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The legalization of same-sex marriage changed the parenting landscape for LGBTQ parents in a variety of ways. Parenthood is presumably different now that same-sex marriage is officially legal. Experiences among LGBTQ couples in the post-legalization of same-sex marriage era raise questions about the context of growing recognition and cultural acceptance of same-sex relationships. I conducted in-depth interviews with LGBTQ parents to learn how they navigate parenting and the construction of parenting roles in the context of a society that has legalized same-sex marriage, yet still is rooted in heteronormative notions of family and parenthood. Specifically, I ask: How do LGBTQ couples construct and make sense of their roles as parents, particularly within the contemporary context of the legalization of same-sex marriage? Understanding the contexts that shape LGBTQ parents’ experiences aids in not only understanding the lives of LGBTQ parents and their families better, but also developing a deeper understanding of contemporary parenting identities and experiences more broadly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in work interferes with family (WIF) and family interferes with work (FIW) conflicts, their antecedents and their outcomes throughout the parenting life cycle. The following parenting stages were compared: parenthood to preschool-age children, parenthood to school-age children, parenthood to adolescents, parenthood to offspring at the launching stage and parenthood to offspring at the empty-nest stage.

The sample included 549 working parents in Israel (270 fathers and 279 mothers). The criterion for inclusion was fulfilling the dual roles of parent and paid worker. The research questionnaires were distributed in workplaces in diverse organizations: high-tech companies, government ministries, factories and business organizations.

Levels of WIF and FIW conflicts are highest during the early parenthood stages. Overload peaks during parenthood to adolescents and during the empty-nest stage. The later stages in the parenting life cycle (the launching and empty-nest stages) benefit parents: WIF and FIW conflicts are relatively low, mental well-being is relatively high and the number of roles that parents perform is higher than in earlier stages. Along the entire parenting life cycle, fathers experience higher levels of WIF conflict than mothers, but no gender differences were found in FIW conflict.

Public policy should encourage employers to develop a family-friendly approach and consider the needs of both parents, based on the understanding that in addition to being breadwinners, fathers and mothers today both participate in housework and in raising children.

From a theoretical perspective, the research conclusions may provide understandings for how to integrate the parental stage as a key variable in theorizing about the experience of stressors in the work–home interface.

This chapter uncovers the destabilizing and transformative dimensions of a legal process commonly described as assimilation. Lawyers working on behalf of a marginalized group often argue that the group merits inclusion in dominant institutions, and they do so by casting the group as like the majority. Scholars have criticized claims of this kind for affirming the status quo and muting significant differences of the excluded group. Yet, this chapter shows how these claims may also disrupt the status quo, transform dominant institutions, and convert distinctive features of the excluded group into more widely shared legal norms. This dynamic is observed in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, and specifically through attention to three phases of LGBT advocacy: (1) claims to parental recognition of unmarried same-sex parents, (2) claims to marriage, and (3) claims regarding the consequences of marriage for same-sex parents. The analysis shows how claims that appeared assimilationist – demanding inclusion in marriage and parenthood by arguing that same-sex couples are similarly situated to their different-sex counterparts – subtly challenged and reshaped legal norms governing parenthood, including marital parenthood. While this chapter focuses on LGBT claims, it uncovers a dynamic that may exist in other settings.

This article focuses on one court case concerning the regulation of Anti-Abortion protesting and asks: (1) Do the various actors involved in this case recognize a tension between their actions and their broader beliefs concerning the regulation of political protests? (2) If this tension is recognized, how do the actors resolve it, and if it is not recognized, why is it not? While concerned with legal consciousness and cognitive dissonance, the article is framed by broader questions concerning tolerance and the interaction of law and political passions.

Purpose – This chapter examines how gender, parenthood, and partner's employment are related to individual's employment patterns, analyzing paid work at individual and household levels.

Methodology/approach – Analyses use individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) wave 5 for 19 countries, for adults aged 25–45. We use logistic regression and a two-stage Heckman sample selection correction procedure to estimate the effects of gender and parenthood on the probabilities of employment and full-time employment.

Findings – The variation between mothers and childless women is larger than that between childless men and childless women; differences in women's employment patterns are driven by gendered parenthood, controlling for women's human capital, partnered status and household income. Fathers and mothers' employment hours in the same household vary cross-nationally.

Mothers' employment behaviors can identify important differences in the strategies countries have pursued to balance work and family life.

Research implications – Important differences between childless women and mothers exist; employment analyses need to recognize the variation in employment hours among women, and how women's hours are related to partners' hours. Further research should consider factors that shape employment cross-nationally, as well as how these relate to differences in wages and occupational gender segregation.

Practical implications – Employment choices of women and mothers must be understood in terms of employment hours, not simply employment, and within the context of partners' employment.

Originality/value of paper – Our chapter clarifies the wide dispersion of employment hours across countries – and how men's and women's employment hours are linked and related to parenthood.

