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This paper aims to overcome the limitations of studies on work-life balance, which have focused on Western countries without considering “mental” dimensions of gendered childcare. By concentrating on South Korea as a case study, this paper also aims to examine how the gendered division of childcare changed when Korea's work-life/family policy followed European work-family conciliation policy.

The Korean Time Use Survey (KTUS) in 2009 and 2019 are used for multiple regression analyses. Based on discussions about theories on unpaid work distribution within households and its stratification effects, this study examines the relationship between wife's and husband's behaviors and the stratification effects in the gendered division of childcare alongside the work-life/family policy change.

Substantial findings indicate the necessity of strengthening various legal and institutional structures that might increase husbands' characteristics of caring masculinities. Additionally, while policies developed to support flexible working arrangements, low-income women at risk of being trapped in dual poverty of time and income should be carefully considered.

This study focuses especially on South Korea, thereby contributing to understanding how national policy and gendered distribution of childcare are related. Notably, this link has not been widely discussed in the literature on work-life balance. It also suggests viable directions for future policies depending on gender and socioeconomic status.

This article aims to provide an overview on key trends in public sector policy and professional development and how they intersect with gender and diversity. It seeks to explore new configurations in the relationship between gender and the professions and to develop a matrix for the collection of articles presented in this volume.

The authors link social policy and governance approaches to the study of professions, using the health professions and academics as case studies. Material from a number of studies carried out by the authors together with published secondary sources provide the basis of our analysis; this is followed by an introduction of the scope and structure of this thematic issue.

The findings underline the significance of public policy as key to better understand gender and diversity in professional groups. The outline of major trends in public sector professions brings into focus both the persistence of gender inequality and the emergence of new lines of gendered divisions in the professions.

The research presented here highlights a need for new models of public sector management and professional development that are more sensitive to equality and diversity.

This article focuses on the “making” of inequality at the interface of public policy and professional action. It introduces a context sensitive approach that moves beyond equal opportunity policies and managerial accounts and highlights new directions in research and policy.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the challenges in improving women's energy access, rights and equitable sustainable development from a Ghanaian perspective.

The research utilizes a mixed method. A qualitative in-depth exploratory design was chosen to understand how gender is mainstreamed within Ghana's energy sector. This included semi-structured interviews with key managers, experience policy experts and focus groups. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed using thematic content analysis (TCA).

The study reveals that the National Energy Policy of 2010, as the main energy policy regulating the energy sector in Ghana, does make provision for gender equality, safety especially women, in line with Ghana's sustainable development goals. The energy policy aims to empower women and create gender parity in the sector. Nevertheless, the study also found major challenges to gender mainstreaming in the energy sector, including poor analysis in formulating energy policies, inadequate financial resources, and poor monitoring and evaluation.

The paper exposes gender equity challenges associated with the energy sector in Ghana. It also offers a new policy angle which connects gender mainstreaming to sustainable development. The research describes how women are included in developing energy policies and in addressing gender challenges in the energy sector.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative case study of national innovation system in Canada and Sweden from the perspective of gender equality. The case study focuses on public policy to illuminate the formal aspects of innovation systems as they are conceived by the state in relation to gender, diversity and social inclusion. Formal policy measures are contrasted with interview data to provide a holistic picture of innovation policy as it relates to gender equality in both countries.

This paper relies on data from 44 qualitative interviews with innovation leaders in the public sector, private sector and academia in Canada and Sweden, as well as a sample of innovation and gender experts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, France, between 2012 and 2014. The theoretical framework draws on feminist institutionalism to explain the gendered interactions of institutions in innovation spaces.

This study finds that Sweden is a global policy leader in the development of gender-conscious innovation policy, while Canada has yet to consider a gender-conscious approach to innovation policy. Gender-conscious innovation policy norms have not traveled across the OECD because of administrative solos and political opportunity structures.

Each of the people contacted to sit for an interview was chosen primarily on their professional title and their ability to speak from a place of knowledge about innovation in their country and or industry, and this creates a success bias within the study focusing on the knowledge of elites in the field.

