Generous parental leave policies are popular in a number of countries around the world and are usually seen as a sign of the ‘family friendliness’ of the state. Relying on in-depth interviews with mothers on parental leave in Hungary, the authors argue that the context in which the policies are implemented should be examined when evaluating their consequences. In semi-peripheral, resource-poor Hungary lengthy parental leave policies turn women into an invisible ‘reserve army of labourers’. While their employment is mostly unaccounted (...) for in aggregate statistics, and political discourse suggests that their ‘job’ is to look after children, nevertheless many women do end up doing some work for wages during the almost five years they spend on parental leave. However, given the rigidity of the labour market and rampant discrimination against mothers with small children, their chances of obtaining formal employment are small. They therefore resort to doing ad hoc, temporary, informal work, which is often underpaid and well below their qualifications. Thus generous family policies do not necessarily indicate the ‘women friendliness’ of the state and may not lead to the relatively favourable trade-off between stable public sector work and lower wages suggested recently by comparative researchers. Instead, in this specific context, which combines legacies of state socialism, a backlash against women’s emancipation before 1990 and a peripheral, vulnerable labour market, familialist policies are associated with a high degree of marginalisation for women with small children in which the state is at best complicit, at worst, an active agent. (shrink)

We contribute to feminist and gender scholarship on cultural notions of motherhood by analyzing the importance of motherhood among mothers and non-mothers. Using a national probability sample of U.S. women ages 25-45, we find a continuous distribution of scores measuring perceptions of the importance of motherhood among both groups. Employing OLS multiple regression, we examine why some women place more importance on motherhood, focusing on interests that could compete with valuing motherhood, and controlling for characteristics associated with becoming a mother. (...) Contrary to cultural schemas that view mother and worker identities as competing, we find that education level is not associated with the importance of motherhood for either group and that valuing work success is positively associated with valuing motherhood among mothers. Consistent with feminist explanations for delayed fertility, valuing leisure is negatively associated with valuing motherhood for non-mothers. (shrink)

In 2002, the United States federal government created the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a policy that has distributed almost $1 billion in welfare money to marriage education programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in classes for a purposive sample of 20 government-approved marriage education programs and textual analysis of more than 3,000 pages of curricular materials, I analyze how U.S. healthy marriage policy addresses issues of gendered communication and power. This case reveals the limitations of what I call ‘‘interpersonal gender interventions,’’ which (...) obscure how gendered ideologies and inequalities are often maintained through institutionalized practices and state action. Specifically, I argue that by focusing on negotiation, communication, and conflict-resolution strategies—or what marriage educators call “relationship skills”—at the interactional level, state-sponsored marriage education masks persistent institutionalized gender inequalities, namely, latent and hidden forms of marital power. More broadly, I use this case to reveal how interpersonal gender interventions will likely have limited utility if individuals learn to develop more gender-egalitarian beliefs in the absence of institutional changes that enable them to act on these values. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in their (...) respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)

Under what conditions do motherhood penalties emerge in countries undergoing transition from state socialism to capitalism? This analysis identifies the ways managers in global financial firms employ gendered assumptions in constructing and implementing labor practices among highly skilled professional workers in Hungary. Relying on 33 in-depth interviews with employers as well as interviews with headhunting firms, labor and employment lawyers, and analysis of antidiscrimination cases brought before Hungary’s Equal Treatment Authority between 2004 and 2008, we identify several strategies global employers (...) use to shed, demote, and marginalize professional mothers. By demonstrating the salience of motherhood as a status characteristic in the postsocialist labor market, our work contributes to existing scholarship on motherhood penalties. Our work also extends this scholarship by showing how the salience of motherhood is strongly conditioned by state-level arrangements that shape the opportunity context in which employers design and carry out employment practices. (shrink)