Work and Care Opportunities under Different Parental Leave Systems: Gender and Class Inequalities in Northern Europe

Abstract

This article analyses public parental leave in eight northern European countries, and assesses its opportunity potential to facilitate equal parental involvement and employment, focusing on gender and income opportunity gaps. It draws on Sen's capability and Weber's ideal‐types approach to analyze policies across countries. It offers the ideal parental leave architecture, one which minimizes the policy‐generated gender and class inequality in parents’ opportunities to share parenting and keep their jobs, thus providing real opportunities for different groups of individuals to achieve valued functionings as parents. Five policy indicators are created using benchmarking and graphical analysis. Two sources of opportunity inequality are considered: the leave system as the opportunity and constraint structure, and the socio‐economic contexts as the conversion factors. The article produces a comprehensive overview of national leave policies, visually presenting leave policy across countries. Considering policy capability ramifications beyond gender challenges a family policy‐cluster idea and the Nordic‐Baltic divide. It demonstrates that leave systems in northern Europe are far from homogenous; they diverge in the degree to which they create real opportunities for parents and children as well as in key policy dimensions through which these opportunities are created.

Family policy and women's employment outcomes in 45 high‐income countries: A systematic qualitative review of 238 comparative and national studies

“…The issue of access has been analysed also by research work that uses qualitative methods. An example is the recent debate about the use of Sen's capability approach within the realm of family policy (see Ciccia & Sainsbury, 2018;Hobson et al, 2011;Javornik & Kurowska, 2017;Mätzke, 2019;Yerkes & Javornik, 2019).…”

Gendering welfare state analysis: tensions between care and paid work

“…It thus shows greater affinity with an intersectional approach to gender (Hobson, 2013). The application of the CA to gender analysis of welfare states has proven challenging (Korpi et al, 2013;Javornik and Kurowska, 2017), and some of its most promising applications have been in the field of worklife balance. In this view, Hobson (2013) has proposed one of the most comprehensive framework of factors shaping gender agency inequalities.…”

Where’s the community in community, work and family? A community-based capabilities approach

“…Means are the social and economic resources individuals have at their disposal (e.g. work-life policies Javornik & Kurowska, 2017;Kurowska, 2018b;. Equal access to resources does not guarantee equal capabilities.…”