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Little is known about gender relations in young African migrant families residing in Hong Kong (HK). This study aims to present a first-hand account of daily lived experiences of African international doctoral student couples residing in HK, with special emphases on their Africa–HK migratory motivations, perceptions of female-breadwinning status, the effects of HK Immigration policy on marital power structures and the influence of spousal relative statuses (“breadwinner” versus “dependent”) on couples gender role performances and decision-making participations.

This study used ethnographic method involving several indoor family visits, non-participant observations and 21 in-depth interviews in six African student families. Fieldnotes were taken and interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and interpreted using thematic content analysis.

Couples, especially dependent men, had a hard time deciding to migrate to HK for family reunion, unlike dependent women who willingly resigned to join their husbands in HK. Among the male dependents, the main reasons for migrating included anticipated economic returns, while women migrated in response to neolocal cultural expectations. Overall, patriarchy persisted – while men had the final say over key household decision-making domains, women remained primary performers of household chores, but manifested little bargaining power, restraining husband’s ability to spend family income when they are the family’s sole-earners. Women’s relative breadwinning status had very minimal significant impact.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of HK’s immigration policy on married African students’ migration motivations and the effects of female-breadwinning status on spousal gender relations in HK’s African student migrant households.

South Korea has shown ultra-low fertility since the 2000s despite a massive expansion of pro-natal policies. The purpose of this research is to analyse institutional and socio-cultural configurations surrounding Korea's pro-natal policy and provide implications as to why the comprehensive packages have not produced intended outcomes.

This study assumes institutional complementarities, suggesting that the effectiveness of policy depends on various support factors. Drawing out insights from the framework of de-familisation, the authors construct a gender and family framework to analyse the pro-natal policy configurations in Korea.

Labour market policies in Korea have explicitly aimed to support dual-earner couples and protect women's employment status after childbirth. However, the dualistic labour market and remaining female-caregiver norms lead to the polarisation of couples into dual earners and male breadwinners. In family policy, the government has rapidly increased affordable childcare services, but widespread distrust in private services and generous birth-related cash benefits formulate a tension between de-familisation and continued familisation. Other welfare programmes that attach welfare rights to marital status also prolong female-caregiver norms in institutional arrangements. The findings suggest that the ambivalence between recent policy developments and the existing arrangements can limit the effectiveness of the policy packages.

The framework based on institutional complementarities addresses the limitations of previous studies concentrating on the statistical testing of individual policy effects. A similar approach can be applied to other countries showing major policy efforts but producing unsatisfactory outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the strategies that New Zealand chartered accountants use to combine work and family responsibilities, and to relate these strategies to chartered accountants' career success.

The study analysed qualitative career history data obtained from interviews with 69 male and female experienced chartered accountants.

A comprehensive work/family strategy typology for New Zealand chartered accountants was developed. The five types identified were Traditional Men, Traditional Women, Work First Women, Family Balancers, and Stepping Stone Men. In general, those who followed a male linear career model (Traditional Men and Work First Women) demonstrated higher levels of career success. Some notable exceptions showed that career success could be achieved by those with higher levels of family responsibilities, if the employing organisation does not demand rigid conformance with the linear career model.

The purposeful bias in the sample selection and the diversity in the interviewees' workplaces decrease the study's generalisability. But those factors contributed to the ability to identify a wide range of current work/family strategies.

The paper provides a basis for the accountancy profession to adapt to the feminisation of the profession and the increasing demands for work/life balance by developing policies and practices targeted at enhancing career progression for a more diverse range of work/family strategic types than is currently recognised.

There are no prior data describing the diversity in New Zealand chartered accountants' work/family strategies.

Despite more than 50 years of research into gender and work, the impact of female expatriates persists to be underrepresented in mainstream international human resource management (IHRM) literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the perceptions of married Indian information technology (IT) women regarding career and expatriating discussions they have with their husbands and its impact on their decision making to undertake international assignments.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 married Indian IT women who had undertaken international assignments after marriage. The study includes two data sets, 1: women on less than one-year assignment; 2: women on greater than one-year assignments.

The study found that women who went on short-term assignments of less than one year travelled alone and found it fortunate and convenient to leave their children in the care of their husbands, in-laws, parents and maids. While in the cases of women travelling for longer-term assignments, most husbands accompanied them. The study suggests that while spousal support was the key, having a shared purpose with husbands along with extended family support was equally significant to facilitate women undertaking an international assignment. As an impetus, the authors note a change within the Indian society where both partners come together to make decisions about expatriating.

The authors discuss the implications for IHRM as they relate to gender diversity within organisations.

The research, underpinned by the early workings of a theory of career hierarchy, explores the complexities in expatriation decision-making processes of married women from the emerging economy of India with traditional family values, who are working within a modern and liberal IT industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in gender‐biased employment practices that it is perceived have occurred in New Zealand accountancy workplaces over the last 30 years, using Oliver's model of deinstitutionalization.

Sequential interviewing was carried out with 69 experienced chartered accountants and three human resource managers, and at a later date with nine young female accountants.

Evidence is presented of perceived political, functional and social pressures cumulatively contributing to deinstitutionalization of overt gender‐biased employment practices, with social and legislative changes being the most influential. Deinstitutionalization appears incomplete as some more subtle gender‐biased practices still remain in New Zealand's accountancy workplaces, relating particularly to senior‐level positions.

This study adds to understanding of how professions evolve. The purposeful bias in the sample selection, the small size of two of the interviewee groups, and the diversity in the interviewees' workplaces are recognized limitations.

Identification of further cultural change is required to deinstitutionalize the more subtle gender‐biased practices in accountancy organizations. This could help to avoid a serious deficiency of senior chartered accountants in practice in the future.

