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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.

Inspired by the “responsibility turn” in the broader organization/management literature, the overarching aim of this article is to help scholars working at the gender × entrepreneurship intersection produce research with a higher likelihood of being accessed, appreciated and acted upon by policy- practitioners. Consistent with this aim, we hope that our paper contributes to an increased use of academic-practitioner collaborations as a means of producing such research.

We selected Cunliffe and Pavlovich’s (2022) recently formulated “public organization/management studies” (public OMS) approach as our guiding methodology. We implemented this approach by forming a co-authorship team comprised of a policy professional and an entrepreneurship scholar and then engaging in a democratic, collaborative and mutually respectful process of knowledge cogeneration.

Our paper is comprised of four distinct sets of ideas. We start by describing who policy-practitioners are and what they want from academic research in general. We follow this with a comprehensive set of priorities for policy-oriented research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus, accompanied by references to academic studies that offer initial insight into the identified priorities. We then offer suggestions for the separate and joint actions that scholars and policy-practitioners can take to increase policy-relevant research on gender and entrepreneurship. We end with a description and critical reflection on our application of the public OMS approach.

The ideas presented in our article offer an original response to recent work that has critiqued the policy implications (or lack thereof) within prior research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus (Foss et al., 2019). Our ideas also complement and extend existing recommendations for strengthening the practical contributions of academic scholarship at this intersection (Nelson, 2020). An especially unique aspect is our description of – and critical reflection upon – how we applied the public OMS approach to bridge the academic-policy divide.

This chapter considers the commitment of gender equality at universities and how it is expressed and measured via a gender equality scorecard. The Gender Equality Scorecard is seen as an accountability measure that seeks to build awareness of the magnitude of the problem (if it exists), interpret the meaning of the (in)equities, and move to action. It is regarded as a supportive mechanism to the development and implementation of a Gender Policy as articulated in The UWI Strategic Plan, 2012–2017. The development of a Scorecard is also seen as an example of collaborative governance in action that fosters engagement, commitment, and action across an institution. The proposed model draws upon the experiences of the Gender Equity Scorecards used by international development agencies and other higher educational institutions. The chapter proposes a framework and methodology using staff and student data from The University of the West Indies for the period 1990–1991 to 2011–2012 to build a Gender Scorecard. Finally, the Scorecard is seen as a tool to track performance related to the creation and enhancement of relevant structures and processes to institutionalize gender equality into the functions, operations, and governance of institutions.

To investigate the association between country-level differences in childcare enrollment, the presence of affirmative action policy, and female parliamentary representation and individual-level conflict between work and family.

This study applies data from the 2002 International Social Survey Program (n = 14,000 + ) for respondents in 29 countries and pairs them with macro-level measures of childcare enrollment, the presence of affirmative action policy, and female parliamentary representation. I estimate the model using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM 7) and also assess cross-level interactions by gender and parental status.

The models show that female parliamentary representation has a robust negative association with individual-level reports of work–family and family–work conflict. These associations do not vary by gender or parental status. Also, mothers report less family–work conflict in countries with more expansive childcare enrollment, indicating that this welfare policy benefits the intended group.

This research implies that greater female parliamentary representation has widespread benefits to all citizens’, rather than just women’s or mothers’, work–family and family–work conflict. Additional longitudinal research would benefit this area of study.

This research suggests that increasing female parliamentary representation at the country-level may promote work–life balance at the individual-level. It also indicates that public childcare enrollment benefits women through lower family–work conflict which may encourage continuous maternal labor force participation and reduce economic gender inequality.

This chapter builds on an emerging area of work–family research applying multilevel modeling to draw empirical links between individual work–family experiences and macro-level structural variation.

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.

Although women have advanced in the economic sphere, the gender pay gap (GPG) remains a persisting problem for gender equality. Using Acker's theory of gendered organisations, this study strives to gain a better understanding from a macro and micro approach, how family and work-related policies, especially family-friendly measures (FFMs), and their uptake, contribute and maintain the GPG in Malta and specifically within the Financial and Insurance sector.

Two research instruments were used. National policy documents were analysed through the gender lens, followed by structured interviews with HR managerial participants within this sector.

