Work-family justice – meanings and possibilities: introduction to the work and family researchers network special issue

ABSTRACT

Work-family justice is a key organizing concept centering intellectual and policy work that calls attention to tensions and challenges in work and family integration and highlights key solutions. This special issue extends knowledge about structural, cultural, historical, and political factors that inform the range of diverse work-family complexities. It presents building blocks to sustain healthier work and family lives that are central to the ideas of work-family justice. In this introductory article, we discuss changes, issues and tensions in the realms of work and family, and we advocate for assessing the intersection of work-family through a global lens. We build upon earlier rigorous scholarship ascertaining the best supports for a healthy and fulfilled workforce and populace, which can advance equality and sustain and improve wellbeing. The special issue introduction also highlights exceptional individual research studies, that – as a whole – elevate work-family scholarship and the solutions that can enhance work-family justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-family
• justice
• inequalities
• social context
• policy
• Global North and Global South

Introduction: work-family justice – meanings and possibilities

As we rethink paid and unpaid work in a changing world, how will it become more sustainably equitable? How will individuals in diverse family forms fare and what will government and workplace policies that support individuals and communities look like? We are delighted that our June 2022 Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) conference in New York City, with the theme of ‘Work-Family Justice: Practices, Partnerships and Possibilities,’ was rich with generative sessions, including Presidential and thematic panels featuring leading scholars and practitioners who interrogated the diverse meanings of work-family justice as well as how it could be practically achieved ‘on the ground.’ An important component of this work is attention to assessing how those embedded in more marginalized positions – based on socioeconomic class, racialized identities, gender, location in colonized nations, or other statuses – are disadvantaged within the work-life intersection and how structures can become more equitable for all.

The world of work, and its intersection with our family lives, is at a major crossroads. We have witnessed remarkable challenges and changes over the past few years, in part spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic – in the economy and housing (e.g. Colomb & Gallent, 2022), technology (e.g. Ollier-Malaterre, 2024), care systems (e.g. World Health Organization, 2020), and of course, the key realms of work and family themselves (Borg et al., 2020; Chung et al., 2022). Crucial questions about an equitable future of paid work and care remain. As we rethink work, how will we ensure it is equitable (Chung et al., 2022)? How do we expand plural understandings of work (Jaga & Mabaso, 2023)? How will societies forge the best conditions for essential workers (Reid et al., 2021)? What is the future of remote work, the hybrid office, and the four-day work week (e.g. Lewis et al., 2023), and how will it relate to equality? How can work be flexible for all kinds of workers (Chung, 2022)? What kinds of care and other supports will governments and workplaces step up to provide (World Health Organization, 2020)? As work-family scholars and leaders, we are on the front line, observing changes and creating knowledge about what matters at the intersection of these fundamental pillars of people’s lives – work and family.

The values of justice and equity at the work-family interface are central to quality of life and civil society and we are interested in possibilities for change. Work-family justice (Collins, 2019) involves making space for everyone to have the opportunities to work and to care in ways that are supported by businesses, government, and their respective policies. In the 2020s, work-family justice ideals have deepened as we recognized and made visible the injustices which thwart individuals and societies. These injustices emerge from a lack of supports or inequitable supports from governments and businesses for the central institution of family (Brinton & Oh, 2019).

In this introduction to the special issue, we articulate key changes in the worlds of work and family, focusing on current inequities, and we align the goals of work-family justice to representing voices more equitably from the Global South. Through exploring the recent debates and developments in these areas, we provide the context in which our special issue articles’ contributions can be read. Additionally, we highlight some emerging issues that are needed in the field of work-family research for us to better meet the goals of work-family justice.

