Thursday, 7 September 2023
Welcoming word by the committee (Lucia Lanfranconi and Isabelle Zinn) and by Dorothee Guggisberg, Dean of the Lucerne School of Social Work (Auditorium)
(Introduction by Isabelle Zinn)
New Work—New Opportunities and New Challenges for Gender Equality
«New Work» tends to be associated with all sorts of individual and organizational benefits: intrinsic fulfillment and purpose, flat hierarchies, organizational agility, job autonomy, and, flexible work practices. In light of ongoing demographic and technological change, these different characteristics of new work will become ever more important and potentially affect gendered labor market inequalities in both positive and negative ways. This keynote will therefore address both the opportunities and challenges associated with new work and asks: How do different features of new work impact gendered labor market inequalities? To answer this question, I will draw on several, original data collections from Germany (ZEIT Vermächtnis Studie, two waves of the IAB-Hopp, and SOEP-IS). In addition to discussing the gendered use and consequences of remote and flexible work options, I will also address the question of whether new work practices change the prevalence of ideal worker behaviors. Lastly, the keynote will also examine gender differences in men’s and women’s preferences for upwardly-mobile vs. family-friendly jobs, and how these preferences differ between parents and nonparents, as well as younger vs. older generations. To foster the conference participants’ thinking about the opportunities and challenges of changing workplaces for gender inequality, the findings for Germany will be situated and discussed in lights of research findings from other countries.
Workshop (WS) 1: Remote work and work-life conflicts (chair: Núria Sanchez-Mira, room 204)
- Olga Leshchenko and Susanne Strauß: Flexible working time arrangements and work-life conflict: the role of gender and housework
- Jana Z'Rotz: New Work – new problems? Analysis of the gendered effects of telework on everyday mobility based on two crosssectional studies
- Aneta Ostaszewska: The pandemic paradox. Has the Covid-19-pandemic been an opportunity for gender equality and a more equal workplace for women at the university? A few conclusions of the project “Women in Universities and the Covid-19 Pandemic. Comparative Research on Women’s Work"
WS 2: The pandemic and organizational changes towards a new work culture (chair: Myriam Gaitsch, room 206)
- Danuscia Tschudi: Teleworking and digitalization: new forms of work that widen old gender inequalities? The situation of those on the margins of the world of work in Ticino
- Alexandra Cloots, Sara Juen: Designing a New Work Culture for a gender-equal work environment
- Lucia Lanfranconi, Isabelle Zinn, Eva Granwehr and Gena Da Rui: In the aftermath of the pandemic. Towards more family-friendly working conditions?
(Introduction by Gesine Fuchs)
Debating transformations of care work from a gender perspective
In recent months, part-time labour has featured prominently in the Swiss news media: The Sunday press has launched the idea that academics must either work at least 70% or pay back the high cost of their education. Who works part-time and why? Is this the new life-style of the Swiss elite? And if the demand for full-time employment for all adults was heeded, who would do the unpaid care work?
My talk takes this controversial debate as a starting point to analyse the current narratives around working hours from a gender perspective. On a conceptual level, I draw on feminist theorists Nancy Fraser, Joan Tronto and others. My aim is to illustrate two key pitfalls in the current debates: their prioritising of paid employment above unpaid care and their understanding of care work as being offloaded from privileged women’s onto marginalised women’s shoulders.
The second part of the talk then zooms in on my own empirical research with the latter – i.e. with women who do paid care work in the households of others. My aim is to shed light on the ambivalences of two ongoing transformations in this commoditised form of care work: transnational labour mediation and the platformisation of care.
The conclusions will take us back to the question of part-time labour and its potential for a more caring society.
WS 3: Labor market challenges – longitudinal perspectives (chair: Stephanie Steinmetz, room 250)
- Alexandra Wicht, Nora Müller, Reinhard Pollak, Silke Anger: Gendered wage effects of changes in job tasks: Evidence from Germany
- Debra Hevenstone, Leen Vandecasteele and Ana Fernandes: A cohort analysis of the motherhood penalty in Switzerland: How work choices contribute to career-long income losses
- Jana Freundt: Women with Children in the Swiss Labor Market
WS 4: New work and gender gaps (chair: Sabine Witt, room 252)
- Regine Graml and Veronika Kneip: Gender Gap in Work-from-Home career prospects: How does flexible work impact career development?
- Joelle Loew: “Communication is everything.” A linguistic perspective on gender and new work in the context of agile IT
- Ines Junginger: Is People Analytics leading to a technically mediated displacement process in HR?
- Alexandra Wrbka: (E)quality workplaces for women? Gender dynamics in collaborative workspaces in rural and peripheral areas in Austria and Greece.
WS 5: Global perspectives on new work (chair: Martina Peitz, room 254)
- Eneida Maria dos Santos: The impacts of remote work in the Global South: a gender analysis of the social division of labour
- Lakshita Bhagat and Bidisha Banerji: Assessing Transformation of Work in India from a Gender Perspective: Opportunities and Challenges in the wake of the Pandemic
- Karine Bilodeau: The Woman/Mother/Teacher Identity Relationship in Preschool and Elementary Education: Role (Con)fusion and Workplace Tensions
WS 6: New work and precarity (chair: Eva Granwehr, room 250)
- Lisa Stalder: Between labour protection and postcolonial tropes of female vulnerability: the regulation of sex work and migration in Switzerland
- Stephanie Steinmetz: Equalising or Marginalising – how platform work shapes gender inequalities across Europe
- Aashika Ravi: Risky Business: A Qualitative Study on the Working Conditions of Self-Employed Women Platform Workers in India
- Valeria Pisani, Michèle Amacker: Perspectives on care work of foster parents in the canton of Bern
WS 7: Gender roles and leadership (chair: Christina Bornatici, room 252)
- Julia Nentwich, Harald Tuckermann and Nadine Steingruber: Paradoxes of Post-heroic Leadership: Why do heroic leadership and gender inequality persist?
- Mira Muheim and Jeremias Amstutz: New Leadership – outlines of a new profile
- Anika Thym: New masculinity norms question the hegemony of the economic over the private sphere
- Hanna Haag: New Work – New Care? Fathers in postpandemic academia
WS 8: New perspectives on care work (chair: Gesine Fuchs, room 254)
- Justyna Tomczyk: Women's household labor in Poland - why isn't it valued? A new take on an old problem
- Émilie Giguère, Jade Avoine, Mireille Sirois-Gagné: Is the career development of service sector employees marked by gender issues? The contribution of a research conducted in the context of digital transformation.
- Romina Cutuli, Débora Garazi and Inés Pérez: Paid Home Care Services. Crisis and prospectives in Postpandemic Argentina
Panel session: The future of gender-just work: new models and solutions towards gender justice (chair: Lucia Lanfranconi, Auditorium)
- Ada Reichhart: Feminist utopias at work: the example of a women-run worker cooperative
- Friedericke Hardering: "New Green Work X Social Innovation for the Working World in the Digital Age"
Fishbowl discussion: New work, new solutions (moderation: Gesine Fuchs and Lucia Lanfranconi, Auditorium)
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