What Mothers Do: Motherhood as a Resource for Negotiating Sick-Leave Legitimacy in Swedish Sickness Insurance Interactions

Abstract

Sick leave in the Nordic countries is a gendered issue. Alongside other explanations, women’s higher levels of sick leave have been linked to their far-reaching family responsibilities. Meanwhile, studies have shown how such responsibilities induce questioning of the legitimacy of sick leave, indicating that normative aspects linking these categories cannot solely be approached in terms of causal explanations. The current study suggests an alternative way of studying this relationship, approaching motherhood as something being “done” in situated ways, to particular ends; a resource for interaction. By analysing naturally occurring interactions—meetings held by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency—the study renders visible the collaborative production of sick leave as a gendered matter, and motherhood as part of the negotiation of sickness insurance. The analysis shows the meaning and import of motherhood for sick leave to be a live issue for participants, drawing attention to how these categories are neither culturally predefined, nor dispositional, but flexibly assembled for certain purposes. Motherhood functions as a resource in two ways: (1) displaying restricted ability to care for children supports claims of impairment; (2) invoking motherhood works to account for slow or inactive rehabilitation. However, occasioning motherhood in the examined context is also risky: (3) displaying extensive mothering may be treated as indicating low commitment to rehabilitation, and (4) displaying limited mothering may be taken as indicating unfitness as a parent.

Keywords:

• Motherhood
• gender
• institutional talk
• sickness insurance
• sick leave

Notes

1. Of the other meetings, two involved sick-listed men without small children. A comparison with invocations of fatherhood is therefore not possible. In the remaining three meetings with sick-listed women, participants oriented to motherhood in one, but not as frequently as in the two meetings examined in this paper; however, the analysis of those instances are in line with the analysis presented here. The other two women did not have small children and did not orient to motherhood.

2. As will be seen in the data excerpts, none of the participants indicates any expectation that either of these men will share the responsibility for taking care of the child. It is possible that this has to do with SL’s detailed accounts of their respective illnesses (in the displayed excerpts and at other times), the general lack of a relationship with the father, and the way in which she presents her new relationship as very recent.