Challenging Patriarchy: The Changing Definition of Women’s Empowerment

Traditionally, prevailing patriarchal norms and social values have confined Bangladeshi women to the private sphere and placed them in a position of disempowerment vis-à-vis men. Since the 1970s the emergence of the readymade garment (RMG) industry has provided women with opportunities for waged work into the public sphere and linked them into the global economy. By using Naila Kabeer’s conceptualisation of empowerment and Walby’s theory of patriarchy as theoretical lenses of analysis, this paper examines what happens when women are empowered in the economic sphere and whether that transfers over into the domestic sphere in terms of changes in patriarchal relations. Evidence from semi-structured interviews with 40 female garment workers, the paper analyses their lives outside the workplace. It argues that experience of paid work can offer female RMG workers a degree of empowerment within home and society, but the level of this varied for women. For “Independent” and “Progressive” women the state of gender relations was changing to an extent as a result of paid employment, whereas “Traditional” women’s entry into the workplace had not brought about any change in the private form of patriarchy. Overall, women’s participation in paid employment such as their role as a wage earner, their increased freedom of movement and autonomy, self-confidence, a greater degree of awareness regarding their life decisions presents a radical challenge to the myth of the male breadwinner model of the family in Bangladesh and the notion of patriarchy. Social Science Review, Vol. 37(2), Dec 2020 Page 239-265

Salvaging Marginalized Men: How the Department of Defense Waged the War on Poverty

Architects of social welfare policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the military as a site for strengthening the male breadwinner as the head of the “traditional family.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert McNamara—men not often mentioned in the same conversations—both spoke of “salvaging” young men through military service. The Department of Defense created Project Transition, a vocational jobs-training program for GIs getting ready to leave the military, and Project 100,000, which lowered draft requirements in order to put men who were previously unqualified into the military. The Department of Defense also made significant moves to end housing discrimination in communities surrounding military installations. Policymakers were convinced that any extension of social welfare demanded reciprocal responsibility from its male citizens. During the longest peacetime draft in American history, policymakers viewed programs to expand civil rights and social welfare as also expanding the umbrella of the obligations of citizenship.

562The “quiet revolution” and mental health? Associations between household-employment configurations and mental-health across 17 years

Background Despite evidence that employed women report more time pressure and work-life penalties than employed men and other women, scant attention has been paid to the possible health effects of female labour-force participation. Methods This analysis examined associations between household labour-force arrangements and the mental health of men and women using 17 waves of data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey. Mental health was measured using the Mental Health Inventory (MHI-5). A five-category measure of household employment configuration was derived: dual full-time employed, male-breadwinner, female-breadwinner, shared part-time employment (both part-time) and male full-time/female part-time (1.5-earner). Using fixed effects regression methods, we examined the within-person effects of household employment configuration on mental health, controlling for time-varying confounders. Results For men, being in the female-breadwinner configuration was associated with poorer mental health compared to being in the 1.5-earner configuration (b-1.98, 95%CI -3.36, -0.61). The mental health of women was poorer when in the male-breadwinner configuration, compared to when in the 1.5-earner arrangement (b-0.89, 95%CI -1.56, -0.22). Conclusions The mental health of both men and women is poorer when not in the labour-force, either as a man in the female-breadwinner arrangement, or as a woman in the male-breadwinner arrangement. Key messages These results suggest that the mental health of women and men benefits from labour-force participation. The results are noteworthy for women, because they pertain to a sizeable proportion of the population who are not in paid employment, and highlight the need for policy reform to support women’s labour-force participation.

Women’s Work and Men

Through the use of selected contemporary sociological research and prolific collections of largely unpublished memoirs, this article analyzes men’s attitudes toward the paid employment of women—particularly married women—in post-Stalinist Poland. The personal narratives reveal an increasing acceptance of women’s work outside the household over time and across generations. A significant shift in Polish men’s attitudes to a greater acceptance of women’s paid employment took place in the younger generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s and socialized after World War II. However, hostile attitudes of working-class men toward working women persisted, based on a continuing aspiration to uphold the male breadwinner family model.

The Welfare State and the Gender Dissimilarity Index in Homelessness: A Comparison of Norway, Belgium and Poland

This article investigates the structural underpinnings of gender dissimilarities in homelessness from a comparative perspective. The Gender Dissimilarity Index is introduced as a simple measure for quantifying the unevenness of the distribution of men and women across the ETHOS-light categories. Three gendered aspects of the welfare state are considered and compared for Norway, Belgium, and Poland: employment and childcare, housing, and homelessness policies. Based on available data, it appears that the most uneven distribution of genders may indicate a combination of the promotion of the male breadwinner model and relatively broad support for people who are homeless, but also the shortage of affordable housing. A more gender-balanced homeless population may be the result of a combination of housing-led approaches and degenderising policies. However, a similar distribution may be attributed to states with implicitly genderising policies coupled with ‘traditional’ attitudes towards gender roles and a lack of adequate responses to women’s needs.

Marriage and Masculinity: Male-Breadwinner Culture, Unemployment, and Separation Risk in 29 Countries

Scholars argue that gender culture, understood as a set of beliefs, norms, and social expectations defining masculinities and femininities, plays an important role in shaping when romantic relationships end. However, the relevance of gender culture is often underappreciated, in part because its empirical identification remains elusive. This study leverages cross-country variation in gender norms to test the hypothesis that gender culture conditions which heterosexual romantic relationships end and when. We analyze the extent to which male-breadwinning norms determine the association between men’s unemployment and couple separation. Using harmonized household panel data for married and cohabiting heterosexual couples in 29 countries from 2004 to 2014, our results provide robust evidence that male-breadwinner norms are a key driver of the association between men’s unemployment and the risk of separation. The magnitude of this mechanism is sizeable; an increase of one standard deviation in male-breadwinner norms increases the odds of separation associated with men’s unemployment by 32 percent. Analyses also show that the importance of male-breadwinner norms is strongest among couples for whom the male-breadwinner identity is most salient, namely married couples. By directly measuring and leveraging variation in the key explanatory of interest, gender culture, our study offers novel and robust evidence reinforcing the importance of gender norms to understand when romantic relationships end.

The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences

The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children: in evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we have evolved a strategy of cooperative reproduction. Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is, therefore, likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers and children. Incorporating evidence-based evolutionary, and anthropological, perspectives into research on health is vital if we are to ensure the wellbeing of individuals across a wide range of contexts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal–child health’.