Changes in the world of work – and work-family justice

There are many factors to consider when thinking about the world of work and the potential changes we expect relevant to work-family justice issues. Developments in the world of work are attributed to the rise in automation and the advancement of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and with it, the removal of the demands for certain skills and jobs for workers in the production process (Autor, 2015). Additionally, neoliberal economic policies are contributing to an alarming rise in precarity at work relating to job insecurity – namely with temporary contracts and bogus self-employment contracts in platform work such as Deliveroo, Uber, and others (Wood et al., 2019). We see more jobs that do not provide workers security of ample hours at the job, and consequently, income security (Farina et al., 2020; Kamerāde & Richardson, 2018). And while some jobs provide sufficient hours, managers may change the shifts quickly and flexibly according to fast-paced changes of consumer demands detected with algorithmic calculations, without consulting workers, effectively removing any control or practicability for workers (Wood et al., 2019). Such unpredictable schedules clash with family and private time schedules and demands, putting severe pressures on families and workers. These are all important factors we can consider when assessing the world of work, all with significant impact on work-family justice, especially when considering its impact on marginalized workers based on their gender, race, socio-economic class, parental and migration status among others.

In addition to these changes, there are three emerging shifts within the world of work that are of paramount importance to how we think about work-family justice in the future, particularly when rethinking the nature of economic participation in the formal economy. These shifts have the potential to radically change the way we think about work and gender relations in the future (Chung et al., 2021; Risman & Mooi-Reci, 2021; Schieman et al., 2022; Stevano et al., 2021). First is the steep rise in homeworking and hybrid working practices we observe across the world. Second is the change in the perception of essential work, specifically about the notion of care. And finally, closely related to these two, is the rise in the popularity of the four-day-week and other modes of reduction of the notion of full-time work.

Homeworking

We have seen an unprecedented increase in people working from home. Pre-pandemic times, very few workers were working from home on a regular basis. These numbers rose to close to half the working population working most days at home during the pandemic, and recently stabilizing to around a third of the population working some days at home – although there are variations across occupations and countries (Barrero et al., 2021; Eurofound, 2022). Homeworking can potentially provide workers better work-life balance and work-family integration and opportunities for workers to better engage in paid employment. This is evidenced for mothers (Chung & Van der Horst, 2018; Fuller & Hirsh, 2018), workers with informal care responsibilities and disabled workers (Clark, 2000; Taylor et al., 2022). Recent studies have also found that homeworking has allowed marginalized workers, such as Black and other ethnic minority workers, and LGBTQ+ workers, a safer environment where they have to deal with fewer issues of racism and (micro-) aggressions at work (Future Form, 2022). Marginalized workers are thus better able to partake in the labor market and be more engaged at work.

However, the rise of homeworking can potentially result in negative outcomes for work-family justice. Despite the changes in the general perceptions around flexible working over the pandemic, negative perceptions about homeworkers’ commitment, productivity, and motivation still exist (Crush, 2022). This negative view is partly due to the persistence of the ideal worker norm, where workers being able to enhance their work-life balance through homeworking violates the image of the ideal worker who should have no other responsibility outside of work (Blair-Loy, 2009; Williams et al., 2013). Such stigmatized views against home workers may especially work against marginalized workers, such as mothers and ethnic minorities, as managers and co-workers may already have biases against these workers’ work capacity and abilities (Gray, 2019). If marginalized workers are indeed more likely to be stigmatized for homeworking, this may end up exacerbating existing labor market inequality patterns. Homeworking can also exacerbate traditional gender roles (Chung & Van der Lippe, 2020). Women may (feel pressured to) do more housework and childcare when working from home to adhere to social norms (Chung & Van der Lippe, 2020; Obioma et al., 2022; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Men may (feel pressured to) carry out more paid work (Chung, 2022) partly to overcome the flexibility stigma and to adhere to their breadwinner roles (Rudman & Mescher, 2013). Having said that, increased involvement of homeworking fathers in childcare and housework was observed during the pandemic (Chung et al., 2021; Petts et al., 2023). This may be due to the sheer increase in childcare demands during this time or possibly due to the decline in stigmatized views against flexible workers during the pandemic. This signifies the potential for homeworking to enhance a more equal division of domestic work when homeworking is normalized (see also, Munsch et al., 2014).