This paper represents one of a limited number of empirical applications of the deinstitutionalization model to organizational change and is the first to address the issue of gender‐biased practices in a profession. The use of sequential interviewing of different age groups, in order to identify and corroborate perceptions of organizational change is a novel approach.

The purpose of this paper is to develop gendered entrepreneurship theory through a focus on the roles of space and place in the daily lives and businesses of mothers who have configured business around the daily routines of family work.

Through a consideration of the accounts of 29 “mumpreneurs” and using a framework forwarded by Jarvis to understand the geographically embedded “infrastructure of everyday life”, this paper seeks to understand mumpreneurial decision making, choice and constraint.

Spatial factors, in their myriad forms, run through and affect mothers’ different levels of capability and constraint, and thus the (gender-role and entrepreneurial) “choices” that individuals and families make. Placing families in the realities of specific, material locales helps to embed our understandings of these decision-making processes in real places.

This discussion: advances new understanding about how space and place enable or constrain mumpreneurship (in particular) and entrepreneurship (more generally); and provides a lens through which to examine the structure/agency dualism in relation to gendered entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to use the kaleidoscope career model as a lens through which to explore the career choices and decisions of young professional couples and the strategies that they use to facilitate successful dual careers while attempting to balance their work and non-work lives.

Data were gathered through face-to-face interviews with 18 couples. Couples were interviewed separately to explore how individual career values and choices shape decisions in partnership. Template analysis was used to identify career patterns as defined by the kaleidoscope career model.

Gender-based patterns suggested by the kaleidoscope career model appear to be giving way to different patterns based on individual career aspirations, earning capacity and motivation within a dual career (as opposed to simply dual income) household. For some young professionals challenge and balance are equally important and so unlike the original interpretation of the KCM their careers reflect dual priorities not challenge followed by balance as their careers evolve.

The sample size is small and participants were recruited through purposeful sampling which may have resulted in a more homogeneous cohort than would have been achieved through random sampling.

Changing demographic profiles and emerging social norms are changing the way Gen Y approach work and careers. Organisations and professional bodies need to respond to these changes through implementation of appropriate HR policies within supportive organisational cultures if they are to attract and retain young professionals.

This research is important because there is clearly a gap between changes at a societal level and the way in which organisations are responding to those changes. The paper provides insights into how public policy and organisational practices can be designed and implemented to meet the needs and expectations of Gen Y professionals.

This study provides an insight into the way Gen Y professionals are navigating dual careers as opposed to dual incomes. It builds on and expands the kaleidoscope career model by showing that Gen Y professionals are less constrained by gender stereotypes than previous generations in their quest for challenge and balance and that some couples are determined to have both challenge and balance, not either/or.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between gender ideologies and the motivation to mitigate climate change among a sample (N = 663) representative of the Taiwanese population, taking into account the different aspects of gender ideology measures and the multidimensionality of gender ideologies.

A landline-based telephone survey in Taiwan was used to collect research data. Pearson correlations were used to determine the associations between gender ideologies and motivation to mitigate climate change, and multiple regression analysis was performed to determine whether gender ideology measures were predictors for motivation to mitigate climate change.

The results suggested that the relationships between gender ideologies and mitigation motivation are complex, and that both traditional and egalitarian views of gender ideologies, measured using different scales, are positively associated with motivation. The dynamics of relationships among subgroups divided by gender and marital status need to be considered, as the relationships between gender ideologies and motivation are salient for unmarried individuals as well as married females.

The findings support the premise that gender ideologies play an essential and complex role in individual climate change mitigation behaviors.

This is the first study that systematically examined the relationships between gender ideologies and motivation to mitigate climate change.

The purpose of this study is to (re-)evaluate the explanatory power of the stressor–stress–strain model and its' current operationalization by examining the influence of general and interaction adjustment and the mediating effect of general satisfaction on expatriates' and spouses' intention to prematurely return from an assignment or overseas location. Though expatriates' premature return intention has been well examined in prior literature, this is the first study to focus on spouses' premature return intention from the expatriate's assignment.

To evaluate the hypotheses, a sample of 104 expatriates and a sample of 64 spouses were collected and analysed utilizing structural equation modeling.

The results show that adjustment, as the opposite of distress, is not a direct negative driver of expatriates' nor spouses' premature return intention. Instead, the findings underscore the relevance of the general satisfaction with the international assignment (IA) as a mediator for both expatriates and spouses, which emphasizes the importance of attitudinal factors in the model. Overall, the results indicate that adjustment, in particular interaction adjustment, might not be a timely measure of distress anymore.

In order to reduce expatriates' and spouses' premature return intention multinational corporations should aim at maximizing satisfaction levels during the IA. To achieve this, both should be included in the selection process prior to the IA to tailor support mechanisms to satisfy their expectations.

This study is the first to investigate the premature return intention from the expatriates' and spouses' perspectives, while (re-)evaluating the explanatory power of the stressor–stress–strain model at present.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on earnings inequality within dual-earner couples in four Central-East European (CEE) countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. It aims to analyse the factors that influence earnings distribution within couples.

The analysis uses OLS regression applied on the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions 2011 survey to reveal the various influence of relevant factors, especially relative education and the presence of children, on relative earnings.

Women, on average, contribute less to a couple’s income than men. While considerably higher in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, such disparity is relatively low in Hungary and Poland. These countries have the highest share of dual-earner couples where the woman outearns her partner. The factor that substantially reduces the within-couple earnings inequality in all the analysed countries is a higher relative education of women. On the contrary, the presence of children, especially those of younger age, increases this disparity in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The research on within-couple earning inequality in CEE countries lags behind the relatively rich evidence from western Europe. This is the first study which systematically describes the situation in CEE countries from a comparative perspective.