Purpose – Historically, the gay and lesbian community has been divided over same-sex marriage along gender lines, with gay men its most frequent supporters and lesbians its most frequent critics. In recent years, however, in localities where same-sex marriage has been available, the gender polarity around same-sex marriage has reversed, with lesbian couples constituting the majority of those married. Although same-sex marriage is framed in a gender-neutral way, the higher rate of lesbians marrying suggests that gay men and lesbians may have different stakes in, demand for, and benefits from access to marriage.Methodology – Drawing on interviews with 42 participants (24 women; 18 men) in the 2004 San Francisco same-sex weddings, I qualitatively analyze how and when gender comes to be salient in the decision by same-sex couples to marry.Findings – Explicitly attending to the intersections of gender, sexual identity, and family, I find that lesbians and gay men did not systematically offer different narratives for why they married, but parents did offer different meanings than childfree respondents: the apparent gender gap is better described as a parenthood gap, which has a demographic relationship to gender with more lesbians than gay men achieving parenthood in California. Scholarship on the gendered experience of reproduction suggests that the importance of gender in the experience of queer parenthood may persist even if parity in parenthood were reached.Originality/value – Findings attest to the importance of attending to the intersections of gender, sexual identity, and family for scholars of same-sex marriage.

The aim of this paper is to draw together within an evaluative framework British research‐based material concerning the impact of children, or the absence of children, on the quality and stability of the marriage relationship. The focus, therefore, is quite specific, and there is no attempt to review the whole corpus of literature on childbearing and child‐rearing. The relevant material is limited, fragmentary, and scattered across the literature of several disciplines. For such reasons it has been necessary in parts to draw upon American research both to indicate where the gaps and possibilities in indigenous research may lie and to show how far British findings supplement and support the American. Despite its thinness and incohesiveness, however, British material is adequate to test some common ideas about the relationship between children and marriage and, as will be seen, some of the conclusions to which it leads are counter‐intuitive, or at least contrary to beliefs which are widely found amongst relevant professionals as well as amongst the general public.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the gendered effects of marriage and parenthood on income inequality among police officers.

This study uses survey data collected by the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1976 to 2018. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is employed to analyze the effect of gender, marriage and parenthood on the yearly income of police officers, controlling for other demographic variables.

The analyses reveal that there is a large income difference among men and women police officers and the compensation processes appear strongly gendered based on family composition. Police women experience a large motherhood income penalty, while police men with traditional family structures have significant income advantages.

While the CPS dataset allows us to track national level trends of within-occupational income inequality, these data are unable to provide detailed information on the specifics of each police job, such as rank of police officers or work experience. Despite these limitations, this study uncovers important patterns in how family structure shapes police income.

The present study fills the knowledge gap about marriage and motherhood penalty among police. This study represents one of the first attempts to explore the gendered compensation processes that are shaped by marriage and parenthood status among police officers at a national level.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of cantonal social policies and cultural settings (in Switzerland) on women’s and men’s employment behaviour. Special consideration is given to the transition to parenthood.

Based on data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey (SLFS) this paper conducts multilevel analyses to test individual and cantonal effects on the probability of employment and on working hours. To analyse the effect of parenthood, models for women and men with children under three are contrasted with models for women and men without children or with older children.

The paper documents the persistence of gender inequality in employment linked to parenthood. How the reconciliation of work and family life can be realised for women and men strongly depends on a set of policies and cultural conditions. Moreover, individual characteristics such as education or marriage are important predictors.

A shortcoming of this study is the focus on the individual employment use and not on household-level division of labour. This disadvantage is due to the design of the SLFS, which is (at present) the only available survey to allow regionalisation at the cantonal level. However, the paper adds important results to the debate about gender inequality and parenthood in Switzerland as previous research has focused only little on cantonal diversity.

The paper connects to previous cantonal comparative studies of female employment but extends their analyses in three important ways. By analysing cantonal differences in policies and culture this paper takes the diversity of framework conditions in Switzerland into account. Furthermore it simultaneously analyses male and female employment behaviour to get a better understanding of gender inequality and parenthood.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of certain factors (such as working mothers’ attitudes towards career role salience, notion of career success, work-life balance and the impact of organisational support systems available for childcare) on career persistence, despite parenthood, and career re-entry after parenthood. It is conducted in relation to new age, young working mothers of the booming IT sector in India.

A survey questionnaire was administered to 138 working mothers in the IT sector to analyse the impact of working mothers’ career role salience, notion of career success, work-life balance and the impact of organisational support systems available for childcare on career persistence, despite parenthood.

The findings state that re-entry is also a growing phenomenon, in as much as career breaks are an accepted reality. Career role salience and notions of career success are important predictors of career re-entry of young mothers. Most importantly, this study highlights the significant role of the trusted, extended family support system, that is characteristically unique to Indian social fabric, in enabling women’s career persistence and career re-entry after motherhood.

Like most survey research, this study’s validity is also limited to the findings on the self-reported responses. Nevertheless, the study points to new areas to be researched, such as the possibility of the same findings with older mothers who have spent considerable years in their careers, or whether the same sample would answer differently after a few years.

The paper includes implications for society and organisations, concerning opting out, and for undertaking genuine initiatives to enable and support women to re-enter their careers after breaks, so that the decision to persist, exit or re-enter their careers remains the privileged choice of women employees.

The paper fulfils an identified need to study how parenthood affects women’s careers in the IT sector and need for organisations in India to understand the practicality of women employees’ needs to integrate work and life.