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Academic mothers perform intersected roles. They carry out their profession in workplaces, while they take the "second shift" of motherhood back to their families. The contested expectations in family and career built by the heterosexual matrix cause tension to academic mothers. We qualitatively investigate the interview data of six Chinese women academics on how they perform to negotiate their motherhood and academic work in the context of Chinese higher education, driven by the Butlerian theoretical concept of the heterosexual matrix. The findings suggest that Chinese academic mothers play a zero-sum game between being mothers and being academics, deriving from their ontological responsibilities of motherhood. We conclude that in the masculine academia, these women academics help maintain the heterosexual matrix by satisfying the gender normativity when they negotiate their performances in their family and career; meanwhile, most have developed some strategies to achieve their career advancement.; Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. (Copyright © 2022 Bao and Wang.)

Working from home is not gender neutral. As the COVID-19 pandemic has relocated all non-essential work to the home setting, it becomes imperative to examine the phenomenon through a gender lens. Accordingly, I conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 30 dual-earning married couples in India to study the gendered work-from-home experiences of men and women during the pandemic. The findings suggest that the pandemic has disproportionately increased the burden of unpaid work for women as compared to men. Women are negotiating gendered time–space arrangements within their households with the allocation of limited resources being in favor of men. When this interacts with work, gender inequalities are reinforced both at work and home. Gender roles and unpaid work determine women’s choices regarding when and where to work, boundary management between work and non-work domains, and their experiences of social isolation. Further, gender roles have also affected women’s decisions regarding returning to work post-pandemic, where some women may not be returning to work at all. Finally, the paper identifies how gender intersects with the existing conceptual frameworks of working from home, and makes a strong case for integrating gender considerations in the work-from-home policies. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the strategies implemented to deal with it have had economic and societal repercussions all over the world. In India, a nationwide lockdown was initiated on 25 March 2020 which continued in a diluted form as we were conducting the interviews for the paper in July 2020. The lockdown brought activities outside the home to a standstill and people were expected to stay indoors in order to ensure social distancing and break the chain of infection. The lockdown sparked its own problems and triggered discussions on issues including economic hardship and domestic violence. The question of how domestic responsibilities are shared among adults in families has also come to the forefront of debate. As hired part-time help was discontinued under lockdown, parents who had hitherto outsourced childcare and housework were suddenly left to fend for themselves. This article attempts to explore the manner in which such unpaid domestic responsibilities, especially childcare, were shared between parents in middle-class homes. The gendered nature of this division of housework and care work, and its varied implications on the paid work and careers of mothers and fathers, is the focus of inquiry. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Since the 1930s, a peculiar 'working mother' gender contract was dominant in the Soviet Union formally empowering women. The pressing expectation of this contract and a necessity to combine motherhood, housework and employment led to the image of the near superwoman who 'has it all'. This paper examines whether highly-skilled Russian-speaking female academics continue to adhere to this cultural ideal striving for work-life balance after migration to the UK and Germany. Based on qualitative interviews with 22 female scholars, the article provides a typology of scenarios for negotiating professional and private life. It elaborates on how role-related partners contribute to achieving balance between paid employment and mothering and explores the consequences for women's well-being. Moreover, the study suggests a feminist approach to analyzing work-family balance, which valorises women's point of view, emphasizing motherhood, children and family relations as an essential personal and social value, while also documenting the increasing challenges faced in the realization of these life priorities. © 2020 Russian Public Opinion Research Center, VCIOM. All rights reserved.

While the percentage of female students in medical schools in Pakistan is as high as 80–85 per cent, the percentage of female doctors in the medical workforce remains below 50 per cent. Our findings draw on in-depth interviews with 31 female doctors to show that the reasons behind the gap between female medical students and female medical professionals are multifold and multilayered, ranging from individual reasons to organizational and sociocultural reasons. We use an adapted version of the relational framework developed by Syed and Özbilgin in 2009 to offer a contextual and multilevel understanding of female domesticity in Pakistan. The study suggests that the problem of female doctors dropping out of the medical workforce is a reflection of the interplay of social, organizational and individual factors, which are tied together by social norms. Practical implications suggest that making hospitals and health organizations more inclusive of women and their needs could be a starting point for policymakers to address the gender gap in the medical profession. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Since the implementation of the two‐child policy in China in 2016, it is unclear how professional women's labor force outcomes and family commitments have changed. Using interviews with 26 professional women with two children in Shanghai, we examined their work–life transitions and labor market outcomes. We found that the overarching constraints the interviewees faced included a lack of institutional childcare support, low paternal participation and increased physical and cognitive childcare labor. The women also experienced different constraining and enabling factors, leading to four types of labor market outcomes: enhancement, rebound, interruption and stagnation. Most of the interviewees who experienced career upward mobility after giving birth to a second child were urban singleton daughters who received tremendous parental support. Some participants experienced career interruption due to a lack of social support. The state should ensure family‐friendly work environments and promote paternal participation to reduce women's work–life conflict and address gender inequality.

