Jana Javornik
Associate Professor of Comparative Social Policy, Director of the Noon Centre for Equality and Diversity in Business, BSc Sociology Programme Director
External affiliations:
June 2013 onwards - Centre for International Research on Care, Labour & Equalities (CIRCLE), School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds.
Former posts:
2013-2016: BSS WCGT Fellow, University of Leeds
2011-2013: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology (Welfare State Studies Programme), Umeå University, Sweden.
2001-2011: Senior Policy Adviser, Slovenian Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (Department for Social Welfare and Social Development).
1998-2011: Detached national expert to the European Commission and the Stability Pact Gender Task Force; involved in a series of the World Bank, ILO, UNDP, UNIFEM and European Industrial Relations Observatory funded projects, exploring equal opportunities and social (policy) change in pEastern Europe.
Research interests:
My research contributes to comparative welfare state research. I explore in particular work-family policies and the role of the state as a social policy player in care/employment solutions in diverse contexts, focusing on Eastern and Northern Europe.
Writing on the following issues:
1) Work-family interface and work-family policies
2) Methodology for comparative analysis of work-family policies
3) Maternal employment
5) Gender roles and parenting
6) Well-being and sustainability
Supervisors: Advisor and Supervisor
Address: University of Leeds
School of Sociology & Social Policy
Circle
Room 12.40
Leeds LS2 9NL
UK
External affiliations:
June 2013 onwards - Centre for International Research on Care, Labour & Equalities (CIRCLE), School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds.
Former posts:
2013-2016: BSS WCGT Fellow, University of Leeds
2011-2013: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology (Welfare State Studies Programme), Umeå University, Sweden.
2001-2011: Senior Policy Adviser, Slovenian Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (Department for Social Welfare and Social Development).
1998-2011: Detached national expert to the European Commission and the Stability Pact Gender Task Force; involved in a series of the World Bank, ILO, UNDP, UNIFEM and European Industrial Relations Observatory funded projects, exploring equal opportunities and social (policy) change in pEastern Europe.
Research interests:
My research contributes to comparative welfare state research. I explore in particular work-family policies and the role of the state as a social policy player in care/employment solutions in diverse contexts, focusing on Eastern and Northern Europe.
Writing on the following issues:
1) Work-family interface and work-family policies
2) Methodology for comparative analysis of work-family policies
3) Maternal employment
5) Gender roles and parenting
6) Well-being and sustainability
Supervisors: Advisor and Supervisor
Address: University of Leeds
School of Sociology & Social Policy
Circle
Room 12.40
Leeds LS2 9NL
UK
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (34)
Uploads
Papers by Jana Javornik
Mayer is breaking the social norm by managing her family and work as most male CEOs do: by leaving childcare to others. Although more companies are starting to offer shared parental leave, only a few CEO dads opt to care for children full time. But men are judged differently when it comes to parenthood.
Ostensibly, more free childcare and early education (ECEC) offers an appealing solution and take-up of the universal entitlement is high. However, this demand-priming approach and its funding streams are too complex, inefficient and unsustainable. These has led to a shortage of supply of both pre-school and school-age care (with critically low provision for disabled children and those in rural areas), mismatch between service and work hours. The key failings of UK childcare policy are its prohibitively high costs (second highest in the OECD), equivalent to a regressive tax on mothers’ labour supply, reducing financial returns from their employment and increasing their reservation wage, and the linking of funding to parents being in paid work; these not only limit families’ choice and force parents to craft their own solutions, but also leave many families disadvantaged. It has been well established that the economic and social conditions of childhood frame the possibilities in later life and we argue that strategically investing in universal quality childcare will yield significant returns.
Mayer is breaking the social norm by managing her family and work as most male CEOs do: by leaving childcare to others. Although more companies are starting to offer shared parental leave, only a few CEO dads opt to care for children full time. But men are judged differently when it comes to parenthood.
Ostensibly, more free childcare and early education (ECEC) offers an appealing solution and take-up of the universal entitlement is high. However, this demand-priming approach and its funding streams are too complex, inefficient and unsustainable. These has led to a shortage of supply of both pre-school and school-age care (with critically low provision for disabled children and those in rural areas), mismatch between service and work hours. The key failings of UK childcare policy are its prohibitively high costs (second highest in the OECD), equivalent to a regressive tax on mothers’ labour supply, reducing financial returns from their employment and increasing their reservation wage, and the linking of funding to parents being in paid work; these not only limit families’ choice and force parents to craft their own solutions, but also leave many families disadvantaged. It has been well established that the economic and social conditions of childhood frame the possibilities in later life and we argue that strategically investing in universal quality childcare will yield significant returns.
