Social Politics

A growing body of research has highlighted the disproportionately negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women globally. This article contributes to this work by interrogating the lived realities of sixty-four women in the United Kingdom through semi-structured in-depth interviews, undertaken during the first and second periods of lockdown associated with COVID-19 in 2020. Categorizing the data by subgroup of women and then by theme, this article explores the normative and policy-imposed constraints experienced by women in 2020 with regard to paid and unpaid labor, mental health, access to healthcare services, and government representation and consideration of women...

Recognition of the differential effects of COVID-19 on women has led to calls for greater application of gender-based analysis within policy responses. Beyond pointing out where such policies are implemented, there is little analysis of the effects of efforts to integrate gender-based analysis into the COVID-19 response. Drawing on interviews informing a lived experienced approach to policy analysis, this article asks if, how, and to what effect gender-based analysis was implemented within social and economic policy responses during the initial lockdown, in British Columbia, Canada...

Studies on the differential effects of health emergencies have largely overlooked women health workers. Whilst the literature has shown the impact of Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) on women and on healthcare workers, little research has considered the gendered effects of the health workforce. This article analyses the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers and working conditions in Brazil's public healthcare system, through consideration of gendered and racialized understandings of care and work. Data were taken from an online survey of 1,263 health workers, undertaken between September and October 2020, disaggregated by sex and by race in order to understand health workers' experiences of the pandemic in one of the countries most significantly affected by the crisis...

Black women are disproportionately involved in the child welfare system. This state-level intervention occurs at two levels-a higher likelihood of being (i) screened for drug use during pregnancy and (ii) reported to child welfare authorities after delivery. Consequently, they face further enmeshment in state-systems, including custody loss and lower reunification odds. Using evidence from the past forty years of research and media reports, we argue that systemic forces and policies largely contribute to racial disproportionality in the child welfare system, and assert this state intervention serves as a mechanism to control black reproduction...

Through the theoretical lens of a "violence continuum" we explore how, in many of the most marginalized areas of Mexico, global and regional historical and contemporary structures have shaped and constrained men's ability to achieve the hegemonic masculinity of neoliberal Mexico. An analysis of statistics and local research studies on male homicide is used to understand how impoverishment and extreme inequality can undermine men's capacity to access a dignified standard of living and exercise their masculinity, in the process of which many draw on interpersonal violence as a resource for respect and manhood...

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family...

Care arrangements for the elderly are becoming a main social process in contemporary societies due to socio-political and lifestyle changes over the last few decades. The family and the State play a basic role in the construction of care systems and in the establishment of strategies to access care resources. In the present context of migration, these resources interact at a transnational level, challenging family and State migratory regimes. These new realities need the recognition of basic international social rights, as the experiences of Peruvians living in a migration context in Spain show...

This article focuses on “transnational aging careers,” a group of elderly migrants who are in constant movement between social contexts, families, and states. Drawing on a case of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain, I look into the ruptures in the structure of care arrangements, kin expectations, and family relations, which migration triggers. I suggest that these transformations, albeit subtle, lead to reformulation of the fabric of the family. In this way, transnational care-motivated mobility affects future security based on kin reciprocity...

The restructuring of long-term care for older people has been marked both by the role of the market and by the role of migrant labor. This article develops the analysis of these processes at the microlevel of the provision of care. It draws on data collected as part of a cross-national comparative study on the employment of migrant care workers in residential care homes and home care services for older people in England and Ireland. The article examines, first, the ways in which divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship shape the preferences of service providers/employers and some service users as regards who provides care...

This article argues that international nurse recruitment from Latvia to Norway is not a win–win situation. The gains and losses of nurse migration are unevenly distributed between sender and receiver countries. On the basis of empirical research and interviews with Latvian nurses and families they left behind, this article argues that nurse migration transforms families and communities and that national health services now become global workplaces. Some decades ago feminist research pointed to the fact that the welfare state was based on a male breadwinner family and women’s unpaid production of care work at home...

