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Purpose – This chapter aims to explore the strategies used by the Hong Kong government to respond to the adult worker model and the male-breadwinner model; and to explore the views of women on the desirability of these strategies. The male-breadwinner model posits that men work full-time outside the home and women take on domestic work. The adult worker model suggests that women and men should be equally expected to participate in formal employment.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter analyses the policy measures used by the Hong Kong government to support women in their participation in formal employment and the local work-based pension scheme (the Mandatory Provident Fund) as well as other policy measures that offer potential for enabling family care providers to accumulate resources for secure retirement. Additionally, it draws on semi-structured interviews with 30 Hong Kong young women to examine their views on the extent to which the government supports them to save pension incomes.

Findings – This study shows that the Hong Kong government uses a ‘weak action strategy’ to respond to the adult worker model and the male-breadwinner model, and that this strategy fails to meet women’s diverse preferences for their roles in the labour market and the family.

Originality/value – Based on a newly developed framework, this study examines the responses made by the government to both the male-breadwinner model and the adult worker model. It sheds new insights into possible ways of assisting women to achieve secure retirement .

Catering services play important role in the Spanish economy, accounting for 6.2% of GDP in 2021. To overcome the adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, catering services are considered one of the drivers to stimulate economic growth. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to analyse the sociodemographic profile of the family's main breadwinner who allocates most of his expenditure budget on different catering services before and during the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 in Spain.

The official Family Budget Survey in Spain was used. This offers information on expenditure by families in 2019 and 2020. CHAID multivariate analysis was employed. This has proved a valuable tool in predicting expenditure, as well as determining the cause–effect relationship of this expenditure.

Findings establish the main breadwinner's expenditure on catering services based on predictors such as “year” affected by the pandemic; “type of employment contract”; “gender”; and “age”. A gender “pub-gap” in consumption in bars and cafes has been revealed, and families with a male breadwinner, on a permanent contract, between the age of 40 and 60 spent the most on catering services.

This research presents a new interdisciplinary approach to family breadwinners as a company whose spend on catering is shaping the economic recovery and leading to new answers for hospitality management. Identified factors can lead to improved decision-making and contextualisation of economic models for food service providers in a post-pandemic future.

The purpose of this paper is to focus first on the development of the segregation of tasks in family and housework in Switzerland and its linkage to the gender time-use gap in unpaid work. In addition, the impact of dual-breadwinner support in policies and culture is examined.

The empirical test refers to a comparison of Swiss cantons, and is based on data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey. The analysis traces both the gender gap and segregation from 2000 to 2013, compares them between 25 Swiss cantons, and links them to political and cultural dual-breadwinner support.

First, the results suggest that both the gender time-use gap and task segregation in unpaid work decrease in Switzerland. Moreover, the gender gap and segregation do not correlate in the sample of Swiss cantons. Second, both the gender gap and segregation correlate with dual-breadwinner support. However, the political dual-breadwinner support is linked to lower segregation, a smaller gender gap, more male and less female housework, the dual-breadwinner culture promotes female housework and both men’s and women’s family time spent on childcare, without affecting the gender gap and segregation.

The results, on the one hand, suggest that both the gender time-use gap and the segregation are important but analytically different dimensions of gender equity. On the other hand, the cross-cantonal analysis highlights the socio-political structuration of gender inequality.

The paper contains the first comparative analysis of the gender time-use gap and task segregation in Switzerland. The results underline the analytical distinction between the gender time-use gap and the task segregation in family and housework. Moreover, the cross-cantonal analysis suggests that the political dual-breadwinner support is an important determinant of the gender divide in unpaid work.

This study was conducted to examine factors that could determine breadwinners' willingness to accept qardhul hassan financing in the time of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Drawing upon ‘Attitude, Social Influence and Self-Efficacy’ (ASE) model, this study examined the effects of attitude, subjective influence and self-efficacy on qardhul hassan financing acceptance during the pandemic. The sample size was 294 respondents who were all breadwinners and sourced from group bottom 40 or B40 in Malaysia.

