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The study aims to investigate how pregnant and nursing mothers’ stories have been neglected in writing about gender, security and spaces.

The study chronicles Agogo Traditional Area’s pregnant and nursing mothers’ resistance and survival in this conflicted environment. The author used photo voices in a participatory photography design to give conflict-area women a voice. Interviews and observations supported this. Pregnant and nursing mothers were sampled using the purposive and snowball sampling techniques. The data analysis considered narrative analysis, photographic and inductive approaches.

The findings highlighted how these mothers in vicious settings experienced healthcare access and problems, societal issues including gender dynamics, food insecurity, and emotional and psychological well-being.

The findings in this study expand the socio-cultural narratives of pregnant and nursing mothers in violent spaces.

This study aims to investigate whether social investment (SI) policies improve employment among single mothers.

This paper analyzes the potential effects of SI policies on vulnerable individuals and workers at the macro level by using the employment position of single mothers as a dependent variable. Time-series cross-national data from 18 OECD countries between 1998 and 2017 are analyzed. Multilevel model analysis is also used for robustness check.

I find that public spending on education and family support is positively associated with the employment rates of single mothers. In contrast, active labor market policy (ALMP) spending is negatively associated. ALMP’s negative effects stand out particularly with public spending on job training. Of all family support policies, family allowances are positively associated with single mothers’ employment, which runs counter to the conventional argument that family allowances are a disincentive for women’s or mothers’ employment. Paid leave (length and generosity) is also associated with higher employment for single mothers. There is also some tentative evidence that public spending on maternity leave benefits (spending level) may raise the odds of single mothers being employed, when individual-level factors are controlled for in multilevel analysis we implement for robustness check.

This paper does not analyze the effects of the qualitative properties of SI policies. Future research is necessary in this respect.

The effects of SI policies on employment among single mothers have not yet been examined in the literature. This paper seeks to be a first cut at measuring the effects.

Child malnutrition is a grave concern for Pakistan, as the country has one of the highest incidences of child stunting in the developing world. The present study examines the relative significance of parents' education on a child's nutritional status in Pakistan.

For analysis, the study has used data from Phase 7 of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) (2017–2018). Since the dependent variable ranges from 0 to 1 (1 indicates not a stunted child, while 0 represents a stunted child), binary logistic regressions are used for the analysis.

The results show that mothers' and fathers' education positively contributes to a child's nutrition. However, mothers' education is considered more significant, especially in the long run. The mother's education categories are positive and significant in the long run, while only their higher education is positive and significant for the father's. Moreover, the magnitude of the effect also shows that the probability of stunting is less if the mothers are educated. The long-run coefficient for mothers' higher education is 0.752, while that of fathers' higher education is only 0.232.

The present study compares the importance of mothers' and fathers' education in child nutrition and concludes that the role of the mother is more crucial for child upbringing. There are rarely any studies that focus on the role of fathers' education in child nutrition and compare whose role, mothers' or fathers,' is more important for child well-being.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2023-0483

Recent research has captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in widening gender inequalities, by highlighting that academic women have been disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women assumed most of the care labour at home, whilst working at normal patterns, leaving them unable to perform as normal. This is very concerning because of the short and long-term detrimental consequences this will have on women’s well-being and their academic careers. This article aims to stimulate a change in the current understandings of academic work by pointing towards alternative – and more inclusive – ways of working in academia.

The two authors engage with autoethnography and draw on their own personal experience of becoming breastfeeding academic mothers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

To understand the positioning of contemporary academic mothers, this study draws on insights from both cultural studies and organisation studies on the emergence of discursive formations about gender, that is “postfeminist sensibility”. Guided by autoethnographic accounts of academic motherhood, this study reveals that today academia creates an individualised, neutral (disembodied), output-focused and control-oriented understanding of academic work.

This paper adds to the conversation of academic motherhood and the impact of the pandemic on working mothers. The study theoretically contributes with the lens of “motherhood” in grasping what academic work can become. It shows the power of motherhood in opening up an alternative way of conceptualising academic work, centred on embodied care and appreciative of the non-linearity and messiness of life.

While past research has explored how opting-out enables mothers to break free from masculinist organizational cultures, less attention has been given to how they resist disciplinary power that constitutes and governs their subjectivities. This paper aims to add to the discussion of opting-out as a site of power and resistance by proposing the concept of “constructive resistance” as a productive vantage point for investigating opted-out mothers' subversive practices of self-making.