Care as essential work

The pandemic potentially enabled a revaluation of care work as ‘essential work.’ The importance of care work in our societies was highlighted as many were in ‘the frontline in the war against COVID-19’ in hospital and social care settings. This revaluation of care work – both paid and unpaid – was based on the realization of the population that care work is essential for the functioning of society (Stevano et al., 2021). Having to carry out care work during the pandemic lockdown, as formal support networks were closed, also may have shifted views about the ‘low-skilled’ nature of care work, although this was not necessarily true in all countries. Revaluation of care work is especially important for work-family justice. The devaluation of work carried out in female-dominated sectors and occupations (Anker, 1997), and the devaluation of women’s contribution in organizations (Acker, 1990), largely stem from societal devaluing of care work. The devaluation of care work also contributes to persistent unequal divisions of labor in households, where the bulk of care and household responsibility remains on women (Eurofound, 2022; Wishart et al., 2019) as men resist taking part in low-value domestic activities. The revaluation of care work is also important for addressing inequalities at work for ethnic minority and migrant workers. Migrant and ethnic minority workers have historically been those who carried out low-waged, low-valued care work (Hochschild, 2003). They may benefit more when care work is renumerated according to the great societal value it provides to the care receiver as well as their family members.

Challenging notions of full-time work

The final trend in how we think about work-family justice in the future is resistance against the work-centric society. Especially since the pandemic, there has been a proliferation of trends such as the great resignation, quiet (or even loud) quitting, the lying down movement, anti-work, and lazy-girl jobs, often proclaimed through social media. Such trends reflect workers feeling a need to push back against the hustle culture of work devotion, and neoliberal policies (Bal & Dóci, 2018). The rise of flexible working and digital technologies has resulted in workers working all the time and everywhere (Chung, 2022). Work has become even more greedy, demanding longer working hours, with increased workload and intensity – resulting in high levels of burn out across the population (Murray, 2020). For example, up to 88% of workers in the United Kingdom (UK) experienced burnout recently¹ costing the economy £ 28 billion yearly,² with similar patterns observed in other countries like the United States (US) (Pfeffer, 2018). Such rise in burnout among workers can partially explain the recent popularity of the four-day-week, where the full-time working norm is moved from a 40+ hour to a 32-hour/four-day-week, without a reduction of salaries. There have been trials across the world such as the UK, Spain, and other places with positive results (Lewis et al., 2023). The trials show that the core work in organizations can be done in less time, with improved productivity (Lewis et al., 2023; Carrell, 2023). The four-day-week questions the existing notion of ‘the ideal worker’ (Williams, 1999). As discussed above, the ideal worker norm is heavily situated in patriarchal gender roles. Male workers are assumed to have no other responsibilities outside of work and should devote themselves to work only, based on the assumption that the (female) partner will be carrying out all reproductive work (Acker, 1990). The four-day-week then is in line with the understanding that gender roles have changed, and with it, the work-family demands of workers. Standard workers now have responsibilities outside of work. The four-day-week questions the notion that work-life balance is at odds with productivity, something which is deeply engrained in many organizations and societies around the world. Its proponents understand that a better work-family integration helps to improve productivity at work and that supporting workers’ demands outside of work is pivotal to improve productivity within organizations (Kelly et al., 2014). A four-day workweek is, however, not without problems, as studies have shown that when implemented at the company level, women may end up working shorter hours whilst men remain in long-hours occupations, which can result in increasing gender inequality patterns both at home and in the labor market (Mullens & Glorieux, 2022).

In sum, there are several changes we can expect from the future of work, that may enhance work-family justice worldwide. However, unless enacted with reflection on our notions of work, the ideal worker, the value of care, or gender roles, these changes may result in exacerbating injustices.

The changing world of families – what does a just future look like?

Families live within changing social contexts and attention to these contexts can advance research. Among many, three features of the changing world of families are central for research that is concerned with work-family justice: (1) an increase in unpaid care work needs, in part based on aging and demographic changes requiring additional elder care across fewer adult children compared to prior generations (Bianchi, 2014); (2) new housing challenges, making work-family justice more difficult (Colomb & Gallent, 2022); and (3) issues linked to individuals and families migrating for stable work opportunities for themselves and their children, either by choice or being forced by disasters, climate change, or conflicts (Barnes et al., 2022; Black et al., 2011). Each feature needs careful consideration for how scholars can expand research in the field, and how policymakers can better understand the lived social problems that must be addressed in order for work-family justice to occur. The gender, class, and racial dimensions of these family changes for inequalities also deserve serious consideration.

