CfP: Mini-conference on Welfare States and Gender Inequality: Regional and Global Perspectives @SASE

Call for papers for the mini-conference on Welfare States and Gender Inequality: Regional and Global Perspectives (#MC10), held at SASE in Limerick, Ireland, June 27-29 2024.

Deadline to submit abstracts is January 19, 2024.


Conference description:

This mini-conference convenes scholarship on how welfare states across the world have shaped policy-making on gender equality, with a focus on barriers, drivers, and consequences of policy development. A substantial body of research, primarily conducted in the Global North, particularly in OECD countries, explores how gender systems interact with and are influenced by welfare states.

There is a strong consensus that over the last 50 years, welfare states have facilitated women’s attachment to the labor market in high-income countries. Cross-national studies show that subsidized childcare and paid parental leave have the highest power in explaining cross-country variation in female employment (Hook and Ruppanner 2021). However, welfare systems have generally not provided equivalent levels of incentives for men to engage in caregiving at home as they have for women’s paid employment. Most high-income countries have notably shorter paternity than maternity leave and limited compensation for paternity/parental leave. Despite legitimizing and encouraging women’s paid employment, welfare states continue to prioritize childcare and family responsibilities for mothers. Moreover, some argue that welfare states have offered greater support for well-educated, socio-economically advantaged women, sometimes at the expense of their less-educated and less-advantaged counterparts (Pavolini and Van Lancker, 2018).

What drives these policy developments? Have there been changes in the development towards more gender-equal sharing of care? The European Union has been a key proponent of social investment and, more recently, father-specific care in the work-life balance policy framework. Most recently, the EU’s WLB Directive, adopted in 2019 and implemented across member states in 2022, introduces minimum standards for parental and paternity leave, carers’ leave, and the right to flexible working arrangements for parents. By requiring each member state to earmark at least two months of paid leave for each parent, the directive has the potential to equalize entitlements and take-up across Europe. Thus, the directive explicitly promotes gender equality by stating that the level of compensation for leave should encourage mothers and fathers to take leave. However, even with such mandates, substantial regional variation in the modalities of policy implementation may remain due to varying institutional legacies, cultural attitudes, and intentions of policy-makers (de la Porte et al., 2023a; Saxonberg 2013; Garritzmann, Häusermann, and Palier 2022: de la Porte et al., 2023). Does the Work-Life Balance Directive affect national gender equality policies and especially leave practices? And to what extent is there a regional dimension in how welfare states ‘de-genderize’ care?

Meanwhile, in the Global South, low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has been historically characterized by weak fiscal and state capacity and substantial labor market informality. This implies a very different welfare architecture for gender equality policies. In the formal labor market, women and men may have access to traditional family leave policies akin to those in many European countries. However, workers in the informal sector are excluded from these entitlements. Informal sector workers usually rely on kinship networks and receive different kinds of policies to help them manage work and family life. In recent decades many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have adopted various social protection policies, such as cash transfers, subsidies, and childcare programs, often targeting women based on their poverty and motherhood status. Such policies usually don’t focus on gender equality and have been criticized for perpetuating women’s caregiving roles (Samman et al. 2016).

Thus, labor market (in)formality or segmentation can differentiate the welfare strategies for people within countries. Importantly, the duality of labor markets and welfare systems is not confined to the Global South; labor market transformations involving flexibilization, employment precarity and insecurity operate alongside secure and protected employment worldwide. Since the bulk of theoretical insights on the relationship between welfare states and gender inequality is in the context of formal sector employment, there is a pressing need for in-depth analyses of the causes and consequences of gender equality policymaking considering labor market informality and segmentation.

This mini-conference is directly related to the theme of the conference. As articulated by Nancy Fraser (1994; 2022), the foundation of dignified and sustainable economic lives rests upon social reproduction–care activities often performed by women outside the official economy. The
reproduction of the workforce, from birthing and caring for new generations to feeding, bathing, and resting adult workers so that they can return to work the next day, is essential for the functioning of the capitalist economy. This means that welfare states continue to play a vital function in redistributing and revaluing care which curbs the logic of exploitative and uneven capital accumulation.

In light of these global developments in welfare states in both Global North and South, this mini-conference will adopt a comparative perspective to explore three interconnected questions:
1. How have welfare states evolved in addressing gender inequalities? Have they expanded, reduced, or restructured entitlements and incentives to combat gender inequalities, and in which specific areas?
2. What strategies have welfare states employed to encourage gender equal participation in caregiving in light of recent initiatives, such as the EU’s WLBD? How have these policies influenced the division of paid work and caregiving among individuals of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, races, or castes?
3. Is it possible to observe any convergence trends on a global scale? Are there global actors other than the EU that have recently promoted a more gender equal sharing of care? Or is the regional perspective more adequate for grasping common trends in reforming welfare policies when it comes to policy (de)genderization?
4. What are the primary challenges and obstacles to progressive and proactive policy-making aimed at addressing gender inequality in the private sphere? How have these hurdles varied across different locations and time periods? What factors are impeding greater investments in initiatives such as parental leave and universal childcare, in the global North and South? What are the administrative hurdles to accessing parental leave in different regions?
5. Building upon the previous question, how have these challenges and barriers been addressed? What factors have driven policymaking efforts concerning gender equality on both national and international scales? How are feminist organizations involved in shaping gender equality policies? Additionally, which stakeholders, beyond feminist movements and leftist parties, contribute to advocating for gender equality policymaking, and in what capacities?

This mini-conference will provide a space for gender and welfare researchers to engage in critical and comparative inquiry into these questions. We would invite papers engaging in empirical contribution to fill in knowledge gaps, especially when it comes to gender inequalities in Global South or taking the regional perspective going beyond (only) the European Union or OECD countries. Finally, we would like to encourage discussions about the suitability of concepts invented in the West to the analysis of policy processes and social inequalities in the countries of the Global South in the search for common conceptual ground.