This Malaysian case study brings together the notion of constructive resistance, critical narrative analysis and APPRAISAL theory to examine the reflective stories of eighteen mothers who exited formal employment. These accounts were collected through an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured email interviews.

The mothers in the sample tend to construct themselves in two main ways, as (1) valuable mothers (capable, tireless, caring mothers who are key figures in their children's lives) and (2) competent professionals. These subjectivities are parasitic on gendered and neoliberal ideals but allow the mothers to undermine neoliberal capitalist work arrangements that were incongruent with their personal values and adversely impacted their well-being, as well as refuse organizational narratives that positioned them as “failed” workers.

Whereas power is primarily seen in previous opting-out scholarship as centralized and constraining, this case study illustrates how the lens of constructive resistance can be beneficial for examining opted-out mothers' struggles against a less direct form of power that governs through the production of truths and subjectivities.

The main impetus of the current paper is to identify and prioritize the work–family balance (WFB) satisfaction attributes specifically for working sole mothers' by deploying the Kano technique and weighted average method.

A multi-stage methodology has been used in the present analysis. Initially, the Kano method has been utilized to categorize the WFB satisfaction attributes using a three-dimensional WFB satisfaction scale. Afterward, the satisfaction coefficient technique was employed on Kano outcomes to get the WFB satisfaction and dissatisfaction index. Subsequently, the weighted average method was employed to prioritize the WFB satisfaction attributes.

Findings uncovered the significance of a non-linear association between WFB attributes and employed sole mothers' WFB satisfaction. The findings revealed that one-dimensional and must-be-based WFB satisfaction attributes are responsible for sole mothers' WFB satisfaction and employing organizations must not overlook them. Additionally, the results of weighted average method-based prioritization can help organizations to focus on particular WFB satisfaction criteria according to their priority level.

The findings are useful for WFB policy-makers and managers to formulate a suitable WFB strategy specifically for single mothers.

Results provide a path for employers to minimize the work–family role conflict and societal dissatisfaction that helps sole mothers to attain the desired WFB.

This study first employed a novel approach that incorporates the Kano application with the weighted average method in order to prioritize the WFB satisfaction attributes for lone mothers.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0074

This study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.

This qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.

This discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.

This research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.

This discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.

This article tackles the intersection of mothering and labor through the author's own experience as a feminist mother/manager from Istanbul, Turkey. It aims to revisit the first years of motherhood, exploring the struggle to invent a peculiar maternal subjectivity in opposition and negotiation with the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the new definition of maternal labor in a highly digital, neoliberal context and the issue of marital fairness in a dual-income heterosexual marriage.

The article presents an autoethnographic, retrospective and introspective inquiry into the first seven years of the author's mothering experience in order to offer an in-depth exploration of the various aspects of contemporary maternal labor.

The article shows how maternal labor has shifted in nature and expanded in scope in a contemporary non-Western context. It investigates the dissolution of the spatial, temporal and sensorial boundaries between the managerial labor dedicated to the workplace, and to the family. Highlighting the similarities of the two forms of labor, the article manifests the materiality, tangibility and visibility of maternal labor.

Further intersectional studies shall be beneficial to redefine maternal labor in different contexts.

Departing and diverting from the terms “invisible labor” and “mental load”, the article suggests a shift in terminology to stress the multifaceted medley of managerial tasks mothers undertake today.

The article provides an original take on maternal labor through the first-hand experience of a middle-class, professional mother from Istanbul, Turkey.

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.

To understand how Indian first-time mothers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) organisations returning to work cope with the perceived ideological psychological contract breaches from a work–home resources perspective.

This paper utilises interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) within the work–home resources (W-HR) model to analyse returning first-time mothers' lived experiences.

This study shows that significant life/work events such as childbirth/lack of career growth can trigger resource depletion at work and home and materialise in first-time mothers perceiving ideological psychological contract breaches at work. It has also been observed that key resource usage and macro support structures aid employees in attenuating work–home conflict by balancing contextual demands and personal resources. This study's participant accounts reveal that the recovery of volatile resources was possible by psychologically detaching and being silent.

The study offers a distinctive perspective by investigating the ideological PC breach experienced by first-time Indian mothers upon their organisational re-entry from a work–home resource model lens. Situated in a unique socio-cultural space and bringing forth the rich lived experiences of women working in the Indian STEM field, this paper explores how key resources shape the coping responses of first-time mothers in this context.