Increasing care work

First, taking the long view of families, demographic changes have placed family members in a precarious place in many parts of the world, with increased care needs that societies are slow to provide support for and that workplaces may not recognize (Barnes et al., 2022; Folbre, 2021). Many developed countries face rapidly aging societies, and with lower fertility and longer life expectancies, the ratio of caregivers to care needs within families is shrinking (Bianchi, 2014). Elder care is an increasingly demanding sphere of family life that must be structured and supported by governments and workplaces. A just work-family system would enable the individuals closest to elders or other dependents – like children or those with disabilities to be better supported. To be economically active, family caregivers need to earn a living in ways that allow for flexible schedules, and which may require the creative redesign of jobs with the recognition of unpaid care work that is needed for a sustainable world (Samtleben & Müller, 2022). Multifaceted public, private, and civil society activist systems must offer and support caregiving spaces, both for the very young and the old, and must also be the groundwork as a support to workers at given times throughout the life course. The increasing home and care demands of future families represents a fundamental shift that must be reconciled with work. Caregivers desire a diversity of different supports and given their essential and unpaid care work, they deserve sustained research and policy attention.

For work-family research, as many prominent scholars have articulated, care must be carefully measured and counted as work (Doucet, 2023; de Laat et al., 2023; Folbre, 2021). In research, we often consider measures of the conditions of the work world most carefully, including hours spent, schedule control, supportiveness of supervisors and co-worker relationships and so on. For advancing research, as exemplified by much recent excellent care work scholarship (e.g. Doucet, 2023; Folbre, 2021; Tronto et al., 2023), we must understand the burdens and the benefits of care and the conditions of caregiving and kin relationships, aligned with how we assess the workplace. We need to get better at recognizing (Doucet, 2022), and dismantling dominant assumptions (Jaga, 2020) of where the care work takes place, who is doing it, examining care work both within and between households. Work-family justice means we do not rely only on individual women to solve the problems of care (Collins, 2019; Milkie & Wray, 2023). We need to remember that care is sometimes provided by those with the fewest resources – people occupying statuses that are considered to matter less in society. For example, sometimes those individuals who have insufficient rights and lack decent work conditions – often caregivers from the Global South – fill the homes of the wealthier in privileged places (Parreñas, 2000). We must increasingly recognize inequities occurring across these households, cities, and nations. For scholars, measuring care work – in new ways that build from recent scholarship with a focus on both its burdens and benefits, will continue to be important (Folbre, 2021).

For families of the future to have work-family justice, positive and supportive connections to caring and to the workforce must be envisioned at each stage of the life course. All of us deserve to be cared for, and to have the right to work and care, and to do them simultaneously across the life course (Collins, 2019; Dobrotić & Blum, 2019; Doucet, 2023). Although not the focus of much work-family research, researchers should consider the important period of adolescence, where preparing for trades and careers happen, and where the groundwork for being able to combine work and family in equitable ways is laid out. When young people come together with family, mentors, and friends to plan their futures as adults, they should have options for envisioning and moving on pathways to safe, decent, and meaningful work that is well compensated and meshes with raising future children and other life demands (Brinton & Oh, 2019). Care work jobs like daycare workers, teachers, and nurses should be much better paid, which might simultaneously provide more respect to unpaid workers performing care and to young people wishing to enter these vital fields. For those young people in severe economic or social circumstances, reducing inequalities will potentially allow the gap between their dream of good jobs and the otherwise likely reality of being on the margins of a high quality of life and decent work, to be reduced (Brown et al., 2017).