The results obtained acknowledged that attitude, subjective influence and self-efficacy shaped the formation and development of breadwinners' acceptance to take up the facility during the pandemic at best for well-being.

Future studies should include samples from other geographies in Malaysia along with new variables relevant to extend the findings.

The results obtained offer new action plans for Islamic social financial institutions to better plan the offered qardhul hassan financing to society at large.

There are two originalities drawn from this study. First, this study is a pioneering work in Malaysia examining the importance of qardhul hassan financing in the time of COVID-19. Second, this study used the ASE model in examining the breadwinners' acceptability of the financing facility in meeting basic needs and requirements.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2022-0420.

Microcredit has become a popular tool for women's socioeconomic development across the globe. The purpose of this study is to examine the influences of gender ideology on women's microcredit participation and their status within the household in rural Bangladesh.

The study adopted a cross‐sectional design. Data were collected from 342 randomly selected married men in five northwest villages. A path analysis was conducted to test the hypothesized model.

Almost 52 percent of the married women were microcredit‐borrowers. However, in 81 percent of cases the loans were fully controlled by their husbands. This study indicates that low socioeconomic status influences women borrowing loans while conservative gender ideology constrain them from using the loans. It also appears that their husbands' liberal gender ideology facilitates women's use of loans (active microcredit participation), which in turn improves their status as household co‐breadwinner.

Though the study is based on men's reports and also correlational (not inferential) by nature, it provides a comprehensive understanding about the way microcredit intervention has been practiced in rural Bangladesh. This may have significant policy and practical implications.

The study discuses under what conditions microcredit intervention can contribute to improve women's status in rural Bangladesh. It is recommended that microcredit intervention should address patriarchal ideology by creating an environment where people may have a chance to re‐think the importance of women's roles and contributions.

The study is original in the linking of theory, policy and practice in the context of patriarchal ideology and microcredit interventions for enhancing women's status in rural Bangladesh.

Socially responsible organizations strive to foster gender diversity values in the workplace. As women, relative to men, tend to fall victim to gender discrimination more frequently, organizations can promote gender diversity in the workplace by either increasing female employment or discouraging job seekers who resist gender diversity from applying for positions. While more attention has been devoted to the former approach, less attention has been given to the latter.

A between-subjects experiment is conducted to test the hypotheses. Participants are randomly assigned to one of five conditions that feature different numbers of women in job advertisements.

For male job seekers who hold a male breadwinner ideology, their job pursuit intentions decrease as the number of women in job advertisements increases. Perceived person-organization fit acts as the mediating influence.

Job advertisements are purposed to attract job seekers who share similar values. Men who embrace male-dominant values are likely to resist and thwart the progress of gender diversity in the workplace. This study informs practitioners of how by strategically adapting job advertisements, organizations can discourage individuals who are likely to be a poor fit from applying for vacant jobs.

This study focuses on gender discrimination and resistance in a job seeking context from a social dominance perspective. The study informs organizations of the potential benefits of strategically adapting job advertisements.

Today, urban entrepreneurship is considered one of the vital strategies that directed cities toward self-control by reducing the unemployment rate and its arising problems, creating sustainable revenue and preparing the ground for citizens’ independence. This paper aims to present an integrated foresight framework and establish the boundary conditions for urban entrepreneurship of women breadwinners. The study explains how particular women solve workplace-specific poverty and foster urban wealth by developing startups, new businesses or ventures.

The current research uses a qualitative method and uses the grounded theory approach. Data were collected by selecting 24 outstanding women entrepreneurs using snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews in Tehran Metropolitan.

The results of the study reveal that the main aspects of the model of urban entrepreneurship consist of causal factors, intervening factors and contextual conditions. By shaping the policies and organizing educational plans, training courses and empowering of women, as well as the establishment of supportive units for the development, identification of the opportunities, developing protective rules, the factors as mentioned above lead to cultural, social and economic development, tendency toward entrepreneurship and development of entrepreneurship among women.

