Placing women? How locality shapes women’s opportunities for reconciling work and care

Abstract

Reconciling work and care is one of the key questions of social policy in contemporary societies. In this thesis, the question of work-care reconciliation is examined from a local perspective. This study analyses the role of locality in how women combine work and care in the city of Jyväskylä, Finland. The theoretical background of this research is situated at the interface of feminist welfare state and social policy research and feminist human geography. To study the research question, a case study approach is applied in this thesis. This study draws from different data sets and methodological approaches. Articles I and II use local childcare policy documents and local care strategies as their data. Articles III and IV are based on four focus group interviews with working mothers and working carers. Methodologically, this study makes different uses of a mix of qualitative methods, aiming to highlight different facets of the research question. The results of this study show that local developments in both childcare and care for older people have moved towards increasing marketisation of services, as well as placing greater responsibility on individuals and families. These developments can be seen as promoting implicit genderising, which does not explicitly aim to reinforce separate gender roles but often ends up supporting the existence of traditional gender roles. In terms of a women-friendly welfare state, these developments risk reinforcing the genderedness of care and deepening the divisions among women. In the focus groups, a strong consensus and shared understanding was often reached regarding the ‘moral’ or ‘right thing to do’ in a given situation in terms of care. These understandings can be seen as reflecting not only the inner feelings and states of the interviewees, but also broader cultural ideals regarding care, and expectations of care which are culturally coded as feminine. However, gender was rarely explicitly mentioned in the interviewees’ accounts, and was largely absent from local policy documents as well. This silence regarding gender, and the focus on the individual, can make gendered structures invisible, and thus hinder development towards equality at the local level. Keywords: care, gender, local social policy, welfare state