Anna Kurowska

University of Warsaw | UW · Faculty of Political Science and International Studies

In-work support through the tax-benefit system has proved to be an effective way of increasing labour supply of lone mothers and first earners in couples in a number of OECD countries. At the same time these instruments usually create negative employment incentives for secondary earners. This in turn reduces the potential of in-work support to addr...

Steven Saxonberg (2014), Gendering Family Policies in Post-Communist Europe: A Historical-Institutional Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. £65.00, pp.292, hbk. - Volume 44 Issue 3 - ANNA KUROWSKA

Until the mid-19th century, these two countries had many features in common in terms of politics, institutions, culture, as well as the economy. They generated almost identical GDP per capita and grew at a similar pace. Since 1960s the paths of the two countries have begun to diverge. In 1960–2001 average annual growth stood at 3.8 percent in Spain...

Financial support for families with children implies inherent trade-offs some of which are less obvious than others. In the end these trade-offs determine the effectiveness of policy with respect to the material situation of families and employment of parents - two crucial elements for the well-being of families. We analyse several kinds of trade-o...

The paper presents estimation results of a logistic regression developed in order to explore such predictors of employment of mothers with children up to 14 years old in Poland as maternal attitudes towards cultural gender roles, a parental family of a working mother and sharing household and childcare duties between parents. The analysis was based...

This study uses a multidimensional approach to identify gender ideologies and investigate their association with work-family arrangements among mothers of dependent children in Poland and western Germany. Based on data from the Generations and Gender Survey, we apply ordinal latent class analysis and identify five gender ideology classes: (1) tradi...

Globalisation and technological advancements have transformed European labour markets, making work schedules more demanding and difficult to manage. Increased expectations for availability beyond standard working hours, along with the need for constant skill updates, have exacerbated work-family conflict, particularly for dual-earner couples with c...

Recent changes in labour markets have increased employment instability. Under these conditions, in male breadwinner families women might increase their labour supply when their male partners become unemployed. Previous studies have extensively investigated the role played by household and individual characteristics in explaining such increases in t...

Little research has been done on parents’ coordination of their work arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic. Synchronized work arrangements (e.g., both parents work from home) could enable working parents to maximize their togetherness, whereas desynchronized working arrangements could enable them to address some pandemic-induced challenges, suc...

Earnings constitute one of the most important sources of income for most of the European families. In this context, growing instability of employment relations and the spread of nonstandard employment – which is usually less secure and less paid than standard employment – pose serious financial risks to families, especially the traditional and mode...

this study explores how various work and family-related contexts moderated the link between work-from-home (WFH) and self-perceived changes to the career prospects among employees with children after over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the link between WFH and the perception of changes to one’s career prospects is likely to differ d...

Recent changes in labour markets have increased employment instability. Under these conditions, in male breadwinner families women might increase their labour supply when their male partners become unemployed. Previous studies have extensively investigated the role played by household and individual characteristics in explaining such increases in t...

Although work is increasingly globalized and mediated by technology, little research has accumulated on the role of culture in shaping individuals' preferences regarding the segmentation or integration of their work and family roles. This study examines the relationships between gender egalitarianism (the extent a culture has a fluid understanding...

The Covid-19 pandemic and related massive spread of home based work led to substantial changes in the conditions for combining work and childbearing. On the one hand, working from home helped parents to accommodate increased childcare needs during the pandemic. On the other hand, it led to acute experiences of blurred boundaries between work and fa...

Although cross-national work–family research has made great strides in recent decades, knowledge accumulation on the impact of culture on the work–family interface has been hampered by a limited geographical and cultural scope that has excluded countries where cultural expectations regarding work, family, and support may differ. We advance this lit...

Here we present the Familydemic Cross Country and Gender Dataset (FCCGD), which offers cross country and gender comparative data on work and family outcomes among parents of dependent children, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers six countries from two continents representing diverse welfare regimes as well as distinct policy reactio...

In spite of increasing levels of female employment, having a child below school age often goes along with a substantial decrease in employment engagement for women. Consequently, previous family policy research suggests that increasing childcare availability might be a promising tool to facilitate maternal employment as it increases the economic in...

