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This article examines current debates about gender equality, work-life balance and flexible working. We contrast policymakers' and organizational discourses of flexible working and work-life balance with managers' and employees' talk about these issues within their organizations. We show how, despite the increasingly gender-neutral language of the official discourses, in the data studied participants consistently reformulate the debates around gendered explanations and assumptions. For example, a 'generic female parent' is constructed in relation to work-life balance and flexible working yet participants routinely maintain that gender makes no difference within their organization. We consider the effects of these accounts; specifically the effect on those who take up flexible working, and the perceived backlash against policies viewed as favouring women or parents. We argue that the location of work-life balance and flexibility debates within a gender-neutral context can in practice result in maintaining or encouraging gendered practices within organizations. Implications of this for organizations, for policymakers and for feminist researchers are discussed.

This article explores young European women and men’s expectations of support - from the state and employers - for reconciling paid employment and family life. It is based on a qualitative study employing focus groups with young women and men in Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. Drawing on the concept of sense of entitlement, derived from social justice theory, it was expected that the type of welfare state and ‘gender contract’ that young adults have experienced will influence their sense of entitlement to support for work and family life. Findings indicate that participants perceived their entitlement to state and employer support differently across national context. However this is moderated by gender, parental and occupational status, and particularly by awareness of provisions in other countries in the case of state support, while perceived entitlement to employer support varies according to the specific policy considered, gender and perception of benefits to employers. Some implications for public policy makers and employers are discussed.

In this article, we critically evaluate a conversation analytic approach to the study of the links between gender and language from a feminist perspective. In so doing, we engage in the recent series of exchanges about conversation analysis (CA) and other strands of discourse analysis that have been published in Discourse & Society. We consider talk from two sets of discourse data, focusing on participants' orientation to gender categories as they crop up in the interactions. We suggest that a CA approach produces a rich understanding of the links between discourse and gender. However, we are critical of several, often unexamined aspects and conundrums of conversation analytic methodology. First, we consider the extent to which the `analytic stances' of feminism and conversation analysis are compatible. Second, we question whether, as Schegloff (1997) suggests, it is fruitful to rely on descriptions of and orientations to gender solely in participants' terms, as well as problematizing the notion of `orienting to gender' itself. Finally, while we propose CA is a useful tool for making claims about the relevance of gender in conversational interaction, and that such claims are grounded in speakers' orientations, we suggest that culture and common-sense knowledge, of both members and analysts, are largely unacknowledged and unexplicated resources in CA.

In this article we investigate the nature of problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. Previous studies have raised concerns about the peer encouragement of self-harming behaviours in online forums, and this analysis considers the nature of peer interaction on a specific forum, ‘ SharpTalk’. This was a research forum which explored the potential of online communities to foster engagement and shared learning between NHS professionals and young people who self-harm. This analysis draws on conversation analysis methods to study problem presentation and responses, and nature of advice given. Analysis highlighted both the tendency to offer advice where it was not asked for, and the mundane ‘safe’ nature of advice. This awareness of how young people interact and provide support online is important for those setting up online interventions to support young people who self-harm.