Working mothers,injury and embodied care work

In this article, we examine how mothers respond when injury interrupts maternal care, using the lens of embodied care, which we conceptualize as a form of ‘body work’. We draw on findings from a qualitative research project with two organizations in Australia that help people with injuries to return to work, examining the experiences of workers who are also mothers of dependent children. Mothers' inability to care for children during periods of injury was a significant concern for our interviewees; constraints on physical labour and physical affection were particularly troubling, indicating the importance of embodied maternal caregiving to maternal roles. Yet, while these mothers inhabited the spheres of paid work and unpaid care work simultaneously, service providers did not consider embodied care work or its relevance to injured women's ongoing needs for support. While our findings reflect the experiences of injured women, they also suggest the need for a materialist analysis of the ways that both paid work and care activities are deeply enmeshed in and through the bodies of those doing the work. Employers and service organizations still fail to recognize maternal ‘body work’, and this may be typical of social attitudes more widely.     

‘Women,work and family’: Educated women's employment decisions and social policies in Egypt

Despite increased access to education, women's conspicuous absence from the labour market in Egypt, and the Arab world in general, has been a key issue. Building on the stock of evidence on women's employment, this study provides a qualitative analysis of the torrent of challenges that educated married and unmarried women face as they venture into the labour market in Egypt. Single women highlight constrained opportunities due to job scarcity and compromised job quality. Issues of low pay, long hours, informality and workplace suitability to gender propriety norms come to the fore in the interview data. Among married working women, the conditions of the work domain are compounded by challenges of time deprivation and weak family and social support. The article highlights women's calculated and aptly negotiated decisions to work or opt out of the labour market in the face of such challenges. The analysis takes issue with the culturalist view that reduces women's employment decisions to ideology. It brings to the context of Arab countries three global arguments pertaining to the inseparability of work and family for women; the role of social policies and labour market conditions in defining women's employment decisions; and the potential disconnect between employment and empowerment. By looking at women as jobseekers and workers, the analysis particularly highlights the intersectionality of different forms of inequality in defining employment opportunities.     

From pillar to post: Women and social work studies in the 21st century

Abstract

A decade or so after the acknowledgement and inclusion of women's issues in mainstream social work courses, we find the circumstances in which such education occurs have changed. The 'third wave' of feminism has revisited the feminist agenda of the 1960s and 1970s; there has been a paradigm shift in what tertiary education is perceived to offer; and global theories have been replaced by post modern interpretations. This article discusses the impact of these changes for social work education drawing on the authors' experiences with the 'Women and Social Work' elective subject in the Bachelor of Social Work Degree at the University of New South Wales, Australia. This elective was popular until the mid 1990s when it failed to attract students. The authors reflect on their experience of teaching the subject and their understanding of current feminism to identify a way forward in the attempt to rekindle student enthusiasm for feminist understandings and provide education which will further the emancipatory project of social work.     

Education,wage work,and marriage: Perspectives of Egyptian working women

We explore young working women's perceptions of marriage and work in contemporary Egypt, when an increase in age at marriage was evident from national survey data. Both working conditions and employment opportunities declined significantly for young women even as their educational attainment increased and marriage was delayed. In‐depth interviews were conducted over a 2‐year period between 1998 and 2000 with 27 young women between the ages of 15 and 29 who were from relatively poor families and working in a range of salaried jobs in three locations. The qualitative data indicate that young women have high expectations in terms of marital living standards. They seek to achieve this in part by saving intensively before marriage when they work, and otherwise by ensuring substantial monetary support from their families. We conclude that rising material aspirations and family nucleation rather than change in female labor force participation drive marriage change in contemporary Egypt. The driving force behind this conclusion is that there is a reinforcement of the traditional values associated with the institution of marriage rather than its erosion.     

The disconnection between policy practices and women's lived experiences: combining work and life in the UK and the Netherlands

Combining work and family life is central to women's participation in the labour market. Work–life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s, but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women's lived realities of combining work and family life in the UK in comparison to the Netherlands as a possible ‘best practices’ model. We argue that women in both countries experience work–life balance as an ongoing process, continually negotiating the boundaries of work and family, and that there needs to be a more sophisticated appreciation of the differing needs of working parents. Whilst policy initiatives can be effective in helping women to reconcile dual roles, many women in both the UK and the Netherlands still resolve these issues at the individual or personal level and feel that policy has not impacted on their lives in any tangible way.     

Wives' Relative Wages,Husbands' Paid Work Hours,and Wives' Labor‐Force Exit

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete‐time event‐history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are their own or their husbands' absolute wages. In addition, I show that women married to men who work more than 45 hours per week are more likely to exit the labor force than are wives whose husbands' work approximately 40 hours per week. My findings highlight the need to examine how women's partners affect women's labor‐force participation.     

