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This article examines how experience with precarious work influences the notions of control and empowerment among female migrant workers. Instead of focusing on migrant workers as victims of a continuous chain of precarious employment, the article aims to enrich the current knowledge by focusing on the complexity of elements involved in subjective assessments of agency. Based on research of Ukrainian female migrants, we show how precarious jobs can be perceived as enabling, allowing women more control over their lives. To understand these perceptions of agency, we show how important it is to focus on the embeddedness of migrants' reflective choices in their life trajectories. In the context of migration, this implies a shift in understanding from one in which migrants compare their experience (of labour or gender structures) between country of origin and country of destination towards a more nuanced approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the interplay between policymakers and scientists in developing the Family Policy Plan for the Czech Republic in 2017. As former members of the government commission that developed the plan, we base the article on participatory observation. When we joined the commission, a 'window of opportunity' had opened as the country for the first time ever had feminist‐friendly minister and vice‐minister of labour and social affairs. We explain why due to the inter‐ and intra‐party dynamics, the parental leave reform to introduce 'daddy months' failed. We argue an adversarial subsystem existed in that the three coalition partners disagreed on the reform. According to Ingold and Gschwend (2014), under such circumstances, scientists play a strategic role, especially if there is unity among them. However, although there was basic unity among the scientists in the commission, the coalition partners at the governing level were able to block or water down the reform proposal under the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article ties in with the scholarship on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender equality. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with parents of children under 12, we examine the processes that led to the increase or dismantling of the gender division of labour in families during the first nationwide lockdown. Using the concepts of path dependency and 'doing' and 'undoing' gender, we explain the strategies couples with children used to adapt to the enormous increase in reproductive work in the family during lockdown. 'Doing gender' practices witnessed during lockdown included an acceptance of the increased care work as the responsibility of women, ensuring 'a room of one's own' only for men, and separating the public and private sphere only for men. Practices that led to 'undoing gender' involved mainly the explicit negotiation between partners of the division of labour during the lockdown and the organisation of reproductive work in 'shifts'. The division of labour within a couple before the pandemic proved to be crucial for what strategy they chose to adapt to the lockdown. According to our findings, extending the egalitarian division of labour has led to greater satisfaction among partners and indicates greater societal resilience to crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, the case of family policy reform in the Czech Republic (Saxonberg, Formanková & Hasková, 2023) shows the need to modify these claims. As Sedlacko & Staronová (2023) argue, Slovak administrators were not interested in knowing the results of scientific studies and the same was true in the case of the Czech commission on family policy reform. Do governments base their decisions on policies according to expert knowledge and scientific evidence?. [Extracted from the article]

While the focus on emotions has been associated with the rise of psychosocial welfare and has promised a gateway to accommodate individually diversified needs of citizens in policies, the article shows that the role of emotions needs to be better understood. Highlighting emotions can serve both to empower and to patronize those who experience them. Referring to emotions can thus strengthen hierarchies and downplay individual requests to initiate a change. The analysis of professional discourses on birth care in Czechia shows the value of contextualising emotions. While midwifery discourses apply the emotional context of birth to support women in their specific birth choices, medical discourses use the emotional context to patronize them and to limit their requirements. As a result, policy demands are seen as illegitimate when coming from midwives, who want to see women's choices more respected in care. We analyse this dynamic through intimacy. As a conceptual framework used in sociology of care, 'intimacy' ties individual emotional experiences to collective discourses on care, the body and related feelings. Viewing professional discourses on birth care through intimacy reveals the role of emotions in the collective recognition of the personal struggle for the right to give birth in conditions that respect bodily and emotional integrity, which informs how we think of the role of emotions in policies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 14 biographical-narrative interviews, using an intersectional approach to examine multiple discrimination based on age, gender, and ethnicity, we analyse the subjective reflections of young Vietnamese migrants from the second and the 1.5 generation on their integration into the Czech labour market. We analyse ethnicity and gender as socially constructed identities in the specific context of the labour market, school, and family. Important advantages that appear in the biographies of young Vietnamese migrant women and men influencing their positions in the labour market are their level of education, their knowledge of Czech and Vietnamese culture and language, and specific work experience. Focusing on potential discrimination and marginalisation, we can say that the young Vietnamese we interviewed often move between two identities - Czech and Vietnamese - to overcome potential disadvantages. Due to a high level of acculturation, they more frequently identify themselves with the Czech majority. At the same time, they derive benefits from the social and cultural capital of being a member of the Vietnamese minority. On the other hand, this advantage can inverse into disadvantage and young Vietnamese could fall into the trap of only occupying work positions that