HEI: University of Strathclyde
Funding: AHRC DTP
Project Title: Rethinking Parenting Leave, Sexual Division of Labour, and Substantive Equality: A Transformative EU Parenting Leave Model
Supervisors:
Professor Rebecca Zahn and Dr Emily Rose
What was your research about?
This thesis offers a normative rethinking of parenting leave as a means of
transforming the sexual division of labour within the family and facilitating substantive equality between the sexes and between groups of parents regardless of their sexual and/or gender identity and family form in the EU. To do so, it enriches socio-legal policy research with feminist legal theory and makes novel contributions to feminist legal theory, socio-legal parenting leave policy research, and EU legal scholarship. First, it examines the meaning of equality and inequality through a feminist theoretical refinement of Fredman’s four-dimensional model of substantive equality by locating it within the earlier feminist equality scholarship of Young and Fraser. Second, it turns this model into an analytical method by distilling from it methodological and normative principles for the purpose of critiquing and reconstructing parenting leave law and policy. And third, it normatively critiques and reconstructs the EU parenting leave framework, consisting of maternity leave under the Pregnant Workers Directive and paternity leave and parental leave under the Work-Life Balance Directive. It demonstrates that rather than facilitating substantive equality, EU law reinforces inequalities between parents: it perpetuates the gendered parental role stereotypes epitomised by the breadwinner-caregiver dichotomy, socially excludes parents who do not conform to the heteronormative nuclear family ideal, and entrenches socio-economic disadvantages by devaluing pregnancy and parenthood. Employing two Nordic parenting leave frameworks as current ‘best practice’ examples of policy models which transform the sexual division of labour within the family, this thesis then devises a transformative parenting leave model for the EU.
By universalising the ‘feminine’ characteristic of caregiving as a gender-neutral parenthood norm, this model deconstructs the sexual division of labour within the family and thus facilitates substantive equality between the sexes and between parents regardless of their sexual and/or gender identity and family form.
Where can people find you?
University of Strathclyde Research Profile: Meemi Matero