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This chapter examines changes in Nigerian family roles because of the gap that exists in communication between left-at-home footballers' wives and their absentee husbands who are working at significant distances from their families' permanent residence. Based on a study of 12 football (i.e., soccer) players in the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) and contextualized within the field of sport labor, the study adds knowledge about the impact of footballer migration on left-behind families. The interview data produced five major themes: long-distance marital communication, effects of a paternalistic family culture, extended family issues, effects of father's absence on children, and effects of loneliness and loss of intimacy on wives. The results demonstrate changing roles among the married couples and extended families who were investigated in this study, perhaps indicating what is happening among similar families in Nigeria. It is notable that although the demands of professional football create this impact on families, there is considerable cultural resistance to role changes, because these changes grant the women new and possibly unexpected roles and increased domestic power. Their husbands, despite being away from home, appear to resist these changes and struggle to assert traditional power from afar. In many cases, the women expertly maneuver around this struggle and, in cases where disagreements emerge, they often use effective strategies to resolve problems and maintain a united family.

The legalization of same-sex marriage changed the parenting landscape for LGBTQ parents in a variety of ways. Parenthood is presumably different now that same-sex marriage is officially legal. Experiences among LGBTQ couples in the post-legalization of same-sex marriage era raise questions about the context of growing recognition and cultural acceptance of same-sex relationships. I conducted in-depth interviews with LGBTQ parents to learn how they navigate parenting and the construction of parenting roles in the context of a society that has legalized same-sex marriage, yet still is rooted in heteronormative notions of family and parenthood. Specifically, I ask: How do LGBTQ couples construct and make sense of their roles as parents, particularly within the contemporary context of the legalization of same-sex marriage? Understanding the contexts that shape LGBTQ parents’ experiences aids in not only understanding the lives of LGBTQ parents and their families better, but also developing a deeper understanding of contemporary parenting identities and experiences more broadly.

This chapter focuses on a population that I call iron moms: women who negotiate work, family, and endurance sport identities. This research sheds light on how mothers with families, full-time jobs, and other responsibilities fit a high level of endurance training into their lives. Looking at endurance sport through the lens of gender and parenthood helps uncover the unique complexities that iron moms face juggling their multiple identities. Included is an assessment of how iron moms manage their status on the athletic visibility continuum as a process associated with identity construction and maintenance. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with 20 active iron mom competitors and textual analysis of triathlon blog postings, this work uncovers the details of how these women attempt to find satisfaction in multiple areas of their lives. This chapter suggests that navigating one's status on the athletic visibility continuum in addition to navigating the complex web of dominant social discourses surrounding motherhood play a critical role in shaping how women craft their existence as an iron mom. Findings stress the value of “me time,” the pervasiveness of “mom guilt,” and the importance of reframing dominant discourses about motherhood.

This chapter discusses work-life interface (WLI) issues for migrant-citizen older British women of South Asian heritage living in the UK. It shows how WLI issues are inevitably entangled with the active ageing agenda for the older workforce and that we need further attention from scholars exploring these issues across life courses to appreciate and understand how ageing across locations, times and contexts unveils unique aspects of WLI. The chapter discussion rethinks some of the existing constructs of WLI and introduces new ones to its periphery, including people’s social identities and the spatio-temporal nature of those identities. Such a rethinking process is supported by critical empirical evidence on the lived experiences of a group of older ethnic minority British women living in Greater Manchester, UK, who juggled between work and caring throughout their lives, and abruptly quit paid work due to unmanageable overlapping demands. The evidence indicates how migrant women from the global south struggle to navigate UK WLI norms/culture and their meanings, especially when irreconcilable differences exist between the community/family norms and the social norms in the host country. The chapter findings have implications for the future of an inclusive labor market as it recommends early planning, provisioning and addressing ageing migrants’ WLI issues to draw sustainable/inclusive future labor market policies.