In the adult life stage, planning for children and fertility choices should also be supported through the ability to time pregnancies and have optimal care and rest through pregnancy and the postpartum period. Once people become parents, workplaces and governments must act where policies are currently weak. The United States, powerful in so many ways, is dead last on providing basics like paid family leave to its population at a crucial time in the life course (https://www.leavenetwork.org/introducing-the-network/). Though businesses have stepped up in recent years, providing increasing forms of support, fewer than half of US workers, bifurcated by income level, have any access to paid leave whatsoever upon the birth or adoption of a child (Shabo, 2023). During the unique period of family formation, new parents need time to nurture young children and each other. For those with school-age children, schools and workplaces could be much better aligned so that the work of care that schools also do through providing supervision many hours per day, can match up to parents’ (work) schedules. For example, workplaces and governments can align to better allow for parents’ and other caregivers’ availabilities to drop off and pick up children from daycares and school. The EU Work-Life balance Directive of 2019 made an important mark across societies in that many European countries significantly expanded leave options for parents through this directive. Although far from perfect, these types of initiatives can improve the lives of caregivers and are supportive of work-life justice.

At the later stages of the life course, older adults need space to make choices. Some workers may seek support to stay in work that continues to provide financial supports and dignity and meaning to them; others, especially workers with health issues or those who have worked in physically demanding occupations, need to be able to leave work while maintaining a healthy standard of living. Should older workers be so privileged as to retire from work, how they are treated and respected by the workplace and by their governments in this transition is a central question. Moreover, how the older generations of workers are able to be supported through their later years through both paid care services and through family members who may assist them in the activities of daily living will continue to be an important and central concern in work-family scholarship.

Housing

A second challenge for families, for workers and to work-family justice is the instability in and a crisis of decent, safe, and affordable housing (Colomb & Gallent, 2022; Franklin, 2020). Housing is a fundamental and basic need that makes families secure and allows for workers, their children, and other dependents to be healthy and have positive family relationships. Housing policies help family formation, work-family reconciliation, and contribute to spaces elders can receive care. Housing will be an increasingly important part of equity across families and should be paid attention to by scholars of work and family, who have focused on commute times, but less so on housing problems at large. Housing issues are tightly linked to increasing inequalities, where some privileged workers may have flexible or remote work and can afford not only their own home, but sometimes spend time renting spaces in other cities that are desirable locations to work. These inequalities, along with the massive growth in short-term rentals like Airbnb, can exacerbate the difficulties that especially the younger generation and lower-paid workers may have in finding suitable housing. Housing challenges are detrimental to lower-paid and non-remote workers who must live near their workplace in expensive housing markets. The pandemic intensified housing inequalities, with the wealthy purchasing properties and shoring up short-term rental stock, creating a recent housing crunch for young families (Colomb & Gallent, 2022). Thus, stable and affordable housing is vital for those who do not have the wealth to buy in the current housing market and in locations where climate change and armed conflicts mean individuals and families struggle for basic needs like housing.

Stable housing is furthermore needed as a basis for stable work and family lives and for providing good care for children (Cross et al., 2022) and is closely linked to increased migration, discussed in detail below. For example, a recent review article by Caxaj et al. (2023) shows the importance of quality housing for migrant farm workers in Canada. Farm workers there who seek to send money back to their families in Mexico and other countries are dependent on employers and communities for decent housing. In a sense, without a stable housing infrastructure, all people, including migrant workers and others are at risk or work and family conflicts. People need access to affordable, stable housing becauseliving precariously without quality housing options undermines people’s ability to work and care in sustainable ways. Scholarly attention to housing issues in work-family lives is increasingly important.

Migration

Global migration, where individuals and families must move for better work, displacements from war torn lands and natural disasters, and from the changing climate, also speaks directly to work-family justice concerns. Migrant work shifts the nature of family and household structures, and accordingly precarious workers’ care patterns and breadwinning conceptualizations. These shifts in care work arise either because migrant workers move away from support systems, such as family members and communities, or they arise because people migrate on their own, leaving their children behind in complex networks of care. These arrangements stretch care work for transnational families across complex geographical boundaries (Stumbitz & Jaga, 2020). For example, older parents often become the primary caregivers for their grandchildren, creating long-distance emotional and material care relationships (e.g. Gu, 2022). In these situations, the child's main connection is with the caregiver rather than the biological parent, and childcare decisions are occasionally made collectively within the community (van Breda & Pinkerton, 2020). Many low-income, precarious workers therefore employ distinct and rather complex approaches for earning a living and providing care. These approaches set them apart from their more privileged counterparts, who have greater access to resources that can make combining work and family easier. For example, such migrant care work includes sending money home to sustain family members left in home countries, or managing different time zones when providing care across provinces or countries.

