» Network Home

A recent press release announced the availability of the Executive Summary of the 2009 Sloan Network Panel Meeting on “Intended and Unintended Consequences of Work-Family Policy: Lessons through International Comparison.”

Highlights from the summary include:

• The global recession has affected today’s families and family policy in various ways. Job insecurity, in particular, has sparked some employee concerns about the necessity to be seen as indispensable and, in some cases, has created a disincentive to be associated with work-family efforts. In addition, while some employers have continued to support employee well-being and resilience, especially among survivor employees now expected to do more with less, others have limited their focus to the bottom line.
• Among different countries, there are varying levels of cultural acceptance about government involvement in family care and concerns. Workloads and cultural norms may hinder willingness and ability to utilize such entitlements.
• Care arrangements can vary—ranging from mother-centered, to care contracts with paid workers, to state-sponsored care arrangements—and have different impacts, including the access to care for subgroups within the population.
• The multifaceted nature of work in today’s 24/7 global economy introduces complex challenges for work-family integration and policy development. Global teams in different time zones, technology that allows many to work all the time, shift work, and work overload can blur the boundaries between work and home life.
• The policy platforms in most countries do not sufficiently promote men’s involvement in family care and caregiving.
• State and local regulations concerning labor practices vary among countries, and these regulations can complicate the efforts of multinational corporations to develop and implement work-family policies.

International attendees shared observations on both the intended consequences—ways that family-supportive policies contributed to work-family integration—as well as possible unintended negative impacts on gender equity, opportunities for career advancement, employer policy enactment, fertility rates, and transnational labor flows.

“The meeting allowed us to consider a variety of trade-offs in designing work-family policies, while also recognizing the importance of both structural support and cultural resonance for those policies. By taking a nuanced, comparative approach, we were able to identify the importance of making men more responsible for care and meeting the needs of workers in our globalized 24/7 economies,” according to attendee Joya Misra, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

The winning article of the 2006 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work and Family Research, “Family Policies, Wage Structures, and Gender Gaps: Sources of Earnings Inequality in 20 Countries” by Hadas Mandel and Moshe Semyonov, generated the idea for this meeting. “Our research found that societies with the most generous family leave policies, while promoting work-family integration and facilitating women’s retention in the paid labor force, also tend to reduce opportunities for women to move into highly paid jobs and upper-level management positions, and, therefore, to reduce women’s earnings capacity,” said attendee Moshe Semyonov, Professor of Sociology & Labor Studies at Tel Aviv University and Professor of Sociology at The University of Illinois–Chicago.

• New on the Network , Policy , Publications , Research