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Uses data from 1994 International Social Survey Programme to examine how attitudes to maternal employment at different stages of child rearing vary across and within eight nations in the European Union, UK, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Considers whether a mismatch exists between belief in a women’s right to work and the “traditional” family ideology. Highlights a north/south divide in attitude and differing welfare policies and gender‐role beliefs.

This article aims to explore how Japanese women with younger children changed their commitment to the labour market between 2000 and 2019 by comparing mothers in three-generation and nuclear family households.

Japan currently has the highest ageing rate in the world at nearly 30%. Since the 1990s, employment flexibilization and women's labour market participation have proceeded in parallel, and the conservative family values of the patriarchy and gender division of labour that have provided intergenerational aid for care within households have been shrinking, by conducting a descriptive analysis of the Labour Force Survey (LFS).

This study identified that a conspicuous increase in part-time employment among mothers in both household types and a decrease by half in the working mother's population in three-generation households. These results suggest that the function of inter-generational assistance by multi-generation cohabitation, which was once thought to be effective in helping working mothers with younger children, is declining.

A study examining the transformation of mothers' employment behaviour differences between three-generation households and nuclear family households is rare. This paper makes a new contribution to the research regarding the grandparents' caregiving, household types and mothers' employment.

Purpose – A central claim of the “added worker effect” is that married women increase their employment when husbands experience unemployment. This study evaluates the added worker effect in the context of the Great Recession. I examine whether married mothers increased their employment during the recession, and if the increase in employment occurred in households where the husband experienced unemployment.

Methodology/approach – I employ descriptive statistics and logistic regression models using 2006 and 2010 American Community Survey data.

Findings – I show that married mothers’ increased employment occurred in households that were less economically disadvantaged prior to the recession. The demand for married women's employment should have been stronger in households where men were employed in industries that were hard-hit by the recession. However, employment rates were lower among women married to men with lower earnings who were employed in the industries with the highest unemployment.

Social implications – These results show that women are not equally able to respond to husbands’ unemployment. Women with lower levels of education and lacking in job experience may be unable to obtain a job in a tight labor market. This may account for some of the household economic polarization and concentration of poverty in the last recession.

Originality/value of paper – Recent studies suggest that couples may be able to make up for spousal unemployment by increasing labor supply of other household members. However, these results indicate that the households that have the greatest need for additional workers may be those that have the most difficulty securing employment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore associations between children's and mothers” work.

Brazilian household survey data are used to examine characteristics of children's and mothers' work in tandem.

Children are more likely to be in the labor force if their mothers are working, especially girls, younger children and rural children. There are strong connections between mothers' and children's employment characteristics, including industry and sector, location, commute times and whether paid. Employed children are more likely to work long hours if their mothers do, or if their mothers are not employed.

Connections between women's and children's work imply that changes in women's employment can change the work activities of their children. Policies and programs designed to influence women's labor force participation, such as micro‐credit programs, should consider their effects on children's time. Moreover, programs, laws, and international conventions that address only child labor ignore the family context of child work, limiting their potential impact.

The paper uses quantitative techniques and survey data to examine a topic usually investigated through small qualitative studies.

Purpose – This chapter explores mothering scripts among women of color and the intersection of race/ethnicity, social class, and family background in their narratives.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 24 African American and Latina mothers, this study analyzes the extent to which their narratives reflect more “intensive” or “extensive” mothering scripts.Findings – African American mothers typically drew from “extensive mothering” narratives, whereas Latina mothers’ scripts were more varied.Research implications – The findings point to the importance of and complexities in an intersectionality perspective: Latinas’ mothering scripts generally varied more across social class categories than those of African American mothers. However, African American mothers’ discussions of stress were mediated by their social class background.Social implications – The chapter concludes with the implications of this research for scholarship on families, and for social policies surrounding caregiving and employment.Originality/value – While rich theoretical and empirical works explore women of color and their family lives, few to none ask mothers themselves to talk about their actual and ideal experiences of motherhood. This chapter fills this gap by exploring the mothering scripts of women of color from diverse class backgrounds

The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.

In any attempt to build up a modern employment policy in a highly‐developed society there are several inter‐related modules. One of these is relevant participation by employees in the decision‐making process; another relates to ownership of the business and the employees' stake in it. There are many more. One aspect of growing importance, one which until recently was not accepted as important but is increasingly asserting itself, is the position of women in society and, in particular, the role of women in the work force. Eventually this feature is destined to become one of the most important of all the aspects of employment and public attitudes towards it will come to be fundamentally modified. At present we are at the very beginning of this process of attitude‐changing and to this extent this is a new but absolutely‐essential field of action for the manager of human resources. It is another of these inescapable obligations which have considerably extended the field of responsibility of the trainer or the manpower change agent. We have already published several authoritative contributions in this topic area. One to which readers might care to refer was contained in our issue of March 1976, page 96, under the title of WOMEN AND WORK. We offer this present article for use as a starter session for in‐plant or college study and we shall add to it as the months go by. In May 1976 a conference was held at Brunei University under the title MOTHERS IN EMPLOYMENT: TRENDS AND ISSUES. This seminar produced a series of first‐class papers which have now been gathered together and published under the title of MOTHERS IN EMPLOYMENT. This 140 page booklet is available from Brunei University Management Programme, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, price £1.95. We have selected it as the most suitable introduction to the topic available and in preparing this current article we have drawn heavily on it and quoted extensively and verbatim from it.

In this paper, we use microdata on employment and earnings from a variety of industrialized countries to investigate the family gap in pay – the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children. We present results from seven countries: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. We find that there is a good deal of variation across our sample countries in the effects of children on women’s employment and in the effects of children on women’s hourly wages even after controlling for differences between women with and without children in characteristics such as age and education. We also find that the variation in the family gap in pay across countries is not primarily due to differential selection into employment or to differences in wage structure across countries. We suggest that future research should examine the impact of family policies such as maternity leave and child care on the family gap in pay.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate alternative measures to better understand and measure success for self-employed mothers in addition to the usual financial indicators.

The present study is a comparative analysis of time spent at work and undertaking childcare by female workers with children in Spain between 2009 and 2010, using a combination of descriptive statistics and linear regression analysis based on the Time-Use Survey 2009-2010.

The results of the paper indicate that self-employed working mothers tend to spend more time with their children when these are under the age of ten, and that they work longer hours than salaried mothers.

This paper has some limitations due to the quantitative approach to secondary data. Further qualitative research could clarify some of the findings; moreover the study is based on Spain, so extending to other countries would help validate the results.

Policy makers, in general – but more specifically in high unemployment scenarios – can facilitate self-employment for both men and women to reduce unemployment and to offer workers the prospect of a more balanced life.

This research contributes to the existing literature, which fosters a more holistic approach to the analysis of female-run ventures by measuring performance using not only economic indicators, but also personal achievements.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the question whether women’s employment is negatively affected in countries with very long periods of childcare leave.

The authors analyzed data on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18-countries, combined with country-level data on childcare, unemployment and service sector size.

The authors found that in countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, while in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is bigger than with short periods of leave.

The authors argued that to correctly answer the long-leave question – the relationship between duration of leave and employment of women should be explicitly hypothesized as being curvilinear; and childcare leave should be expected to affect only mothers, not women without children; testing the long-leave hypothesis requires the use of country-comparative data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time; and is best tested against person-level data.