Background Due to the great burden of family and the conflicts among family, society and career roles resulting from migrant working, rural women suffer more conflicts between work and family and need more social attention. Previous studies of the conflicts between family and work mainly focus on the group of career women, and there is a lack of the research on the conflicts between work and family of rural women, which needs to be systematically and further studied.Methods This study used a sample survey of 380 rural women in rural areas of Sichuan Province to measure rural women’s cognition of work-family, coordination and handling of conflicts, post-conflict choices, and subjective well-being; the study constructs an ordered multi-class logistic regression model to explore the impact of work-family conflict on the subjective well-being of rural women in rural regions.Results The study result shows that: (1) The level of subjective well-being of rural women is generally high, and 70% of women feel satisfied or very satisfied. (2) The factor which impacts the subjective well-being among rural women most is work-interfering-with-family conflict, followed by work-family balance and confidence in conflict coordination.Conclusion This study can enhance our understanding of rural women in rural areas, and provide a reference for formulating policies to improve people’s life satisfaction.

Previous studies of immigrant families have reported consistent findings concerning the positive effects of employed wives’ financial contributions and Western gender ideologies on women’s bargaining power in the family. This paper revisits this thesis. Data presented in this article are derived from a larger project based on 45 life-history interviews with Taiwanese immigrant women in a Midwest urban region. Findings suggest that women’s employment does not serve as a key factor that shapes spousal power relations in Taiwanese immigrant families. Rather, gendered work-family boundaries and individuals’ abilities construct main rationales in women’s interpretations of their division of labor at home and their dominance in financial management. None of the women interviewed consider Western culture as an inspiration for egalitarian gender ideology. In contrast, Confucian culture is often used by husbands and mothers-in-law to demand traditional gender practice, which is further reinforced and surveilled by the Taiwanese ethnic community. Therefore, the interconnections of work, family, money, culture, and power and their interactive effects on spousal relations are more complicated than previously suggested. This study also reveals varied forms of patriarchal bargaining in Taiwanese immigrant families. Married women tend to accommodate patriarchy in their housework assignment, but actively bargain in their management of family finances and persistence to seek employment. The findings suggest that heterogeneity within the research sample, household structure, and individuals’ subjectivities must be examined to understand the nuances and complexity of women’s gender strategies and bargaining power in immigration families. Theoretical implications of the study are also discussed.

Women’s work is a continuum that intersperses productive work with reproductive work, unpaid work with paid work and all kinds of activities with leisure and self-care. She plans, manages and implements her work at home, often being responsible for all the three domains. Women from working-class families may seem to be making a “choice” in deciding the continuum, and delving deep, we find that it is more often a “coping mechanism” in “managing poverty” of all forms—income, time and opportunity. This paper explores how women’s organisation of work is influenced by the interplay of three institutions—State, market and family, and how gendered division of work is reproduced in the process. © 2019, Indian Society of Labour Economics.

This study explores the processual identity formation of six Japanese women who gave up a job, turned to higher education, and became university EFL teachers in Japan. My research questions include: (1) How did they change their careers and become university EFL teachers? (2) Since they entered the university EFL teaching profession, how have they felt about their own gender? and (3) How did their working experience influence their EFL teaching? Drawing on a poststructural feminist theory of identity, I examine their nonlinear, changing and contested teacher identities in social, economic and political contexts. Their stories help us understand the complex relations between individuals and the gendered social world and hidden issues involving self-conflict, a sense of unfairness, the burden of gender-differentiated expectation, and emotional strain. I also draw attention to the use of their former identities as a component of their pedagogy, which leads to feminist teaching.

L’équilibre entre la vie et le travail est passé au premier plan à Singapour, comme dans d’autres pays. Les débats se concentrent sur les charges épargnées entre les générations. Menos atención se ha prestado a cómo influyen los asuntos de clase en el resultado para las mujeres. Dans cet article, il est dit que le régime de travail et de soins à Singapour génère des conséquences désagréables entre les femmes dans leur classe. L'héritage historique du pronatalisme, influencé par l'Eugénèse, la recherche d'un développement centré sur les entreprises et la réticence persistante ont fait de la couverture universelle et la préférence correspondante des solutions « privées » au propriétaire, crée un contexte dans le courant est beaucoup plus difficile à trouver un équilibre entre les travail rémunéré et responsabilités de la maison pour les femmes des maisons de basse consommation. L'individualisation et la commercialisation des nécessités de la maison, à Singapour et dans d'autres endroits en général, tiennent compte des circonstances, des nécessités et du bien-être des femmes dans une situation de classe inférieure et socava la valeur de la maison et le travail du personnel.

In this article I explore marriage as a strategy of family migration among a transnational community of middle-class Jat Sikhs. Family reunification and status aspirations are examined as central concerns of the transnational movement of Jat Sikhs from India to Canada. It is argued that Jat Sikh transnationalism and gender are mutually-constitutive: migration strategies can construct women, as well as men, as agents of marital citizenship, and in facilitating migration, transnational marriage may transform practices and notions of gender and status. The article is based on preliminary ethnographic research among Jat Sikh brides in Toronto and Vancouver, and forms part of a larger study of gender, modernity and identity in Indo-Canadian Jat Sikh marriages.