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This chapter examines the relationship between constitutional guarantees of sex equality, understood as prohibiting unequal treatment between men and women, and the constitutional protections of maternity. Textual guarantees of sex equality are nearly universal in constitutions around the world, and many constitutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia also include provisions guaranteeing mothers the special protection of the state. In the United States, by contrast, the special treatment of mothers has long been contested as a threat to gender equality, and the efforts to add a sex equality amendment to the U.S. constitution have failed over the past century because of conflicts about the status of motherhood. This study traces the origins and jurisprudential development of maternity clauses in European constitutions to shed light on the possibility of synthesizing maternity protection with a constitutional commitment to gender equality.

This paper aims to highlight secular and Islamic feminist approaches to entrepreneurship as potential means to challenge gender inequality in the Turkish context. In Turkey, gender equality remains elusive in a nation where secular and Islamic ideologies compete and produce different solutions to ongoing economic, socio-cultural and political issues. Women’s entrepreneurship has emerged as an important solution toward gender equality and economic development.

Using two women’s organizations that exemplify secular and Islamic feminist ideologies, the author examines whether the entrepreneurship activities they promote give way to challenging patriarchal norms, values and practices widespread in Turkish society.

Through their distinct practices and engagement with entrepreneurship, both secular and Islamic feminist positions allow for praxis and represent an ethico-political commitment to dismantling neo-liberal development ideologies in the Turkish context that perpetuate gender inequality.

Secular and Islamic feminist practices and entrepreneurship practices have different implications for achieving gender equality including changes in gender norms, economic development policies and women’s empowerment in a Muslim-majority country. In addition, it raises questions around the popular notion of “entrepreneurship as women’s empowerment”.

This paper is of value to scholars who want to understand secular and Islamic feminisms and their implications for challenging gender inequality. The Turkish context with its traditional and modern societal norms and values provides a rich case study to examine these issues through the exemplars of entrepreneurship. It is also of value to scholars who want to understand structural constraints associated with gender equality beyond individual-level challenges.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This chapter explores the influences of Vietnamese culture coupled with national policies on gender equality on academic women’s advancement into senior leadership positions.

In-depth interviews with 20 mid-level women leaders and five top-level leaders were conducted at four different higher education institutions in the Mekong Delta (MD) in southern Vietnam. In addition, document analysis and participant observations contributed to the overall analysis, which allowed for the cross-check of data from multiple sources to investigate the participants’ understanding, perception, conceptualization, and interpretation of their experiences of advancing in their careers.

Findings show that there is a large gap between the policies and gender practices. Gender equality does not exist in reality, regardless of tremendous efforts from the Vietnamese government and policy makers to ensure it in all spheres of life. Additionally, patriarchal hierarchy remains dominant in the institutional administrative system, and Vietnamese Confucian ideology continues to confine and adversely affect both men’s and women’s perceptions of women’s social roles, status, and forms of social participation. Nevertheless, academic women still develop professionally and find their own ways to advance to a few key leadership positions at their institutions.

The sample of this study is limited to academic women in the MD in Vietnam. Future research should include more women and universities and colleges, from not only the southern part but also other regions of Vietnam. Further, international and comparative studies should be conducted to see differences in experiences of academic women from several Southeast Asian countries as they move up their career ladder.

Because there have not been any empirical studies about women and leadership in academia in the MD, this study serves as a resource and foundation for improving gender policies and practices as well as future research on this topic and gender issues of colleges and universities in Vietnam.

Since the late eighteenth century, American men have supported women's equality. (see Kimmel and Mosmiller, 1992). Even before the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York heralded the birth of the organized women's movement in 1848, American men had begun to argue in favor of women's rights. That celebrated radical, Thomas Paine, for example, mused in 1775 that any formal declaration of independence from England should include women, since women have, as he put it, “an equal right to virtue.”(Paine, [1775] 1992, 63–66). Other reformers, like Benjamin Rush and John Neal articulated claims for women's entry into schools and public life. Charles Brockden Brown, America's first professional novelist, penned a passionate plea for women's equality in Alcuin(1798).

The purpose of this paper is to examine how female expatriates interpret the effectiveness of practical implementation of equality/diversity policies, trusting this to support their expatriate careers.

A cross-sectional, qualitative research approach draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with 14 human resources equality/diversity policy implementers and 26 current female expatriates in two oil and gas firms.

Early-career stage female expatriates believe that equality/diversity policy implementation will support their international careers. At the most senior levels, women expatriates highlight unequal treatment breaching their trust in delivery of equality/diversity principles to support their expatriate career progression.

Longitudinal research is needed to assess how early-career women expatriates' willingness to trust in organisational equality/diversity principles alters as their careers progress, and the effects of any changing trust relations on their contributions to organisational strategic objectives. Larger senior female expatriate samples are needed to research links between trust relations and turnover.

Organisations must weigh up benefits from using transparent expatriate selection processes versus less formal mechanisms, if informal processes are not to undermine espoused equality interventions. Unconscious bias training should form part of wide-ranging programmes to tackle discrimination. Senior managerial action with embedded accountability is needed.

Exploring the rhetoric and reality of equality/diversity policy implementation on women comprising a minority expatriate group, this research demonstrates women expatriates' early-career trust in gender equality falls away as they first recognise and then accept diminishing female expatriate senior grade representation and the implications for their expatriate careers. Should turnover result, this could detrimentally affect organisational expatriate gender diversity objectives.

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.