This study explores how policy might be reimagined to support gender equality and diversity, thus changing the institutional landscape to support a wider range of innovations and distributing the benefits of innovation in a more equitable way.

This paper challenges assumptions about the social and economic power dynamics reflected in current innovation systems in Canada and Sweden.

This is the first study of its kind in comparative public policy to explore differences in gender equality and innovation policy in Canada and Sweden. This research also contributes more widely to the existing body of gender, public policy and innovation literatures in Canada and Sweden, respectively.

The purpose of the paper is to evaluate what caused the debates and confusion in articulating a gender-equal inheritance policy in Bangladesh, and to identify the socio-political drivers and nature of the political power play that thwarted the policy’s adoption.

The research undergirding this paper is based on a qualitative approach involving a case study with in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, and secondary data analysis. The interviews were conducted with policy makers, officials, lawyers, women activists, Muslim religious scholars, Hindu priests, academics and researchers, and women representing Hindu and Muslim religions.

The findings illustrate that the controversies between the Islamic religion and national and international policies led to serious debates and confusion about gender-equal rights of inheritance in Bangladesh. The failure to formulate and adopt a gender-equal inheritance policy was influenced by several socio-political phenomena and gender-biased institutional settings. This kind of policy is deeply political, and cultural compatibility is necessary to formulate it, especially when the policy affects religious sentiments. Religious sentiments and beliefs, which are associated with religion-based personal law, therefore influence both the formulation or non-formulation of a gender-equal policy. To move forward with the fundamental idea of women’s inclusion, there is a strong need to identify the socio-cultural and political drivers behind formulating, non-formulating, as well as implementing a gender-equal policy.

The paper will be beneficial to scholars and policy makers who seek to explore the epicenter of challenges and opposition to formulating a gender-equal policy in the context of a developing country with a Muslim majority.

An increasing number of countries have introduced duties for public-sector organisations who, in addition to addressing discrimination, are now also required to promote equality of opportunity between different groups. The purpose of this paper is to explore the limited progress of gender equality policies, through a study of the local implementation of equalities policies. The authors highlight the role of equalities leads in the public sector as local “agents of change”, and explore explanations of the implementation gap between policy and practice.

The paper reports on a small-scale qualitative study with equalities leads in the health sector in England. The study comprised semi-structured interviews with equalities leads from nine health organisations which were purposively selected to include a mix of areas and populations. The interviews focused on the leads’ backgrounds and their perceptions of barriers to their work.

The equalities leads had a range of experience prior to their current post, though most had little formal subject-specific training. They highlighted a number of barriers to effective implementation of gender equality strategies, including resource issues, the impact of organisational change, the increased the number of equalities they were expected to address, organisational perceptions that gender was no longer a priority and resistance to what are seen as “tick box” exercises.

The value of this paper is that it adds to the understanding of the challenges facing the implementation of gender equalities policies in the health sector, the reasons for these and the role of local policy implementers in the effectiveness of national equalities policies.

The paper considers the impact of work‐life balance policies on the work and family practices of professional, dual‐earner parents with dependent children, by assessing the extent to which “well‐balanced families” have been resultantly facilitated. It poses two research questions: the first centres on how far work‐life balance policies have better enabled working parents to manage their commitments to employers and children, whilst the second focuses on how far parental and employer responses to work‐life balance policies may be gendered. The ultimate aim is to (re)‐articulate the importance of gender in the work‐life balance agenda.

The paper draws upon historical and conceptual research on work and family practices. It invokes gender as a lens through which notions of the “well‐balanced family” are considered.

It is argued that work‐life balance policies have not led to well‐balanced, or “gender‐neutral”, work and family practices. This is for two reasons, both relating to gender. First, the take up of work‐life balance policies is gendered, with more mothers than fathers working flexibly. This is partly because organizational expectations fail to acknowledge social change around the paternal parenting role. Second, work‐life balance policies focus mainly on the issues of paid work and childcare, failing to take account of domestic labour, the main burden of which continues to be carried by mothers.