Women's employment patterns during early parenthood: A group‐based trajectory analysis

Research on women's employment and parenthood frequently focuses on the correlates and consequences of decisions at a particular time, such as a birth. This article applies a group‐based trajectory method to examine women's employment trajectories across the period of early parenthood using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N= 2,093). We find that throughout early parenthood, women exhibit significant movement into and out of the labor force. Factors that typically predict women's employment status, such as age at first birth and education, are also good predictors of women's employment patterns. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research, particularly on the use of a static measure of women's or couples’ employment status.     

Preparing,Working, Recovering: Gendered Experiences of Night Work among Women and their Families

The negative physiological consequences of night work are well evidenced, but there has been limited research on the gendered consequences of night work for partnered women with children. This paper examines women's experiences of night work by drawing on qualitative interview and audio sleep diary data with 20 UK female nurses working non‐regular rotating shifts, together with interview and diary data from their male partners and children. The analysis shows how the lived experience of women's night work is characterized by three phases, which we discuss within a timescape perspective. Alongside changes to paid work and sleep during the period of night shifts, the ‘preparation’ and ‘recovery’ phases of women's night work involve intense periods of considerable additional unpaid and unrecognized work and anxiety. Gendered expectations for household management and family wellbeing mean that women night workers undertake considerable responsibility for complex planning before night shifts begin, and re‐enter established domestic routines within hours after night shifts end. Women maintain continuity for their families by actively managing the impacts of night work. This enables the fulfilment and ‘display’ of successful and normative gendered patterns of domestic responsibility, which appears to be central to women's own coping with night shifts.     

Women's provisioning work: counting the cost for women living on low income

This paper reports on a research project that uses the concept of provisioning as a starting place in understanding the activities women in marginalized communities undertake to provide for themselves and members of their households and neighborhoods. This project explores the household and collective provisioning undertaken by women who are all part of formal community organizations in Canada. The work women do is explored from the dimension of women's relationships of responsibility. This vantage point uncovers a complex web of activity including paid employment, voluntary work, care work, exchanges of goods and services, community work, and self-provisioning. In addition, the provisioning strategies that women use when public resources are scarce are explored. In the face of significant cutbacks in public provision of goods and services, women are engaging in a complex network of activities in order to compensate through private provisioning for resources that are no longer available through public provisioning. The policy context in which these strategies are pursued is explored as well as the way in which risky policies produce risky coping strategies.     

Student involvement in the UK sex industry: motivations and experiences

The Student Sex Work Project was set up in 2012 in the United Kingdom (UK) to locate students who are involved in the sex industry, to discover their motivations and needs, and in doing so provide an evidence base to consider the development of policy and practice within Higher Education. As part of this initiative, a large survey was undertaken comprising students from throughout the UK. Reporting on the findings from this survey, the article sheds some light on what occupations students take up in the sex industry, what motivates their participation and how they experience the work. The study also offers a much‐needed empirical input to the ongoing academic debates on the nature of sex work. The results suggest that there can be little doubt of a student presence within the sex industry in the UK. The motivations and experiences of student sex workers cover elements of agency and choice as well as of force and exploitation and it is suggested that student sex work is best understood from a polymorphous framework which leaves room for a wide variety of experiences and challenges.     

Foodwork as re-articulation of women's in/visible work: A study of food allergy blogs

This paper advances our understanding of foodwork as the organization of women's work and racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities in the provisioning, preparation, and consumption of food. Drawing on notions of the in/visibility of women's work, I conceptualize foodwork as the articulation of visible and invisible women's work in the social organization of everyday food practices. The analysis of three blogs, written by women with, or mothers of children with, food allergies, provides a glimpse into the everyday living with food allergy. The investigation of the actual practices of allergy foodwork shows that they are interactive and intersectional patterns of work and make everyday life possible. The paper maps directions for research to explore how foodwork could be organized differently starting from the transformative potential of everyday food practices, blogs, and food allergy.     

Uncertainty and the Rise of the Work‐Family Dilemma

Existing research argues that women's wages, consumerism, and changing attitudes dismantled the male bread‐winner system. Families' economic need is dismissed with the suggestion that mothers' rhetoric of “need” was a smoke screen to defend against social stigma for working mothers. Drawing on biennial data from 1965 to 1987, I suggest that consumptive certainty of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to economic uncertainty in the 1970s and beyond. Economic uncertainty provided impetus, legitimacy, and justification for young families to adopt new work‐family arrangements. Hence, economic uncertainty is conceptualized as a real circumstance that substantiates families' reasonable perceptions of need.     