The developments in the publicly-funded childcare system in Slovenia are addressed in two ways. (i) The policy analysis focuses on the national policy context, i.e. the type of governance; actors in childcare provision; political and financial support for public childcare, including the impact of the current crisis. It will investigate the reconfiguring of childcare services, looking at changes in how they are delivered, organised, financed and allocated. (ii) The impact of such changes in territorial differentiation terms is analysed looking at three municipalities: Ljubljana (the capitol and the miniatured state), Slovenske Konjice (the municipality which in the 1970s started the infrastructural 'revolution' in the delivery of childcare services) and Zreče (small municipality with prevailing rural areas and metal industry that has traditionally employed the vast majority of the local population).
The chapter covers service allocation; the relation between national and local authorities; needs assessment and service delivery re-design; funding constraints and welfare retrenchment - restructuring of the system; public-private partnership (outsourcing/concessions, for-profit).
The author first analyzes the emancipatory potential of national policies on childcare leave and formal childcare service provision between 2000 and 2008, in order to determine whether or not childcare policies provide options for carers to engage in paid employment. It finds that among eight post-socialist countries Slovenia and Lithuania create conditions for women’s continuous employment, while Hungary, the Czech Republic and Estonia provide financial incentives for women to retreat from the labour force for a longer period after childbirth, whereas parents in Poland, Slovakia and Latvia are left nearly without public support.
Drawing upon maternal employment data, the author finds evidence in favour of the childcare policies explanation. In countries with gender-neutral leave of moderate duration and affordable, adequate and accessible formal childcare services the employment rates for mothers with pre-school children are significantly higher than in other countries. Educational attainment and the income needs of households suppress rather than rival the childcare policies explanation, and the unregulated service markets and day care by other family members account for mothers’ employment in countries with limited state support.
"
Ostensibly, more free childcare and early education (ECEC) offers an appealing solution and take-up of the universal entitlement is high. However, this demand-priming approach and its funding streams are too complex, inefficient and unsustainable. These has led to a shortage of supply of both pre-school and school-age care (with critically low provision for disabled children and those in rural areas), mismatch between service and work hours. The key failings of UK childcare policy are its prohibitively high costs (second highest in the OECD), equivalent to a regressive tax on mothers’ labour supply, reducing financial returns from their employment and increasing their reservation wage, and the linking of funding to parents being in paid work; these not only limit families’ choice and force parents to craft their own solutions, but also leave many families disadvantaged. It has been well established that the economic and social conditions of childhood frame the possibilities in later life and we argue that strategically investing in universal quality childcare will yield significant returns.
The author first analyzes the emancipatory potential of national policies on childcare leave and formal childcare service provision between 2000 and 2008, in order to determine whether or not childcare policies provide options for carers to engage in paid employment. It finds that among eight post-socialist countries Slovenia and Lithuania create conditions for women’s continuous employment, while Hungary, the Czech Republic and Estonia provide financial incentives for women to retreat from the labour force for a longer period after childbirth, whereas parents in Poland, Slovakia and Latvia are left nearly without public support.
Drawing upon maternal employment data, the author finds evidence in favour of the childcare policies explanation. In countries with gender-neutral leave of moderate duration and affordable, adequate and accessible formal childcare services the employment rates for mothers with pre-school children are significantly higher than in other countries. Educational attainment and the income needs of households suppress rather than rival the childcare policies explanation, and the unregulated service markets and day care by other family members account for mothers’ employment in countries with limited state support.
The findingssuggest that parents’ decision-making is deeply embedded in the institutional context, providing both practical solutions and normative messages. In both countries, interviews reflect a context presenting dual roles as synergistic rather than conflicting, by establishing an ideal of combining work and family, even when children are small. Fundamental decisions related to occupation and fertility are made with little consideration of work-family conflict.
Regarding the implications of those decisions, however, differences appear both between and within countries. Although both countries provide a generous period of gender-neutral parental leave, its usage differed. In the Slovenian sample, leave was predominantly used by mothers and in one block, thus post-poning work-family conflict for about a year. However, there is a ‘care gap’ for children under 3, which is filled mainly by grandparents and after that, grandparents continue to be involved in the work-family puzzle. In the Swedish sample, parental leave was used flexibly by both parents in order to juggle work-family demands over longer period of time.