This article builds on a recent operationalization of inclusiveness of parental leave benefits proposed by Ivana Dobrotić and Sonja Blum and complements it by developing indicators of contextualized inclusiveness. This contextualized approach sets the formal entitlement and eligibility rules of social rights to parental leave benefits in the releva...

This paper examines the role of a country’s care regime as a potential moderator of the link between the share of female employees and the provision of family-friendly practices in companies. Based on theoretical sampling, we compare the provision of flextime and day care services in companies in three country contexts (Sweden, Poland, and Germany)...

This paper explores gendered impact of home-based work (HBW) on the capability to balance work with non-work in double-earner families with dependent children in two countries with distinct models of division of labour: Poland and Sweden. At first, I critically engage with the WLB conceptualization in HBW studies and try to address identified gaps....

The capability approach, an increasingly popular conceptual and theoretical framework focused on what individuals are able to do and be, offers a unique evaluative perspective to social policy analysis. This book explores the advantages of this approach and offers a way forward in addressing conceptual and empirical issues as they apply specificall...

Introduction European social policies address a broad array of issues, including (un)employment, activation, child- and elderly care, education, health, housing, migration, aging and poverty (Yerkes, 2015). The design and evaluation of these policies have been approached from multiple perspectives, including the social investment paradigm, which ha...

Introduction Social policy as a multi-layered research field spans numerous domains, each with their inherent complexities and approaches. Taking policy domains as an evaluative entry point, social policy research seeks to understand their development, processes, aims, implementation and impact from multiple perspectives and actors, including polic...

Introduction Parental leave as a social policy intertwines many intersecting policy domains such as family, employment, gender equality, demography, child wellbeing (Kamerman and Moss, 2011) and, in CA terms, parents’ and children's capabilities to be and do after childbirth (Javornik and Kurowska, 2017). It shapes the conditions under which women...

In this chapter, we discuss the key challenges and issues related to interpreting basic concepts of the capability approach (CA) in a social policy context. We start by briefly introducing the CA, tracing the idea of capabilities back to the writings of Aristotle and interpreting them in the context of Sen's capability approach. We then discuss the...

This concluding chapter synthesizes the key messages from the book and presents a framework for future uses of the capability approach (CA) in social policy research and practice. As shown throughout the volume, social policy as a multi-layered research field spans numerous domains, each with their inherent complexities and approaches. Taking polic...

This chapter analyses public parental leave in five pairs of 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 approach and Weber's ideal-types to comparative policy analysis. It offers the ideal parental lea...

The capability approach, an increasingly popular conceptual and theoretical framework focused on what individuals are able to do and be, offers a unique evaluative perspective to social policy analysis. This book explores the advantages of this approach and offers a way forward in addressing conceptual and empirical issues as they apply specificall...

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach, it explains the successful introduction of the major Parental Leave reform undertaken in Poland in 2013 in terms of three streams - policies, problems and politics – and how they can combine together. Second, it assesses the solutions introduced by the ref...

This volume brings together contributors from 18 countries to provide international perspectives on the politics of parental leave policies in different parts of the world. Initially looking in depth at the politics of care leave policies across Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia, the book moves on to consider a variety of key issues in depth,...

Despite the considerable volume of literature on the impact of economic conditions on childbearing, most studies have focused on the deterioration of the individual’s economic situation and economic uncertainty. This study complements previous studies by exploring how both negative and positive changes to the household’s economic situation impact t...

The article explores the extent to which Europeans’ welfare attitudes explain (trans)national solidarity behavior. We set our analyses against the backdrop of the broader debate of welfare state consequences: Does a strong welfare state that is considered to take care of those in need diminish or strengthen citizens’ motivations to become engaged i...

Poland has been portrayed in scholarly literature as a country of low “civic” social capital and of strong familial bonds, as well as a country focused on in-group solidarity. The goal of the chapter is to shed light on the issue whether specific post-communist legacy of social capital affects solidarity practices. Adding to the literature on polit...

