Éva Fodor

Family policies and gender in Hungary, Poland, and Romania

Abstract This paper discusses changes and new directions in the gendered nature of the welfare state in three post-state socialist societies: Hungary, Poland and Romania. Relying on an analysis of laws and regulations passed after 1989 concerning child care, maternity and parental leave, family support, unemployment and labor market policies, retirement and abortion laws, the authors identify the differences and the similarities among the three countries, pointing out not only their status in 2001, but also their trajectory, the dynamics and timing of their change. The authors argue that there are essential differences between the three countries in terms of women’s relationship to the welfare state. They also specify some of the key historical and social variables which might explain variation across countries.

Racial differences in occupational status and income in South Africa, 1880 and 1881

Using data on employed men from the 1980 and 1991 South African Censuses, we analyze the determinants of occupational status and income. Whites are found to have much higher occupational status, and especially income, than members of other racial groups. Most of the racial differentials in occupational status can be explained by racial differences in the personal assets that determine occupational attainment (especially education), but only a much smaller fraction of the White/non-White income differential can be so explained. Despite a modest reduction between 1980 and 1991 in the role of race in socioeconomic attainment, the overall picture shows more stability than change.

Public Maternalism Goes to Market Recruitment, Hiring, and Promotion in Postsocialist Hungary

Under what conditions do motherhood penalties emerge in countries undergoing transition from state socialism to capitalism? This analysis identifies the ways managers in global financial firms employ gendered assumptions in constructing and implementing labor practices among highly skilled professional workers in Hungary. Relying on 33 in-depth interviews with employers as well as interviews with headhunting firms, labor and employment lawyers, and analysis of antidiscrimination cases brought before Hungary’s Equal Treatment Authority between 2004 and 2008, we identify several strategies global employers use to shed, demote, and marginalize professional mothers. By demonstrating the salience of motherhood as a status characteristic in the postsocialist labor market, our work contributes to existing scholarship on motherhood penalties. Our work also extends this scholarship by showing how the salience of motherhood is strongly conditioned by state-level arrangements that shape the opportunity context in which employers design and carry out employment practices.

A Different Type of Gender Gap: How Women and Men Experience Poverty

While recent surveys do not find that poverty is feminized in post-communist Hungary, this project explores gender differences in the experience of destitution. Drawing on a content analysis of in-depth interviews in twentyseven very low-income households, the author exposes the particularly gendered daily practice of poverty in Hungarian families. The author argues that one of the major gender differences in the experience of poverty is that men often find themselves in a gender role crisis when they are too poor to function as successful breadwinners. Women, on the other hand, tend to feel their roles as caretakers intensified and thus avoid a conflict with (newly) hegemonic ideals of femininity. As a response, poor marriedcouple families devise ways in which they try to alleviate mens gender shame. The goal of the article is to identify four such strategies, which are used by poor couples to devise livable alternatives to hegemonic gender roles.

The State Socialist Emancipation Project: Gender Inequality in Workplace Authority in Hungary and Austria

C ommunist revolutionaries set out to unite not only the proletariat but also the housewives of the world. While admittedly secondary in importance to the abolition of class-based inequalities, the emancipation project targeting women featured significantly on the agenda of Eastern European Communist Party ideologues. In their understanding, women’s emancipation centered on the political and economic imperative of integrating the female population into paid work and into positions of state socialist authority (Molyneux 1982; Einhorn 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000b). Early feminist scholars, among them Simone de Beauvoir, expressed enthusiasm for the radical changes introduced by the Communist Party in Russia and elsewhere, but most recent scholarship on gender emphasizes the shortcomings of the emancipation project (Wolchik and Meyer 1985; Funk and Mueller 1993; Corrin 1994). How successful was the communist political campaign to liberate women if we accept its obviously narrow self-definition? Did women’s emancipation in state socialist societies change the degree of, and, more importantly, did it alter the mechanisms of male domination? What, if any, are its long-term consequences for women’s position in the labor market after the fall of the state socialist regimes? The goal of this article is to evaluate the success of the state socialist women’s emancipation project through comparison with the achievements of a comparable capitalist society. I contrast state socialist Hungary and capitalist Austria, two countries that followed similar trajectories until the

Making the ‘reserve army’ invisible: Lengthy parental leave and women’s economic marginalisation in Hungary

Generous parental leave policies are popular in a number of countries around the world and are usually seen as a sign of the ‘family friendliness’ of the state. Relying on in-depth interviews with mothers on parental leave in Hungary, the authors argue that the context in which the policies are implemented should be examined when evaluating their consequences. In semi-peripheral, resource-poor Hungary lengthy parental leave policies turn women into an invisible ‘reserve army of labourers’. While their employment is mostly unaccounted for in aggregate statistics, and political discourse suggests that their ‘job’ is to look after children, nevertheless many women do end up doing some work for wages during the almost five years they spend on parental leave. However, given the rigidity of the labour market and rampant discrimination against mothers with small children, their chances of obtaining formal employment are small. They therefore resort to doing ad hoc, temporary, informal work, which is often underpaid and well below their qualifications. Thus generous family policies do not necessarily indicate the ‘women friendliness’ of the state and may not lead to the relatively favourable trade-off between stable public sector work and lower wages suggested recently by comparative researchers. Instead, in this specific context, which combines legacies of state socialism, a backlash against women’s emancipation before 1990 and a peripheral, vulnerable labour market, familialist policies are associated with a high degree of marginalisation for women with small children in which the state is at best complicit, at worst, an active agent.

Gender Differences in Quality of Life

Despite decades of policy promoting emancipation, gender differences still constitute a major social problem in Europe. In terms of social inequality and quality of life, women run a higher risk than men of being among the disadvantaged groups (Padavic and Reskin, 2002; EC, 2008). Comparable data from the UNECE’s Gender Statistics Database show that women in each of the eight countries in this research project have a smaller chance of being economically active and economically independent than men; they are also at a higher risk of unemployment, make less money when they do have jobs, are more often among the ‘working poor’ and have less institutional power than men in the workplace. Single mothers run a particularly high risk of poverty (Ypei, 2009). Moreover, due in part to persistent financial hardship, they also run a higher risk of depression (Brown and Moran, 1997), a dramatic expression of a lack of quality of life.

Managing Motherhood: Job Context and Employer Bias:

How does job context influence employers’ views of mothers as workers? Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews with employers in the finance and business service sectors of Hungary, the authors find that finance employers rely on a variety of strategies aimed at excluding mothers from entry-level professional jobs, while business services employers invest significant resources aimed at recruiting and accommodating mothers. To explain this variation, the authors suggest that employers’ views of mothers are dependent on their perception of skill requirements and knowledge/skill dynamism.

“An Ebbing Tide Lowers All Boats”: How the Great Recession of 2008 Affected Men and Women in Central and Eastern Europe

In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labor force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than mens in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labor force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.

Vorzeige-Parlamentarierinnen und Kleinstadt-Bürgermeisterinnen: die Partizipation von Frauen in der ungarischen Politik seit 1990

Im Jahre 1988 sasen in der ungarischen Abgeordnetenversammlung mehr Frauen als in den Parlamenten der meisten anderen europaischen Lander. Zehn Jahre spater lasst sich jedoch das genaue Gegenteil feststellen. Verglichen mit den Staaten Europas ist die Unterreprasentation von Frauen in der ungarischen Politik ohnegleichen. Einem zufalligen Beobachter konnte dies vorkommen wie eine Wende um 180 Grad. Aber im Grunde genommen hat sich gar nicht viel verandert.