Migration is a key work-family justice focus because work-family justice has no basis when survival is threatened. Where migrants have left or been forced out of their homes to find better work, that work must be safe and compensated well. Migrants and especially refugees deserve quality pathways to citizenship along with the work they and their family members take up (Caxaj et al., 2023). For migrant families, challenges in being distant geographically may be mitigated somewhat by technologies, but only if those technologies are easily accessible and affordable.

In sum, how families’ care needs, housing, and migration processes are changing in the 2020s poses challenges for work-family reconciliation and justice. Now more than ever, workplace and government policies are needed to support the work of family care, and the basics such as housing, as well as the complex needs of migrant families, in order for people to be able to be healthy at work and healthy at home.

Changing work-family contexts of the Global South and North

Insufficient attention has been paid in existing work-family scholarship to the material conditions and lived realities of those at the margins of society (Jaga & Ollier-Malaterre, 2022). This calls not only for more studies on those who hold marginal status, but also for new framings, conceptualizations, and vocabularies to broaden theory on holistic and contextualized perspectives to be more representative, while contributing to more dignified lives and livelihoods for a large proportion of workers across the globe. In short, we suggest the need for greater attention to work-family justice. To advance work-family justice globally, we must broaden our focus beyond white-collar work, middle class lives, and nuclear family structures as universal experiences (Jaga & Ollier-Malaterre, 2022).

Work-family policies are intricately connected to global processes, as they often reflect and respond to broader economic and political trends. Across the Global North and Global South, economic shifts such as growing inequality and work deregulation, complicate the work-family interface (Simson & Savage, 2020). Likewise, factors like globalization, advancing technology, and evolving governance models, create global economic challenges that are reshaping organizational structures, increasing work insecurity (Bakker et al., 2016). Consequently, low-income and precarious workers are rising both in the Global South and North. However, reduced state interventions, cuts in social safety nets, and institutionalized care programs are more severe in Global South contexts, exacerbating inequalities and vulnerabilities in these regions.

Attention for work-family justice and hence more representation in work-family scholarship includes centering the realities of low-income and precarious workers that may be in informal and irregular paid work characterized by financial instability from employment insecurity, including informal labor, gig work (app or non-app based) (Woodcock & Graham, 2019) and paid domestic work (Banerjee & Wilks, 2022), including attention to the fact that people often migrate for such work. Migrant precarious workers are either those from developing Global South countries searching for a better life in their resettlement countries (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022), those who are ‘South-South’ migrant workers – who are growing as western economies shift production facilities to developing countries (Sambajee & Scholarios, 2023), and those who migrate from rural to urban centers in their same country, away from their families, for work opportunities. The resulting precarious work arrangements tend to uphold capitalism in the Global North and urban centers, extracting low wage labor from a large supply of mostly Global South workers.

Complexities of care across geographical boundaries are not limited to precarious migrant workers, but also affect migrant professionals and the growing number of digital nomads. Interestingly, digital nomads often choose locations in low to middle-income countries to maximize their privileges because these locations offer cost-effective living expenses such as accommodation and services. The relative affordability and quality of life in these countries can amplify their financial resources and personal well-being, creating a favorable environment for remote work and lifestyle. This choice, however, can create conflicts between their pursuit of leisure and their responsibilities to distant family members (Thompson, 2019).

These intricate examples of work-family arrangements support the argument that work-family research focusing primarily on nuclear families and formal work structures are insufficient. While female-headed households are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa because of migration, war, and colonial legacies, in Northern countries, factors such as increased family diversity, including multiparent families, LGBTQ+ families (Kaufman et al., 2022), and single parenting from rising divorce rates (e.g. in Germany, see Obioma et al., 2022), require new work-family conceptualizations, including that of breadwinner. It is important to therefore approach work-family studies with attention to contextual complexities, to avoid depicting migrant workers as homogeneous.

