Gender inequality by design: does successful implementation of childcare policy deliver gender-just outcomes?

Abstract

The intractability of complex forms of gender inequality and the normalisation of gender equality policies on public policy agendas continue to challenge feminist research and activism concerned with gender-just outcomes. Through integrative multi-level analysis of policy design-implementation-outcomes building on the feminist policy implementation framework, this article illuminates how dominant discursive framing supports divergent policy approaches by different actors within state-institutional sites. Based on a decade of childcare policy implementation in Poland, the analysis shows that a shared family well-being frame is deployed by political actors to design and implement contrasting models for childcare. These have profound implications for the attainment of gender-just outcomes by sometimes challenging, but more frequently, reconstituting gender hierarchies. The policy design-implementation-outcome lens highlights the centrality of gender throughout the policy process and thus helps account for the persistence of inequalities through their construction and reconstruction. It also suggests that, politically, the policy effort can be deployed towards alternative processes and policies, and thus towards the attainment of gender-just outcomes.

Law and gendered labour market segmentation

“…They are complementary to welldesigned parental leave and critical to the ongoing cultivation of gender equality (Leitner 2003;Cukrowska-Torzewska 2017). Such care policies are equally important for women in countries with highly developed welfare states (Plomien 2019) and in countries where there is a high degree of socio-economic inequality and a high proportion of informal work. Filgueira and Martínez Franzoni (2019) explain how the lack of care options in emerging and developing countries in Latin America has stalled women's labour force participation, as poorer women cannot afford to pay for care, while middle-class and wealthy women rely primarily on paid, but mostly informal, domestic workers.…”

Global Contestations of Gender Rights

“…Policy Responses -Here, the researcher traces what is actually happening with the specific policy being studied -How was it put on the books and adopted? -with a clear focus on implementation and evaluation in action within the purview of the multi-level and complex "integrative designimplementation-outcomes" put forward by Plomien (2019) and discussed above. The mix of implementation instruments accounts for the full range of "identifiable methods through which collective action is structured to address a public problem" (Salamon 2002: 9).…”

“…In her study of the implementation of childcare policy in Poland, Plomien (2019) In the scholarly world that systematically studies "if, how, and why contemporary democracies are feminist by focusing on the interface between gender politics and the state" (Mazur 2002: 2), there has been an over-emphasis on examining gender equality policy in Western post-industrial democracies alone, often to the detriment of the politics of gender equality outside of the West (ibid; Lombardo/Meier 2022). There has by no means been a lack of research on what governments do outside of the West.…”

Labour mobility in transnational Europe: between depletion, mitigation and citizenship entitlements harm

“…In Ukraine, despite a comprehensive legal gender equality framework, combining childcare with employment has become more difficult as family policies emphasise women's care leaves and benefits, disincentivising women's employment and childbearing alike and reinforcing 'neotraditionalism' (Johnson and Robinson, 2007;Hankivsky and Salnykova, 2012;ILO, 2013). Poland's similar re-traditionalisation of the gender order ensued from adverse labour market conditions and familialist policies unsupportive of women's financial autonomy (Saraceno and Keck, 2011;Giordano, 2019), only recently seeing better employment outcomes and childcare services (alongside pro-natalist benefits) (Plomien, 2019;Shields, 2019). The UK's mixed family policy model, which includes some childcare provisioning beside counter-measures in the form of unpaid family care contributions and fiscal arrangements benefiting male breadwinner households, marginally modifies the male breadwinner/female caregiver model (Keck and Saraceno, 2011;Giordano, 2019).…”