Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
This paper deals with methodological issues about how to compare and analyze care policies in relation to gender equality aims. The analysis of the normative assumptions about gender roles and the social organization of care has been the object of a vast amount of feminist scholarship. Parallel to mainstream welfare analysis, these studies have developed around the construction of regime typologies and the use of concepts such as that of defamilialisation to understand commonalities and differences across a limited number of countries. More recently, the validity of this approach has been questioned by scholars emphasizing that the regime approach is biased in favour of policy coherence, while defamilialisation is inadeguate to assess gender equality in care policies. By using fuzzy set ideal type analysis to investigate care policies (childcare and parental leave) in 30 European countries, this paper demonstrates that there are a number of advantages in the use of the configurational method to analyze gender equality in care policies. First, such an approach directly confronts the complexity and multidimensionality of such policies by making sense of the ways in which different aspects combine. Second, it deals explicitly with the hybrid nature of some policies and the existence of sub-types within certain models. Third, it clearly distinguishes between real types and ideal types, thus, forcing us to us to consider the theoretical implications and empirical consequences of our normative ideals.