Findings suggest that at a macro level, family and work-related policies could be divided into two broad categories: A set of family-friendly policies that contribute to the GPG because of their gendered nature, or because the uptake is mostly taken by women. These include make-work pay policies, which initially appear to be gender neutral, but which attracted lower educated inactive women to the Maltese labour market at low pay, contributing to an increase in the GPG. Second, a set of policies that take on a gender-neutral approach and help reduce the GPG. These include policies like the free childcare and after school care scheme that allow mothers to have a better adherence to the labour market. At the micro level within organisations, pay discrepancies between women and men were largely negated and awareness about the issue was low. Here, “ideal worker” values based on masculine norms seemed to lead to covert biases towards mothers who shoulder heavier care responsibilities in the families and make a bigger use of FFMs. Because men are better able to conform to these gendered values and norms, the GPG persists through vertical segregation and glass ceilings, among others.

Since not all the companies in the Eurostat NACE code list participated in this research, results could not be generalised but were indicative to future large-scale studies..

At the macro and policy level, some FFMs take on a clear gendered approach. For example, the disparity in length between maternity (18 weeks) and paternity leave (1 day) reinforces gender roles and stereotypes, which contribute to the GPG in the long run. While some FFMs like parental leave, career breaks, urgent family leave, telework, flexible and reduced hours seem to take on a more gender-neutral approach, the uptake of FFMs (except childcare) seems to generate discriminatory behaviour that may affect the GPG. When considering the make-work pay policies such as the “in-work benefit” and the “tapering of benefits”, this study showed that these policies attracted lower educated and low-skilled women into the labour market, which in turn may have further contributed to the increasing GPGs. On the other hand, the childcare and after school policies relieve working mothers from caregiving duties, minimising career interruptions, discriminatory behaviour and overall GPGs.

This study confirmed that organisations within the Financial and Insurance sector are gendered and give value to full-time commitment and long working hours, especially in managerial roles. Managerial positions remain associated with men because mothers tend to make more use of FFMs such as parental leave, reduced, flexible hours and teleworking. Mothers are indirectly penalised for doing so, because in gendered organisations, the uptake of FFMs conflict with the demands of work and ideal worker values (Acker, 1990). This maintains the vertical segregation and widens the GPG within the Financial and Insurance sector.

By using the gender lens and taking a wider and more holistic approach from the macro and micro level, this study highlights how interlinking factors lead to and sustain the GPG in the Financial and Insurance sector in Malta.

Arguing that a gendered invisibility surrounding climate justice contributes to the overall vulnerability and burden placed upon the ability of women from disadvantaged communities, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of developing a participative gender framework for climate justice with the potential to address the policy and programme vulnerability gap within climate change and conflict in Sudan’s Savannah Belt.

In utilising gender responsive discourse analysis, along with setting out the history of gender engagement within social forestry, this paper examines both the method of Sudan’s reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) development and its content.

The paper’s findings demonstrate that the REDD+ programme in Sudan provides ample evidence of the importance of integrating climate justice and gender approaches to policy, programming and projects through ensuring women and local community participation at all levels and interaction within policy and programme development, along with its implementation.

The paper is theoretical in nature but did draw upon case studies and consultations, and the author was involved in some of the research.

The paper provides a positive and arguably original example of social forestry within the Savannah Belt and its utilisation as a best practice that has fed into Sudan’s REDD+ Proposal/Policy Document so as to potentially drive and streamline similar such initiatives across Sudan.

This article explores the patterns and dynamics of parenting-related leave policy reforms in the European former socialist countries (EFSCs). It sheds light on the development pattern of their leave policies and their potential to reproduce, impede, or transform traditional gender norms in employment and care.

The article provides a historical comparative analysis of leave policy developments in 21 EFSCs in the 1970–2018 period. It systematically explores continuity and changes in leave policy design − generosity (leave duration and benefits level) and fathers' entitlements to leaves − as well as policy concerns and gender-equality-related implications.

Following the state-socialist commitment to gender equality, the EFSCs introduced childcare/parental leaves early. Nevertheless, they developed mother-centered leaves of equality-impeding character, in that they did not promote gender equality. The divergence of EFSCs' leave policies intensified in the period of transition from socialism to capitalism, as competing priorities and inter-related policy concerns – such as re-traditionalization, fertility incentives, gender equality, and labor market participation – influenced policy design. Leave policies of the EFSCs that joined the EU gradually transformed towards more gender-equal ones. Nonetheless, the progress has been slow, and only three countries can be classified as having equality-transforming leaves (Slovenia, Lithuania, and Romania).

This article extends existent comparative studies on maternity/paternity/parental leaves, exploring the region that has been overlooked by such research. It provides valuable insights into the implications of intersectional dimensions of leave design as well as competing priorities and concerns embedded in it. It points to the methodological complexity of evaluating the development of parental leave policies in a cross-country perspective.