The article is the result of qualitative research of informal care markets in Slovenia in the field of childcare, elder care, and cleaning. The author assesses Slovenia's position in the “global care chain” and finds that “local care chains” prevail in the field of childcare and elder care, while a co-occurrence of female gender, “other” ethnicity, and poverty is typical in the field of household cleaning. The main emphasis of the article is on the analysis of hierarchization of the informal market of care work according to following two criteria: social reputation of individual type of care work and citizenship status of care workers...

In this article, we discuss a case study that deals with the care chain phenomenon and focuses on the question of how Poland and the Ukraine as sending countries and Poland as a receiving country are affected and deal with female migrant domestic workers. We look at the ways in which these women organize care replacement for their families left behind and at those families’ care strategies. As public discourse in both countries is reacting to the feminization of migration in a form that specifically questions the social citizenship obligations of these women, we also look at the media portrayal of the situation of nonmigrating children...

The authors examine the politics of caregiving for identity to enrich scholarship about power. They report on a qualitative study with Aboriginal mothers who parent in the wake of the Canadian Indian residential schools (IRS). Just as this system disrupted familial caregiving to assimilate Aboriginal Peoples, data show some mothers now strive to organize their caregiving in ways that serve decolonization and community empowerment. Building on their expertise, the authors argue that counter-colonial family policy investments to support such caregiving should factor in any just compensation for the IRS system if its population, and not just individual, costs are to be redressed...

The expansion of employment-centered family policies of the Grand Coalition in Germany came with some surprise, as Christian Democrats have traditionally been strongly committed to the male breadwinner model and corresponding family policies. This article investigates why Christian Democrats (though with some inconsistencies) promoted “social-democratic” family policies guided by the adult worker rather than by the male breadwinner model. Illuminating the politics of recent family policy reforms, the electoral rationale for this modernization of family policy, the role of political entrepreneurship, and intraparty political conflicts over the new policy paradigm are discussed...

In 2010, fifteen years after the Beijing declaration on women's rights, the UN Commission on the Status of Women met to review progress in gender mainstreaming. Reports on gender equality by member states revealed differences in the degree of change achieved in this period, while highlighting common barriers to gender mainstreaming. The same barriers have long been identified by academics and activists, but prove remarkably resistant to strategies to address gender inequalities. This paper reviews approaches to gender mainstreaming in the context of health policy, and suggests that a model of the obstacles to gender mainstreaming, which identifies barriers as essentially pragmatic, conceptual, or political in origin, might enable a more explicit discussion of the factors underlying this resistance and the ways in which they might be challenged...

This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks into the Polish and Turkish contexts for empirical evidence. The Polish context shows a highly institutionalized system of family policies in contrast to almost unessential institutions in Turkey...

Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change women's reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women...

This paper examines the development of employment-oriented family policy in Germany and Japan, two countries united by conservative welfare legacies and very low birthrates, through a close analysis of discourse. Why have recent reforms in Germany moved well beyond those in Japan despite remarkably similar “human capital” discourses? The relative strength of interpretative patterns—in this case, discursive patterns that successfully frame family policy reform as an economic imperative—and the role of employers are identified as critical explanatory factors...

Managers are key actors shaping employees’ capabilities to utilize work–life policies. However, most research on managers’ implementation of these policies has been conducted in liberal welfare states and ignores the impact of institutional context. In this study, we situate managers within specific workplace and national layers of context. We investigated how managers in financial organizations in the Netherlands, UK, and Slovenia talk about the utilization of work–life policies. Managers’ discourses stressed disruption and dependency considerations in these case studies, as in the US research...

Good jobs can generate capabilities that allow employees to avoid tensions between work and family/home. Following the conceptual framework of Amartya Sen, we examine how job-related demands and resources are related to the level of interference, as well as satisfaction with managing work and home in Spanish and German employees, using three different large-scale European surveys: European Quality of Life Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey. We find that long working hours systematically increase tensions between work and home, as do time pressure, job-related stress, and working hard...