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The COVID-19 pandemic prompted individuals to devise new temporal strategies in various spheres of their lives as a result of the spatial regulations imposed during the first lockdown. We apply Lisa Suckert's theoretical model of 'the capitalist time regime' in the analysis of 68 interviews with parents of schoolchildren in seven European countries conducted during the first COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020. We examine actors' agency and capability to govern time during the pandemic and the extent to which disruption enables subversion of the temporal regime and its five features: measurement and commodification of time, temporal expansionism, acceleration, appropriation of the future, with the special emphasis on unequal temporal autonomy of actors. Expanding on Dale Southerton's analysis of the role of gender in temporal autonomy, we also look at the participants' positions at the intersections of gender, age of children, profession, economic situation, and the use of the welfare system. Finally, we contextualise participants' creative challenges to the unequal temporal autonomy within Barbara Hobson's approach to capabilities and achievements. The results show that participants creatively negotiated time under lockdown spatial conditions, thus producing new socio-temporal conditions that suited them and their families. We identified shift work in family arrangements, time for oneself and increased efficiency due to enhanced autonomy as the key creative subversive strategies addressing unequal temporal autonomy of actors with regard to gender and also other axes of disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on dual-career academic couples, how they combine careers and parenthood and how their strategies translate into employment pathways of researchers, and especially women researchers. Based on sixteen in-depth interviews with dual-career academic couples, the analysis identified two types of partnerships which differed in terms of how they combined work and parenthood and how they harmonized his and her career: "traditional couples" and "egalitarian couples". While most previous research on dual-career couples analyses the individual level, this investigation considers the couple as a point of departure. The analysis is framed by the linked-lives approach, which studies partners' work paths as mutually interrelated. The analysis shows that in dual-career academic couples, women's careers are often perceived to be secondary to men's careers, but there were differences between women who built their careers before 1989 and contemporary young women researchers. It is argued that gender ideologies have different effects depending on the institutional conditions in which the ideologies are enacted. It is suggested that the paper contributes an important dimension to explanations of the gap in the position of men and women in the academic labour market.

The paper asks how parenting desires are associated with the construction of sexual identity and what factors most influence whether gays/ lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals declaring same-sex attraction want to have (more) children. The subject has been explored mainly in the Western liberal and gay-family-friendly legislation and social environment so far. Our study was conducted in the Czech Republic, a CEE country where sexual minorities face strong legal and social barriers to non-heterosexual parenthood. In an online survey (N = 882) conducted in 2019 among self-identified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual people with same-sex attraction, we found a considerable gap in parenting desires by sexual identity. Parenting desires are weaker among homosexuals, especially men, while bisexuals are closer to heterosexuals in their parenting desires. Our research suggests that in the context of discussions of parenthood Czech women are unwilling to identify as lesbians and opt instead to claim a different sexual identity. Our findings indicate that the structural barriers to parenthood thus play a much more important role than the overall liberal-minded atmosphere in the Czech Republic. [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]

Gender pay gap, parenthood and work precarity. The paper focuses on how parenthood (measured by the number of children) contributes to the high level of gender pay gap (GPG) in the Czech Republic and how is it shaped by precarious work contracts. The analysis is based on a questionnaire survey of a representative sample of 1119 respondents aged 20 to 55 years. Sequential testing of regression models proved that number of children affects significantly the size of a GPG, even after controlling for several factors. The interaction between gender and the number of children explains 22% of the total GPG for hourly wages and 30% of the total GPG for monthly wages. Parenthood plays a key role, especially among precarious workers, where it explains about 49% of the total GPG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the intersection between the gender culture and the neoliberal transformation of research and academia. It focuses on the impact of the transformation on the early-career women academic researchers in the Czech Republic (CR). It examines a sample of women academics to see how their career paths unfold over time and identify the mechanisms, factors, and barriers that affect their academic careers in the early stages. The article looks at 14 excellent early-career women academics from different domains based on two interviews repeated after 7 years and investigates the trajectory of their academic paths from the longitudinal perspective. The combination of a highly conservative gender culture, the neoliberal reforms introduced in the field of research and academia over the past decade, and the resistance to promoting gender equality measures make the CR an informative case to study. I argue that the gender culture of the CR and Czech research and academic institutions and the conditions for work-life balance combine with the neoliberal reforms to have a very negative impact on the early stage of women's academic careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards women in politics and gender culture in general have implications for the status of women in politics and their descriptive representation. In the paper we ask what attitudes people have in the Czech Republic towards women in politics and their descriptive representation, how these attitudes have changed across time, and what factors are associated with these changes. We draw mainly on a survey carried out in 2014, and we compare its data with survey data collected in 2006. The analysis indicates that people nowadays seem to be more tolerant of the low representation of women in politics and are less supportive of using active measures to promote women in politics than they were in the past. The analysis also shows that the decline in support for women in politics is by far the most significant among men, especially men with low education and men who assess the living standard of their household as poor. The paper further deals with the possible sources of this shift in attitudes and suggest a hypothesis and topics for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper asks in what ways students in Czech higher education cope with sexual harassment and what strategies they choose to deal with it. It builds on a qualitative study of a higher education institution in Prague. The study reveals that student's narratives are organized on two planes between which there is a clear discrepancy: on the "hypothetical" plane external strategies of open resistance against sexual harassment predominate; on the second plane involving students' narratives about dealing with real situations of harassment or deeper considerations of hypothetical cases of harassment, scepticism prevails toward these strategies. In this case internal strategies predominate, together with avoiding the harasser. Active resistance against harassment and challenge to the status quo through coping strategies for sexual harassment are limited by two types of "ideational" and "material". On the ideational level students often downplay their experience, express fears of secondary victimization and being accused of making false accusations; these responses are tied to a severe power imbalance. On the "material level" students report lacking information about the issue and distrust in school management. [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]

Data on divorces are gathered by the Czech Statistical Office and thus widely accessible and well known, but much less information is available about the stability of unmarried cohabitations. This paper focuses on the differences between marriage and unmarried cohabitations in terms of their stability. The authors study the impact of various factors on the stability of marriages and unmarried cohabitations taking into account the different socio-demographic indicators. To explain this phenomenon they use various theoretical approaches emphasizing different factors of partnership instability (from socializing factors to premarital cohabitation, values, education and gender, to factors based on the theory of rational choice). The analysis identified factors that operate in the same manner within both marriages and unmarried cohabitations (e.g. children in the partnership, experience with the previous partnership break-ups) as well as factors that play a different role in the stability of marriages and unmarried cohabitations (e.g. education, duration of partnership, generation). The paper is based on quantitative data from the survey 'Life -course 2010', which included 4010 respondents. The authors used the event history approach in their analysis which enabled them to track the dependences of the variables in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of sexual harassment at universities has been explored in western and mainly American sociology since the mid -1970s. Since then, anti -harassment policies and procedures (including follow -up victim care) have been introduced at most Anglo -Saxon universities designing how to deal with 'harassers' and 'victims'. In the Czech Republic, empirical research on this issue and on university anti -harassment policies is still lacking. The aim of this article is to introduce the methods and procedures employed at Anglo -American universities in an effort to tackle sexual harassment. The experiences of these academic institutions represent an indispensable source of information and inspiration for the Czech higher education environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]