Both samples point to the importance but also the limitation of family policies in solving work-family conflict. In particular, public day care does not allow for two full-time schedules. In Slovenia, this is due to push factors (low availability, high costs, restriction on hours). In Sweden, prevailing perceptions of child wellbeing and family affinity urge parents to minimize day care hours. The strategies used are mainly part-time, schedule flexibility and making strategic use of the partner (e.g, taking ’shifts’ at home ), while grandparents are very peripheral. In contrast, the right to request part-time is rarely used in Slovenia and fathers are perceived as secondary caregivers.
The mean level of work-conflict was similar in the two samples, for both men and women. At the same time, there was a large variation within each country, related to the character of work as well as to gender. In particular, the tools for work-family reconciliation provided by policy (work hour reductions, right to leave to care for sick children) could not be effiently used when work demands were high. Finally, women in both samples felt more responsible for finding ’family friendly’ solution and made greater accomodations to this end – yet, they perceived more work-family conflict than men.
The empirical evidence for such theses is scarce. However, a considerably more compelling trend can be identified when narrowing the focus to employment patterns of women in the phase of “active motherhood in [their] biographies” (Pfau-Effinger 2004a: 2): employment rates for women aged 25-49 without pre-school children have, between 2000 and 2008, contrasted sharply with the employment rates for women with children under 7. Whilst the former have been similarly high among the eight post-socialist countries, the latter ranged from the lowest 30 per cent in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, to about 90 per cent in Slovenia. This shift in employment practices among women with children deviates from the pattern of total female employment in a cross-country perspective, and seems at odds with the re-traditionalization thesis which argues that trends in mothers’ employment would be similar among these eight countries. The puzzle is what accounts for such behavioural change among women with young children and those without.
This paper aims to show whether, and how, the current trends in care/work integration practices have been influenced by the historical-institutional developments during the period of state socialism. I will argue that a longer scan produces a picture of continuity, and indicates that treating these eight countries as one single group (as often the case in the earlier literature) masks an interesting and nuanced story. I will show that state socialism put these eight countries on different paths, and that the social inheritance continues to exert a powerful effect on their social practices in the contemporary post-socialist period
We see two important caveats:
* First, the construct of work-family conflict does not capture role conflictas discussed in the theories – that is, as competing pressures from two spheres. In contrast, we argue that indicators measure the ’residual’ conflict which remains after strategies to deal with these pressures have been employed. As a result, important variations in choices and constraints are missed, and potentials for interventions may be misconstrued.
*Second, research on work-family conflict has largely ignored the competing hypothesis of role expansion.
Our point of concern is the strong domination of the conflict perspective in describing work-family interactions. The rivalling hypothesis of role expansion - claiming that the combination of dual roles in paid work and family is a source of wellbeing rather than stress - was formulated already in the 1970´s, and has gained new interest in recent years when a variety of constructs have been proposed to describe positivework-family interactions. However, this hypothesis has been largely ignored in research on work-family conflict.
Our paper argues that such theoretical and empirical divide has hampered our understanding of the challenges as well as benefits of the dual-earner family. The importance of merging the role conflict and the role expansion perspective is demonstrated by our large-scale quantitative study of 15 European countries (Grönlund&Öun 2010). Based on European Social Survey 2004, we found that role conflict (i.e. work-family conflict) and role expansion (measured as well-being and life satisfaction) may go hand in hand. However, the conflict-expansion nexus appears to vary both with gender and with national social policies. Moreover, the findings indicate that predictors commonly associated with work-family conflict – for example, long work hours and high workload - produce both conflict and well-being.
Second, perceptions of conflict are conflated with actions producing or reducing conflict. Research on work-family conflict is based on theories of role conflict and role strain (e.g. Goode 1960). In their seminal article, Greenhaus & Beutell (1985) define work-family conflict as ”a form of interrole conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect, that is, participaton in the work (family) role is made more difficult by virtue of participation in the family (work) role” (ibid 77). This conflict is very much a product of individual actors. In role strain theory, Goode (1960) points out that people take actions to make their role systems maneagable. The individual ”must move through a continuous process of role descisions and bargains by which he attempts to adjust these demands and reduce role strain to some bearable proportions” (ibid 495).
