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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 explore the gendered nature of housing insecurity by investigating how gender affects women’s experience moving from transitional to market housing. By describing women’s pathways out of supportive or transitional housing support, the authors show how patriarchal forces in housing policies and practices affect women’s efforts to find secure housing. The authors argue that gender-neutral approaches to housing will fail to meet women’s needs.

This study explores the narratives from women accessing support services in Halifax, Canada. The first author conducted deep narrative interviews with women seeking to move from transition to market housing.

This research sheds light on the effects of gendered barriers to safe, suitable and affordable housing; how women’s experiences and expectations are shaped by these barriers; and, how housing-based supports must address the uniquely gendered experiences women face as they access market housing. In addition, this research reveals the importance of gender-responsive services that empower women facing a sexist housing market.

Little research has explored questions related to gender and housing among those seeking to move from transitional to marker housing, and existing research focuses on women’s housing insecurity as it relates to domestic violence. The sample of women included those having housing insecurity for a variety of reasons, including substance use and young motherhood.

Skilled migrant (SM) women play a key role in developed countries especially in healthcare and education in easing staffing shortages and migrate expecting to gain qualification-matched employment (QME). The aim of this review is to assess whether SM women gain the anticipated QME, equitably compared to their skilled counterparts and to examine why and how they do so.

I conducted a systematic literature review to derive empirical studies to assess if, why and how SM women achieve QME (1) using SM women-only samples and comparative samples including SM women, and (2) examining whether they gain QME directly on or soon after migration or indirectly over time through undertaking alternative, contingent paths.

Only a minority of SM women achieve the anticipated QME directly soon after migration and less often than their skilled counterparts. Explaining the mechanism for achieving QME, other women, especially due to having young families, indirectly undertake alternative, lower-level contingent paths enabling them to ascend later to QME.

The SM literature gains new knowledge from revealing how SM women can gain positions post-migration comparable to their pre-migration qualifications through undertaking the alternative, contingent paths of steppingstone jobs and academic study, especially as part of agreed familial strategies. This review results in a theoretical mechanism (mediation by a developmental contingency path) to provide an alternative mechanism by which SM women achieve QME.

Over the years, at the international level, the social construction assumption according to which women would be less innovative than men and, consequently, also less prone to be involved in innovative fields, since their educational path decisions to career path decisions, has long prevailed. This has resulted in a widespread lack of representation of women in more innovative sectors, in comparison to their male counterparts. In recent years then, if the pandemic has had an impact, at least for some specific socio-economic contexts, especially on those that can be typically considered as ‘necessity entrepreneurs’, it has to be said that it has been able also to generate some virtuous dynamics crosswise related to innovative issues. In particular, this chapter aims to go in depth into these issues from the perspective of innovative women entrepreneurs in the attempt to answer to the following questions: how does the socio-economic environment affect innovative women entrepreneurs? And, what are the unique experiences, achievements and contributions of innovative women entrepreneurs in Italy? In order to answer to these specific research questions, an analysis based on direct interviews with a sample of Italian innovative women entrepreneurs has been conducted.

The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experiences of working mothers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and assess their perceptions of the types of training opportunities that would help advance their careers as they navigated pandemic-related challenges.

In study 1, 53 participants responded to an online survey that included open-ended questions regarding the impact COVID-19 has had on their careers and desires they have for training to ameliorate these concerns. For study 2, 10 participants completed an interview that included open-ended questions regarding workplace changes and professional development/training opportunities since the pandemic.

Thematic analysis showed mothers facing several setbacks in their careers, including delays, loss of hours and wages, childcare stressors and strained or lost relationships with colleagues and supervisors. A small number of participants also reported some surprisingly positive experiences, such as a push toward career innovation. Participants reported little to no exposure to career development opportunities and expressed a desire for training for leadership and interpersonal connection in the workplace.

Although quantitative data have been helpful in identifying and quantifying growing gender gaps in work during the pandemic, the qualitative analyses the authors used highlight how recent difficulties encountered by working mothers risk a growing gender gap in work and career mobility as women in the leadership pipeline struggle with challenges. Further, the findings suggest ways that women in management can support the working mothers on their staff, including by suggesting ways additional training may address some concerns.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.

This study aims to determine the prevalence and predictors of postpartum depression (PPD) among nursing mothers in Nsukka, Nigeria.

This study was a descriptive cross-sectional survey among nursing mothers in three hospitals in Nsukka, Nigeria. Data was collected using a self-administered Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale (EPDS) and sociodemographic form. The data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics, chi-square test and binary logistic regression.

A total of 270 nursing mothers participated in this survey, giving a response rate of 94.4%. The prevalence of PPD among the study group was 20.0%. However, women who did not have complications during childbirth were about two times (AOR = 0.417, 95% CI = 0.204, 0.852, P = 0.016) less likely to develop symptoms of PPD than women who experienced birth complications. In addition, women who had poor relationships with their partners have approximately seven times (AOR = 6.994, 95% CI = 1.110, 44.059, P = 0.038) higher odds of developing PPD compared with those women who had excellent relationships with their partners.

The sample size was small, hence, might limit the generalizability of its findings beyond the study group. Health-care practitioners should provide appropriate interventions to women at a higher risk of developing PPD on the need to maintain a healthy and supportive relationship with their partners.

This study provides unique insight into PPD among nursing mothers and its determinants from a different regional, socioeconomic, societal expectations, social support system, access to health care and cultural context.

The study aims to understand why women-owned microenterprises (WOMEs) in India experience a lower growth rate, where growth can be represented in increments in the venture’s size or scope. There is no conclusive understanding of the factors that affect the sustained growth of WOMEs in India.

What personal, social and economic factors support or hinder the choice, growth and sustainability of women-owned ventures? What role do institutional factors (government, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), self-help groups and microfinance institutions) play toward the sustainability of WOMEs? The answers to these questions were obtained through a qualitative design by interviewing 30 micro women entrepreneurs from Tamil Nadu, a Southern state of India and one of the largest hubs for WOMEs and their responses were content analyzed using NVivo 12 software.

The findings capture and apply the fundamentals of two key theoretical perspectives, resource-based view (RBV) and self-determination theory (SDT), in identifying the links between the individual, social and economic factors and their combined effect on the sustained growth of women-owned micro businesses. The findings add value in identifying the ingrained cultural norms and traditions and several internal and external factors that support or challenge the growth of WOMEs. This study highlights that the interventions by the government need to be strengthened for the growth and sustainability of WOMEs.

The study’s findings provide suggestions to policymakers, banks, funding agencies, financial institutions and NGOs to design applicable policies and schemes toward the sustained growth of WOMEs.

This study contributes toward a better understanding of the trends in the context of WOMEs from an Indian context. This topic has received little attention in the academic literature. Second, the study’s conceptual contribution is an application of SDT and RBV to understand and categorize the enablers and deterrents in the path of growth of WOMEs, which is a novel pursuit.

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.