The article examines the effects that positive and negative experiences with applying for social welfare have on the individual’s propensity to protest. We investigate how being denied or granted social benefits or services as well as the interaction of these two experiences influences self-reported prospective protest behaviour. We also explore th...

Political narratives formulated by the conservative Law and Justice party, which came into power in 2015, put into question most of the democratic achievements in Poland since 1989. This opened up a widespread political legitimation crisis. We explore this crisis at the individual level. An ‘unfinished transformation’ hypothesis assumes that the we...

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 pare...

In-work support through the tax-benefit system has proved to be an effective way of increasing the labor supply of lone mothers and first earners in couples in a number of OECD countries. At the same time, these instruments usually create negative employment incentives for secondary earners. This in turn reduces the potential of in-work support to...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to solve the puzzle of the disproportionately lower employment rate of mothers of toddlers with relation to the employment rate of mothers of preschool and school-age children in Estonia. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on the Most Similar System Design and compares Estonia with Lithuania. T...

This article critically engages with Saxonberg's proposal (2013) to replace the (de)familialization perspective with the (de)genderization approach in comparative family policy/regime studies. It argues: (1) there is a need to refine the term ‘(de)familialization’ and to bring in the child's and elderly's perspective; (2) the ‘(de)familialization’...

Family policy, gender and class, capability, comparative analysis, policy indicators, Nordic and Baltic

The goal of this article is to explore the discursive construction of social citizenship of various labor market actors during crisis. Using the newspaper data from nine countries we conduct a quantitative and qualitative study of the rights and duties attributed to employees, employers, and outsiders in the labor market. We find that the attributi...

Country chapter for Poland. For comparisons with other countries in this review – on demographic, economic, employment and gender equality indicators and on leave provision and early childhood education and care services-go to crosscountry comparisons page on website: http://www.leavenetwork.org/fileadmin/Leavenetwork/Annual_reviews/2016_Full_draft...

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki analizy zmian w dostępie do opieki nad dzieckiem w wieku poniżej trzech lat przed wejściem w życie ustawy o opiece nad dzieckiem do lat 3 w Polsce z 2011 r. i po jej wdrożeniu. Autorka stara się odpowiedzieć na następujące pytania: czy dostęp do tej opieki wzrósł istotnie po wejściu w życie wymienionej ustawy; czy mamy do...

The chapter presents the details of Polish parental leave scheme with reference to other childcare related instruments and review of recent research on these issues (2015) The country note available at: http://www.leavenetwork.org/fileadmin/Leavenetwork/Country_notes/2015/poland.pm.pdf

The Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have often been treated as a monolith in comparative social policy analyses. While there are moderate differences in gender employment gaps of childless men and women in these countries, the picture of employment among parents of young children is completely different. The employment rates of fathers...

Polska konstytucja zapewnia kobietom takie same prawa w zakresie prowadzenia własnej działalności gospodarczej jak mężczyznom. Jednak zjawiska o charakterze gospodarczym zachodzą w określonym kontekście społecznym i kulturowym, w którym funkcjonują kulturowe wzorce ról przypisanych płciom i różne oczekiwania społeczne wobec matek i ojców małych dzi...

The paper presents results of estimation of Cox proportional hazard model developed in order to identify the importance of employment for a first and a second childbirth for Polish women born in 1960 and after. The analysis is based on data from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey GGS-PL. The results show: a) positive and statistica...

see: http://www.sseriga.edu/files/content/bje2013_no2.pdf

see at: http://kolegia.sgh.waw.pl/pl/KGS/publikacje/Documents/Kobieta_2013.pdf

In the present paper, we analyse the differences in the use of pre-school education from the point of view of local social citizenship theory. Adopting this perspective means that, the level of diffusion of pre-school education reflects the level of entitlement to this type of education, an ingredient of the "social element of citizenship". Thus, i...

Microsimulation methods and models of labor market decisions have attracted a lot of attention as an approach to the assessment of consequences of family related policies in the area of labor market and fertility. We set these models in the context of relevant demographic theories and present them from the point of view of their potential as tool t...