Research has shown that young adults face strong economic burdens when it comes to establishing their intimate relationships in times of labor market deregulation and economic recession. However, little is known about possible protective effects of the transition to cohabitation on subjective worries. Based on economic and gender-specific assumptions, the present paper uses data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) from 1991 to 2020. Longitudinal analyses show that the transition into cohabitation reduces the economic worries of German women, especially in times of macroeconomic crisis. For men, cohabitation is only protective against economic worries if they or their partner have high economic resources. The latter may indicate that young men in precarious living situations perceive the male breadwinner model as a subjective burden in the context of cohabitation.

Past research has established a relationship between the perceptions of fairness in the division of household labor and relationship satisfaction. Varying according to gender and time, this relationship has been found with differing outcomes, including relationship satisfaction, relationship happiness, divorce, and sexual frequency. Although this relationship has been well studied, little research has focused on how this relationship is moderated by relationship status. According to the Second Demographic Transition Theory (SDT), as societies become more “modern,” cohabitation will become more prevalent, eventually becoming socially and culturally equivalent to marriage. As such, it is vital to ask how cohabitation and marriage differ, or if they differ at all. Therefore, this gap is explored by asking, “How do perceptions of the division of household labor affect married and cohabitating heterosexual couples’ relationship happiness and chance of separation?” In order to answer this question, the National Survey of Families and Households (Wave III) is analyzed, with outcomes focusing on relationship happiness and chance of separation. Results indicate that when married and cohabitating individuals experience similar levels of happiness with their partner’s housework, they also experience similar levels of relationship happiness and chance of separation, with relationship status not affecting the impact happiness with partner’s housework has on these relationship outcomes. This suggests that cohabitation and marriage may continue to become more similar overall.

Comparative studies have confirmed that the current types of cohabitation (defined as living together as a couple without being married) and the meanings attached to them differ across Europe. This variation could reflect differences in the levels of progress or the stages countries have reached in a common developmental process, as suggested by the theory of the Second Demographic Transition and Kiernan’s stage model of cohabitation. However, it may also indicate that countries are on different developmental paths, as suggested by path dependency theories. To examine whether changes in the prevalence of cohabitation follow a common script, this study analyses types of cohabitation within emerging family formation patterns over cohorts and across countries.

For this purpose, sequence methodology is applied to analyze cohort-specific family trajectories in France, western Germany, Norway, and Italy. In particular, using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS), patterns of union status and co-residence with (own) children between ages 15 and 35 among the 1935–1969 birth cohorts (for Germany, among the 1940–1974 birth cohorts) are compared.

Our findings provide some support for the claim that there were common patterns of change. However, also country-specific variations in family trajectory patterns were detected, which suggests that general processes of change were mediated through country-specific institutions (path dependencies). The empirical evidence for convergence as well as for divergence indicates that both theoretical strands add to our understanding of the spread of cohabitation in European countries.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

Economies and societies are not digitally isolated. Digital technologies are widely recognised as key drivers of information dissemination, knowledge sharing, income and employment. Digital technologies also influence the interlinkages of digitalisation, gender and labour market outcomes. Digital technologies impact every sphere of day-to-day life. It impacts ways of communication, trade and business; influences networking abilities; shapes societal norms, attitudes and behaviours. It is hence argued that digital technologies may have crucial implications for women's participation in the workforce.

Gender equality and increasing women's workforce participation is an important goal under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Research indicates that women are mainly involved in agricultural work, blue-collar formal work, while collar formal work, and entrepreneurship. Digital technologies significantly impact the ways of working in all these sectors. Consequently, it is argued that digital technologies influence women's participation across all such types of work.

This chapter aims at unravelling the linkages between digital technologies and women's workforce participation. To this end, the influences of digital technologies on women's participation in agricultural work, blue-collar formal work, white-collar formal work and entrepreneurship are discussed. The implications and impacts of the use of broadband, internet and mobile technologies are also discussed. This chapter also includes important theories of women's workforce participation and discusses them in light of digitalisation.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.