This study undertakes a first of its kind cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis at the level of how women breadwinners foster urban wealth using developing new businesses, startups or ventures. Despite the importance of urban entrepreneurship, theories for understanding the nexus of urban contexts remain underdeveloped. Therefore, there is still a theoretical gap and lack of research; hence, the current study tries to shed light on the topic and fill this gap in the body of knowledge.

The gender-gap reversal in education could have far-reaching consequences for marriage and family lives in the United States. This study seeks to address the following question: As women increasingly marry men with less education than they have themselves, is the traditional male breadwinner model in marriage challenged?

This study takes a life course approach to examine how educational assortative mating shapes trajectories of change in female breadwinning status over the course of marriage. It uses group-based trajectory models to analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.

The results reveal substantial movement by wives in and out of the primary breadwinner role across marital years and great heterogeneity in female breadwinning trajectories across couples. In addition, educational assortative mating plays a role in shaping female breadwinning trajectories: Compared with wives married to men whose educational levels equal or exceed their own, wives married to men with less education than themselves are more likely to have a continuously high probability of being primary earners and are also more likely to gradually or rapidly transition into primary earners if initially they are not.

This study examines couples’ breadwinning arrangements over an extended period of time and identifies qualitatively distinct patterns of change in female breadwinning that are not readily identifiable using ad hoc, ex ante classification rules. The findings suggest that future research on the economics of marriage and couple relations in families would benefit from a life course approach to conceptualizing couples’ dynamic divisions of breadwinning.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether households with members that experience job loss shocks are able to protect their previous level of consumption. The paper also tests whether consumption protection is affected when spells persist through time.

The paper estimates an intertemporal consumption model, where households try to smooth their marginal utility over time. For that purpose it analyses Spanish household budget surveys that span a long period, 1999-2012, including the Great Recession. Unlike most consumption datasets, this microdata is designed as a panel and provides detailed information for all consumption categories as well as household members’ labour status.

The paper finds that consumption smoothing is dependent on the household member facing the unemployment transition. In particular, only main breadwinner’s unemployment transitions affects consumption smoothing. It also shows that the consumption drop persists beyond the period of the job loss for ongoing spells, although it follows a decreasing pattern. Finally, the estimation results are stable over the business cycle.

The results suggest that Spanish households are not capable of fully insuring against main breadwinner’s unemployment shocks. Further, the results show that this effect remains up to two years for ongoing unemployment spells. Thus these results highlight a welfare loss by Spanish households with unemployed members.

The paper extends the usual analysis of job loss shocks by the main breadwinner to include the cases of both the spouse and the rest of household members, who tend to account for most unemployment. Further, it tests for unemployment persistence. Finally, it checks the sensitivity of the results to the business cycle, including the Great Recession.

The purpose of this paper is to study the experiences of middle-class working mothers from the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service) sector in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their experiences of work from home are studied in the backdrop of the ideal worker model at work and the adult worker model at home. Further, the study aims to identify the need for sustainable, inclusive practices for working mothers in Indian organizations to break the male breadwinner model in middle-class households.

A qualitative approach to collect data from 39 middle-class mothers working in MNCs in four metro cities in India. The semi-structured, in-depth interviews focused on their experiences of motherhood, care and work before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic made it evident that the ideal worker model in organizations and the adult worker model at home were illusions for working mothers. The results indicate a continued obligation of the “ideal worker culture” at organizations, even during the health crisis. It made the working mothers realize that they were chasing both the (ideal worker and adult worker) norms but could never achieve them. Subsequently, the male breadwinner model was reinforced at home due to the matrix of motherhood, care and work during the pandemic. The study concludes by arguing the reconstruction of the ideal worker image to make workplaces more inclusive for working mothers.

The study is placed in the context of Indian middle-class motherhood during the pandemic, a demography less explored in the literature. The paper puts forth various myths constituting the gendered realities of Indian middle-class motherhood. It also discusses sustainable, inclusive workplace practices for mothers from their future workplaces' standpoint, especially in post-pandemic times.