relate to their ethnic origin. For the reasons mentioned above, the Vietnamese in our study seek to acquire the highest possible cultural capital - the highest possible education and position in a prestigious profession, regardless of gender - as their strategy for overcoming potential disadvantage and avoiding the trap of 'migrant' labour-market niches their parents occupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersectional perspective represents, in Czech sociology, an untapped opportunity to examine the interaction between the different lines of inequality in the process of constantly changing social structure. This article aims to enrich current Czech sociological research in two ways. Firstly, it analyses and describes the impacts of the economic crisis on labour market relations in the Czech Republic. Secondly, it applies the intersectional perspective in a quantitative analysis of structural inequalities. In this perspective, we analyse the changing structure of the labour market between 2008 and 2012 at the intersection of gender, class (education), age and parenthood, using statistical indicators. Moreover, we use event -history analysis to capture the risk of job loss in the first phase of the crisis (2008-2010). Our analysis shows that the economic crisis deepened existing inequalities in the labour market, further differentiated female labour market prospects by educational attainment, especially in interaction with parenthood, and also rapidly deteriorated the labour market situation of men with low education, including fathers of small children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how structural changes in Czech society brought about by the transition from the centrally planned state-socialist regime towards market-based capitalism, which impacts individual opportunities and choices. The intersectional approach and concept of social capital allows us to interpret employment trajectories of women in the Czech Republic in its historical as well as biographical contexts. This paper addresses the underdevelopment of intersectional analysis of the dynamically changing women's position in post-socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe. Eva is representative of women with low education, and by analyzing her biography, we interpret the changing intersection of class and gender in post-socialist Czech society. The state-socialist experiment with women's emancipation solely through their participation in paid work has failed and ever since women's emancipation or gender equality has never been a political priority. The turn to capitalism after 1989 intensified re-traditionalization trends, making it difficult to combine work and care. Not only did Eva deal in her working strategies with the deterioration of the status of low-educated women in changing class relations in post-socialist society although she remained childless, she also encountered maternity discrimination and the relative impossibility to combine paid work with care (for a family member). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the biographies of women at the intersection of class and gender in the Czech Republic. With the transition towards a market-based economy and a decrease in the symbolic capital of workers in the blue-collar and service fields, and in the context of a familialist social policy and a labour market that discourages a combination of paid employment and care responsibilities, women with low education find themselves in the secondary labour market and exposed to gender discrimination. We illustrate how an intersectional approach (Brah - Phoenix 2004) can be used in sociology to analyze the ways in which class, gender and other social categories, such as care responsibility, interact and mutually constitute each other in the lives of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the problem of growing uncertainties in the Czech labour market over the past 20 years with regard to the specific conditions of unskilled women struggling to integrate their paid work and unpaid work. The economic uncertainties and growing levels of global competition in production increase pressure for a transformation and flexibilisation of workforce. Actors occupying marginalised positions in the labour market tend to have lower levels of social capital and lower levels of work experience and education. At the same time, these people, including mothers caring for young children, find it difficult to cope with the increasing pressure for productivity and flexibility. The socioeconomic marginalisation of unskilled mothers is further strengthened by measures of the state's social policy. The analysis at hand is based on three biographic interviews on the work trajectories of women whose highest level of education is vocational or lower. A biographic approach makes it possible to analyse the impact of structural and institutional conditions and social and cultural processes on the work and life trajectories of respondents. Their testimonies reveal the mechanisms of gender discrimination, social exclusion and subordination that unskilled mothers have to face in their personal lives and careers, and the strategies and resources they employ in order to cope with their situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship may be associated with independence and profit, but it may also be a precarious type of employment. Self-employment is often a strategy for those groups of workers who face marginalisation and disadvantages on the labour market, such as mothers of young children or migrants. In this paper we use an intersectional approach and draw on the theory of precarity to analyse how Czech and Ukrainian entrepreneurs with small children (in the Czech Republic) describe and perceive precarity in self-employment. Our analysis shows that entrepreneurship is a form of precarious work, especially for mothers of young children. Their social position, which forms on the intersection of gender, caring commitments, and/or migration status, serves to constrain or allow certain career choices. While the main source of disadvantage for Czech entrepreneurs is the intersection of gender and caring commitments (e.g. in work-life balance), the social position of Ukrainian entrepreneurs (in the Czech Republic) is much more precarious because of their status as migrants (e.g. their low income from business is further reduced by the cost of private insurance, the paying of remittances, or the repayment of debts for migrating to the Czech Republic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]