough to compensate for the female breadwinner earnings penalty, including in socialdemocratic countries. Once controls are included in our regression models, it never happens that pure female breadwinners have higher disposable household incomes than pure male breadwinners. Thus, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that female-breadwinner families sit at the intersection of multiple disadvantages. In turn, these couples offer comparative scholars of the welfare state an ‘acid test’ case study for how effectively families are protected from social risk. Our results additionally highlight how cross-national differences in the female breadwinner income disadvantage do not fit neatly with established welfare typologies, suggesting other factors – in particular, labour market characteristics and the economic cycle – are also at play.

Since the mid-1990s, welfare states have introduced various ‘activation’ policies designed to promote employment. Most typologies distinguish between a Nordic-style ‘train-first’ approach focused on developing jobseekers’ employability and an Anglo-Saxon ‘work-first’ approach that instead emphasises quick job (re-)entry. These typologies tell us what activation means for the unemployed (male) worker. However, by ignoring the family, they overlook what activation means for the (female) parent-worker with childcare responsibilities. To contribute to filling this gap, this article uses fuzzy-set ideal-type analysis to compare 22 countries representing five ‘worlds’ of welfare by how (de-)activating their labour market policies, parental leave provisions, childcare services and the scheduling of primary education are for lone mothers. It reveals that cross-national variations in support for maternal activation are not well captured by the Nordic-style ‘train-first’/Anglo-Saxon ‘work-first’ dichotomy. Hence, despite the greater attention to gender and ‘new social risks’ within comparative social policy scholarship in recent years, the activation literature remains gender-blind.

Since the late-1990s, advanced economies have converged on an ‘active’ social policy agenda aimed at maximising employment. Consequently, women are no longer treated as caregivers. Rather, they are required and assumed to be in employment. Although gender has moved from margins to the mainstream of comparative welfare state research in recent years, the agenda of ‘gendering’ the analysis of welfare states under activation remains incomplete. This three-paper thesis contributes to completing this agenda. Papers 1 and 2 assess activation strategies towards lone mothers who, as sole breadwinners and caregivers within their households, are a ‘litmus test’ of gendered social rights. Focusing on the UK, Paper 1 shows that, against the commonplace characterisation of the UK as a pioneer of ‘making work pay’, changes to the UK’s tax-benefit system since 2010 have weakened lone mothers’ financial incentives to work beyond a few hours a week. Paper 2 subsequently builds on Paper 1 in dimensional and geographical scope by examining how active labour market and family policies across 22 welfare states help or hinder lone mothers’ employment. It shows that cross-national variations in support for maternal activation are not well captured by the commonplace dichotomy within the mainstream literature between a Nordic-style ‘train-first’ approach to activation and an Anglo-Saxon ‘work-first’ approach. Paper 3 then extends Papers 1 and 2 in conceptual terms. It argues that analysing women’s social risks under activation requires looking not just at active labour market and family policies. Also important are gender boardroom quotas and other regulatory policies that set numerical targets for women in top corporate board and executive positions. This is because a ‘critical mass’ (23-40 per cent) of women in top management can generate important ‘trickle-down’ benefits, which can help to alleviate some of the ‘new’ social risks (e.g. work/care conflicts, in-work poverty) faced by women at the bottom of the labour market under activation.

Lone mothers in the UK are a key target group of tax-benefit measures designed to ‘make work pay’. This article assesses how the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition’s ‘make work pay’ agenda since 2010 has potentially affected single mothers. It calculates two lone mothers’ incomes and incentives for a range of working hours and wage rates under the Coalition and previous New Labour government. While the Coalition’s measures substantially improve the lone mothers’ incentives to work in mini-jobs of fewer than sixteen hours, their incentives to work longer are still weak, if not weaker than under Labour. Furthermore, the financial returns to progressing in work begin to diminish once hours exceed just six at average wage and nine at minimum wage. While tougher conditionality may still push many lone parents to work longer, weak labour demand and reduced employment supports could undermine their abilities to meet increased work expectations.