The Menopause Taboo at Work: Examining Women’s Embodied Experiences of Menopause in the UK Police Service

This article contributes to the growing body of knowledge about gendered ageing at work through an examination of the embodied experiences of women undergoing menopause transition in the UK police service. Drawing on 1197 survey responses, providing both quantitative and qualitative data gathered across three police forces in 2017–18, the findings highlight the importance of a material-discursive approach that considers contextual influences on women’s bodily experiences. The article evidences gendered ageism and the penalty suffered by women whose ageing bodies fail to comply with an ideal worker norm. It makes an important contribution both to theorising embodiment, drawing in age as well as gender discourses, and to promoting a material-discursive approach that recognises the materiality of the body while also offering the potential for agency, reflection and resistance.

Conclusions: Change in Policies, Fathers’ Caregiving and the Ideal Worker Norm

This concluding chapter discusses the ways in which the parental leave design in terms of the father’s quota may have consequences for change in fatherhood and caregiving and thus for the wider processes of change towards a dual earner/dual carer model. It highlights change in fathers’ sense of entitlement to leave, which has made it into a norm. Aspects such as flexible use and the possibility for mothers to stay home are identified to harm the process of change towards dual caring. A focus on the content of the leave identifies further aspects of change in the father-child relation and care competence of fathers in the direction of caring masculinities. Working life’s supportive role contributes to placing a change of the ideal worker norm within sight.

“What Type of a Grown Man Doesn’t Have a Full-Time Job?”

This chapter aims to understand why part-time work and gender interact with one another in the field experiment. The masculine nature of the ideal worker norm and the feminized nature of part-time employment are central to understanding the gender-differentiated ways that hiring professionals treat workers with histories of part-time employment. During initial screening, employers likely do not have information about why a worker was in a part-time position, leaving them with significant uncertainty. Given a job applicant's narrative is unlikely to be available at this moment of initial screening, one way that employers make sense of part-time employment is by drawing on the stereotypes and cultural beliefs about the gender of the worker to weave a narrative about the applicant's part-time experience. In this way, hiring professionals develop stratified stories.

What Helps and What Hinders? Exploring the Role of Workplace Characteristics for Parental Leave Use and Its Career Consequences

The division of parental leave among couples today is still unequal—even in countries with progressive leave schemes. Given the gendered nature of the workplace, we examine how organizational characteristics relate to fathers’ uptake and length of parental leave as well as to the perceived career consequences of leave uptake among those fathers who took leave. In our mixed methods study, we draw on unique quantitative and qualitative data on different-sex couples with young children in Germany (2015). We find that the fear of professional repercussions and the lack of a replacement at work inhibit fathers both from taking leave in general and, for those who take leave, from taking it for more than two months. Interestingly, however, the majority of fathers who took leave did not think that their leave negatively affected their professional advancement. This positive evaluation was independent of the length of leave. We compared fathers’ perceived leave consequences to those of mothers, who tended to have a more negative view of the impact of taking leave on their careers. Both fathers and mothers were more likely to report negative career consequences if they worked in organizations that promoted a strong ideal worker norm, that is, where employees thought that they were expected to prioritize paid work over their private life.

Women in the German Workplace: What Facilitates or Constrains Their Claims-Making for Career Advancement?

To contribute to the understanding of gender inequalities within the workplace, this article explored gender differences in claims-making for career advancement and how they depend on workplace contexts based on unique German linked employer–employee data. Applying organizational fixed-effects models, we found that women were less likely than men to make claims, especially when they had children, and that this was related to their working fewer hours. The gender gap in claims-making further depended on workplace characteristics that influenced women’s ability and their feeling of deservingness to work in more demanding positions. Although claims by mothers’ increased in work–life supportive workplaces, highly demanding workplace cultures seemed to hinder women’s attempts to negotiate for career advancement. Thus, the dominance of the ideal worker norm was a relevant driver for the gender gap in claims-making. Whereas this gap in making claims was found to be only partially related to the workplace gender structure, the formalization of human resource practices, such as performance-based evaluations in the workplace, fostered mothers’ claims-making, indicating that these evaluations were used to legitimize their claims in the workplace.