Deeply ingrained social assumptions about the gendered division of labour within heterosexual couples limit the impact of work‐life balance policies on work family practices.

The paper moves forward the debate on work‐life balance through taking an interdisciplinary approach to an issue which has often been addressed previously from discipline‐specific approaches such as health, psychology or policy.

In Sweden, gender mainstreaming policies have a long political history. As part of the national gender equality strategy of the Swedish forest industry, the ten largest forestry companies committed themselves to gender mainstream their policies. Limiting the impact of policies and the agency of change, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the varied and conflicting meanings and constitution of the concepts, the problem and, in extent, the organisational realities of gender mainstreaming.

In both, implementation and practice, gender mainstreaming posse challenges on various levels and by analysing these documents as practical texts from the WPR-approach. This paper explores constructions of gender and gender equality and their implications on the practice and the political of gender mainstreaming in a male-dominated primary industry.

The results show that the organisations themselves were not constituted as the subject of the policy but instead some of the individuals (women). The subject position of women represented in company policy was one of lacking skills and competences and in the need of help. Not only men and the masculine norms but organisational processes and structures were also generally invisible in the material. Power and conflict were mainly absent from the understanding of gender equality. Instead, consenting ideas of gender equality were the focus. Such conceptualisations of gender equality are beneficial for all risk concealing power structures and thereby limit the political space for change.

By highlighting the scale of policy and the significance of organisational contexts, the results indicate how gender and gender equality are constitutive through the governing technologies of neoliberal and market-oriented ideologies in policy – emphasising the further limiting of space for structural change and politicalization within the male-dominated organisations of Swedish forest industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how theories of inter-organizational learning can create new insights and nuances to how processes of intra-organizational learning come about in a single, complex and multi-sited organization.

A constructivist thematic analysis of the “Handbook of Feminist Foreign Policy” produced by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SMFA) is completed, exploring the organization’s own presentation of the complex learning processes that took place when implementing the new policy in 2014.

The literature on inter-organizational learning has a so far unexplored explanatory potential to understand learning processes that take place in complex, multi-sited organizations. This case demonstrates why and how this potential is relevant to exploit. Five themes are constructed from the analysis; four pointing out how gender mainstreaming is spread throughout the different parts of the organization and one detailing how the learning process has provided the SMFA knowledge exportable to other organizations.

Due to the complexity in large, multi-sited organizations today, this paper argues what is classically understood as solely inter-organizational processes could also apply to a single organization, as the learning processes this engages in, transitions intra- and inter-organizational learning. The study advances current understandings through exploring mechanisms of gender mainstreaming.

The article explores to what extent party politics has influenced the different trajectories in Spain and Italy in terms of gendered active social policies (ASPs) (i.e. ALMPs and WLBPs). Second, it investigates how social and political modernization in the two countries has facilitated or hindered party competition on gendered ASPs.

To investigate to what extent parties support gendered ASPs, the article relies on an original content analysis of party manifestos issued during the 2010s national elections. A total of 1387 quasi-sentences have been coded. The results were then quantified to graphically show how positions differentiate across parties and countries.

The content analysis of party manifestos displays that party politics matters: gendered ASPs are backed in a very different way by the Spanish and Italian parties. While in Spain all political parties have strongly championed ALMPs and WLBPs, this is not the case for the Italian parties. The research has also stressed that the specific path of social and political modernization is an important intervening variable that alters positively or negatively parties' support for gendered ASPs.

The article contributes to widen theoretically and empirically the literature on ASPs in the Southern European countries. Theoretically, it questions the supposed homogeneity of the Southern social model and investigated the alleged bifurcation between Italy and Spain, focusing on those policies – ASPs – that constitute the foundations of the Southern model: familialism and dualization. Furthermore, this bifurcation was analyzed adopting a gender perspective, and exploring adherence to or departure from the Southern model. Third, the article focuses on the politics of ASPs demonstrating that inspecting the political arena can contribute to explain policy change.