In empirical research, this actor perspective appears to have been lost. Recently, researchers have pointed out that the prevailing construct does not capture role conflict as it was theoretically depicted –that is, as simultaneous pressures from two spheres. Instead, it measures work-family interference, which is the daily experience of strain or stress related to the work-family interface (Carlson &Grzyvacs 2008). Thus, reported levels of work-family conflict mirror the stress that remains after individual strategies to resolve the problem of competing pressures have been employed.
If work-family conflict is regarded as a ’residual’ conflict, empirical findings appear less puzzling. For example, although theory implies that role conflict would be high in dual-earner families with preschool children, several empirical studies find no relation between children and work-family conflict. Similarly, most studies find no gender difference in work-family conflict, although it is widely recognized that women adjust their involvement in paid work precisely to avoid this conflict. Studies reporting a higher conflict among women with egalitarian gender attitudes, or in a gender-equal society such as Sweden, or among service class women with considerable power resources may be better understood if we consider that individuals employ work-family balancing strategies; that those are aimed at balancing conflict and expansionrather than just reducing conflict and that they are formulated within specific contexts.
To further our understanding of these issues, we have conducted a qualitative study comprising five European countries representing different welfare regimes. In each country, we have interviewed men and women in five occupations, all parents with dependent children. Based on our preliminary empirical findings, this paper expands our arguments and provides suggestions for further research.
Paper by Anne Grönlund, Jana Javornik, Ida Öun
The empirical evidence for such theses is scarce. I found that a significant decline in female employment rates in the early years of the 1990s was a tidal wave. Namely, between 2000 and 2008, the employment rates for women in full-time jobs were, on average, still higher (at about 80 per cent and over) than in other countries of the European Union, with practically no cross-country variation, and with fairly narrow gender gaps in employment (Eurostat 2005, 2010). This empirical evidence indicates that women in eight most advanced post-socialist countries did not retreat from the labour force, but have continued to engage in paid employment on a full-time basis.
However, within the broad category of ‘female employment’ something else is going on: I found a considerably more compelling trend when I narrowed my focus to employment patterns of women in the phase of “active motherhood in [their] biographies” (Pfau-Effinger 2004a: 2). On the one hand, the employment rates for women aged 25-49 without children under 7 were similarly high among the eight post-socialist countries. But, this trend contrasted sharply with the employment rates for women with children under 7; these ranged from the lowest 30 per cent in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, to about 90 per cent in Slovenia. This shift in employment practices among women with children deviates from the pattern of total female employment in a cross-country perspective, and seems at odds with the re-traditionalization thesis which argues that trends in mothers’ employment would be similar among these eight countries. The puzzle is what accounts for such behavioural change among women with young children and those without.
This paper explores the puzzling phenomenon of a wide cross-country variation, and shed clarifies (1) what has shaped it, and (2) whether or not the current trends in care/work integration practices have in any way been influenced by the historical-institutional developments during the period of state socialism. The paper shows that the socialist period produced extraordinary leap in terms of female employment, which in turn dismantled the male breadwinner family model (if it ever existed) and heralded significant change in the role of the state in the family. A longer scan has produced a picture of continuity, and indicates that treating these eight countries as one single group masks an interesting and nuanced story. It also shows that state socialism put these eight countries on different paths, and that the social inheritance continues to exert a powerful effect on their social practices in the contemporary post-socialist period.
This paper argues that childcare policies (i.e. policies on parental leave and formal day care) ostensibly reflect whether, and how, the states support mothers in paid employment as well as challenge the gender-specific parenting. The varieties of familialism literature provides the theoretical foundations for this research and offers perspectives of how the states use childcare policies differently to challenge, or reinforce the conventional gender division of labour – and in so doing shape mothers’ employment. This paper explores the intersection of state, market and family and how this has shaped the scope of women’s choices and employment opportunities in eight most advanced post-socialist countries that entered the EU in 2004, focusing on the period between 1950 and 2008. It shows that the states have differed in their policy priorities and goals – that is, in the extent to which they have considered the uneven capacity of mothers to invest in paid employment. Drawing upon detailed policy characteristics this paper presents compelling cross-country variations and shows that broadly similar states countries divide up into three (recognizable) policy clusters, which represent three types of familialism in the field of child care: de-familialism, explicit familialism, and implicit familialism. The paper indicates that despite variations within clusters, variations between clusters are greater. Such differences emphasize the need for a more dynamic model of welfare state typology, and enhance the interpretative capacities of the ‘varieties of familialism’ strategy of deconstructing welfare regimes, in order to address the question of how welfare regimes relate to women in different roles.