Disability and sex work: developing affinities through decriminalization

This article argues that strong policy frameworks are required to support the health and well-being of sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers. Through an examination of the context of sex work in Canada, we articulate the flaws of sex work criminalization and the persistent barriers that criminalization creates. Our analysis of the intersection of disabled sexuality and access to sexual services identifies how the sex industry can aid in the flourishing of the erotic lives of disabled people. The article culminates in a discussion of the benefits of sex work decriminalization for sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers.     

Correlates of Voluntary vs. Involuntary Part‐time Employment among US Women

This article presents a study of the extent to which type and duration of labour force attachment add to the explanatory power of psychological, demographic, and family household characteristics to predict voluntary (n=166) vs. involuntary part‐time (n=160) employment of women in the United States. We use the terms ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ to reflect the woman's choice in accepting to work in paid part‐time employment. In this context, voluntary part‐time work is not meant to be construed as charitable, non‐paid activities, but rather is construed as individuals who are working part‐time but who would prefer to be working full‐time, if a suitable job were available. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience (NLSLME), we found that labour market attachment characteristics added little to predict part‐time employment status (involuntary vs. voluntary) and had virtually no effect on the odds of any other correlates on employment status. The major exception was number of years of unemployment. The longer working women were previously unemployed, the greater the likelihood they were involuntarily employed in part‐time jobs. In addition, we found that marriage and private sector employment decreased the likelihood of involuntary part‐time employment. Findings suggest that involuntarily part‐time employed women appear to be ‘settling’ for what they can get, namely, part‐time rather than full‐time jobs and that unmarried part‐timers may be viewed as a stigmatized or marginal group more likely to be employed in the public rather than private sector. Policy implications and future research are discussed.     

Launching the workplace flexibility movement: work family research and a program of social change

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program was established in 1994 and ended in 2011. Over the course of its 17-year lifespan, this program – through its vision, commitment and unique, pragmatic grant-making strategies – pioneered the interdisciplinary field of work–family research and spearheaded a national movement to create more flexible workplaces that effectively meet the needs of employees and employers. The program's first strategic phase supported high-quality, multidisciplinary research to examine what was happening within working families at all stages of their lives, both at home and at work. Results from these investigations highlighted the structural mismatch between the needs of this diverse workforce – comprised increasingly of working parents and older workers – and the demands of a rigidly structured workplace requiring full-time, full-year work, with little to no flexibility in how, when, or where work gets done. After a decade of scholarly research documenting that the challenges facing American families were not private, individual problems but public, societal concerns, the Sloan Foundation designed and launched in 2003 the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. Its goals were twofold: to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and to establish it as a standard of the American workplace. As a result of the collective efforts of Sloan-supported organizations and people, the stage is now set for a social movement to realign the structure of the American workplace to the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. Lessons for subsequent research-driven social movements close the article.     

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.     

Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator

Digital transformation and the reorganization of the firm have given rise to new forms of work that diverge significantly from the standard employment relationship. Advocates of digital disruption suggest that the existing legal framework cannot accommodate “innovative” working templates and business models. This article, however, argues that labour regulation can continue to facilitate innovation, presenting the employment relationship as a flexible instrument, and standard forms of employment as the means of achieving efficiencies and cost advantages. First, they allow for the full exercise of managerial prerogative and attendant internal flexibility in workforce deployment, and, second, they constitute an effective device to deliver training and develop skills.     

The Motherhood Penalty at Midlife: Long‐Term Effects of Children on Women's Careers

The authors build on prior research on the motherhood wage penalty to examine whether the career penalties faced by mothers change over the life course. They broaden the focus beyond wages to also consider labor force participation and occupational status and use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women to model the changing impact of motherhood as women age from their 20s to their 50s (n = 4,730). They found that motherhood is “costly” to women's careers, but the effects on all 3 labor force outcomes attenuate at older ages. Children reduce women's labor force participation, but this effect is strongest when women are younger and is eliminated by the 40s and 50s. Mothers also seem able to regain ground in terms of occupational status. The wage penalty for having children varies by parity, persisting across the life course only for women who have 3 or more children.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

To work or not to work: Variables affecting non‐financial employment commitment over time

The most common indicator of non‐financial employment commitment (NFEC) is the “lottery question” – whether a person would continue working if they won a lottery. This cross‐sectional research seeks to identify the demographic variables and the “meaning of work” dimensions that could predict individual NFEC, presenting the main international findings over time, with particular reference to data collected in Israel in 1981, 1994 and 2006. The authors' findings point to a marked decrease in NFEC in the new millennium and a change in its predictors over time. The findings and their implications for work and employment are examined in the light of social and economic changes in Israel.