This paper seeks to locate the institutionalization of contemporary childcare policies by putting the relationship between maternal employment and the state into a historical perspective – that is, by extending policy analysis to the periods both before and after the collapse of state socialism. On the one hand, it analyzes whether or not the developments during state socialism, i.e. between the 1950s and the late 1980s, shed new light on social practices in the contemporary post-socialist period. It shows that the socialist period produced extraordinary leap in terms of female employment, which in turn dismantled the male breadwinner family model and heralded significant change in the role of the state in the family. However, although the eight countries pursued similar programmes of the socialist revolutionary transformation of institutional order in that period, mothers’ employment and social organisation of care have been constructed around a contrasting set of normative fundamentals – maternal ideology competed with the duty of labour to different extent in different socialist countries (also Pascall and Manning 2000: 245). The eight countries show significant variation in the (oppressive) use of state as well as in the state intervention via social policies. On the other hand, this paper extends the study to the period after 1990 and finds that the eight countries experienced long periods of relatively stable policy arrangements between the 1950s and 2008, with moments of dynamism and reform between 1989 and the second half of the 1990s. Overall, this paper challenges earlier theses about a resurgence of patriarchal order, ascendancy of neo-familialism, and women’s retreat to domestic life in these countries. Instead, it argues that intra-group diversities are symptoms of larger, more sustained differences, and thus challenges the dichotomy between the ‘socialist past’ and the ‘post-socialist present’ as well as the thesis about the re-traditionalization of cultural norms and gender-role values.
In sum, this paper argues that historical legacies and institutional arrangements play an important role in how countries deal with gender roles, and indicates that the social inheritance continues to exert a powerful effect on contemporary social practices in the eight countries: their states either rely on households to produce care (i.e. familialistic policies) or, instead, acknowledge the importance of the wider society, particularly at the collective level (i.e. the de-familialistic policies). Putting the policy review in a historical perspective this paper contributes to a further academic debate about the continuity and path dependence in childcare policies and offers some perspectives for further research that could derive more generalizations about the stability/change in the varieties of familialism.
To examine childcare policies in these countries, national policy programmes are analyzed. I draw attention to more detailed policy characteristics that received insufficient attention in earlier comparative research. Drawing from earlier studies, I evaluate the two policies along twelve policy aspects: (i) total length of leave time, (ii) income support payments during leave, (iii) job protection during leave, (iv) flexibility of leave provision, (v) parental entitlements, and (vi) daddy-quotas. Public childcare service provision was also evaluated along six aspects, reflecting (i) availability of services, (ii) their affordability, and (iii) quality of service provision.
The Children and Families Act, of which the new Shared Parental Leave regulation is a major feature, is a well-meant piece of legislation, intended to give parents more job security and more control over family life. The policy also aimed to 'create a new, more equal system which allows both parents to keep a strong link to their workplace' - by men spending more time caring. Shared parenting is expected to reduce the gender opportunity gaps, i.e. 'the “gender penalty” that women suffer from taking time out of the workplace with their children’. In this paper, we aim to explore whether shared parental leave is in fact likely to challenge gender inequality through shared parenting.
The new legislation purports to bring equality into the workplace and the home, however, the government has not created a new right here – it is merely allowing parents to split an existing right, making the chances of parents (voluntarily) sharing leave slimmer. Second, it creates a right only to the statutory minimum leave and pay. The Achilles heel of this intervention is that it doesn't apply to occupational schemes. Thus in many workplaces an incentive for the mother to take leave remains.
We argue that the new law is unlikely to encourage more fathers to take parental leave – it appears to provide parents with new rights and choice over how the leave is taken, but in practice, 'the discretion remains with the employers' (Javornik, 2014a; Mitchell 2015). We support this by examining the eligibility, the statutory remuneration and the need for maternal consent to access leave. Using a recent employment tribunal example, we show how legal uncertainty over possible use of anti-discrimination law (to challenge father's exclusion from occupational maternity leave schemes) abounds. We explore the concept of indirect discrimination in this context, and use concepts from the field of social policy to consider whether excluding fathers from occupational schemes can be objectively justified in the context of social norms moving towards greater equality in shared parenting