Despite an established scholarship on context in fields such as sociology (e.g. Connell, 2011), feminist studies (e.g. Allen & Jaramillo-Sierra, 2015), and development studies (e.g. Banerjee & Wilks, 2022), the work-family field continues to pay insufficient attention to the material and social context for understanding racial, gendered, and social class disparities in work-family experiences. Hence recognition that these experiences are tied to wider structural and power dynamics, such as those of historical legacies of colonialism, and systems of patriarchy and inequality (Sambajee & Scholarios, 2023) are urgently needed to enable work-family justice. Should we as scholars hesitate to capture such contextual complexity, we may silence some voices, while making the lives of others invisible, thereby deepening injustice. For example, women are typically over-represented in domestic labor, service work, and other care work positions. Private homes tend to serve as spaces where domestic workers experience subordination, often with limited labor protections. This can lead to exploitation and trauma for undocumented migrants. Even in executive roles with labor protections, highly educated middle-class women worldwide still face gendered subordination and stereotypes, as they are often expected to handle more emotional labor and people-related tasks due to their perceived suitability for displaying tact and care (Kabeer & Santos, 2017).

Work-family justice requires our urgent attention across the globe, calling scholars to focus on intricate contextual factors of work and family, recognizing the diversity within the social environment and a deep consideration of location to generate diverse insights that can contribute to the global literature on the work-family interface.

Special issue article highlights

Much important work was presented at the 2022 WFRN Conference. In our special issue, we are only able to showcase a very small portion of the work of scholars and leaders in the field. We highlight five special issue articles, a combination of research papers and a ‘Voices’ article, that address some of the key emerging issues with regards to achieving and defining work-family justice.

In the article, ‘Work-family justice: Its meanings and its implementation,’ Collins, Jaga, Folbre, Castro Bernardini, Leiwant, Shabo, Milkie, and Gornick (2023) clearly highlight the scholarly importance of conceptually understanding the meaning of the term ‘justice’ for work and family interconnections. They further demonstrate how, practically speaking, we can work for work-family justice ‘on the ground.’ This piece integrates the voices of multiple authors who served on Presidential panels at the 2022 conference. Each has a unique take on work-family justice, which helps to extend our understandings of the key issues at hand.

Building on these ideas, the article ‘More than employment policies? Parental leaves, flexible work and fathers’ participation in unpaid care work’ by de Laat, Doucet, and Gerhardt. (2023), underscores how one crucial goal we need to realize as a part of achieving work-family justice, is enabling parents of all genders to better contribute to the caring of children and other family members. Despite the development of paternity leaves in the past decade to meet this goal (Koslowski et al., 2021), in most countries, care work, especially caring for children, remains gendered, with women carrying out the large bulk of unpaid care work. The gendered nature of care is not necessarily due to fathers’ resistance in taking part in childcare and other domestic roles. Many fathers want to be more involved (Chung & Van der Lippe, 2020; Parker & Wang, 2013), but face barriers due to cultural stigmas around take up of leaves and other family-friendly arrangements. For men, taking up leave and other family-friendly arrangements may result in a femininity stigma (Rudman & Mescher, 2013) – that is when men take up family-friendly arrangements, it makes them deviate away from both the ideal worker image and the masculine breadwinner image (see also, Kelland et al., 2022).

de Laat et al. (2023) examine how parental leaves and flexible working policies help fathers engage more in childcare in Canada during the pandemic. The Canadian context provides the authors an interesting case study, where parental leave take-up for fathers is limited due to the policy design. Using data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, they explore how the take up of parental leave, flexible schedules, and homeworking shaped the division of direct and indirect care tasks between heterosexual couples. A key contribution of this work is their conceptualization of care. Following Folbre’s (2021) notion of care, they argue that housework is a form of indirect care, as housework supports care and makes direct care work possible. Their empirical results suggest that taking up (longer) leaves and flexible schedules may allow fathers to be involved in both direct and indirect care. As we have discussed above, the results of this paper also evidence how we cannot rely on single policy measures but need a more careful consideration of a number of different policy tools in combination. Citing the works of Chung (2022), de Laat et al. (2023) argue that flexible working policies alone cannot be a solution to this problem and that governments need to actively engage in supporting fathers take up of leave provisions. Further, they argue, there needs to be removal of barriers in the take up of leaves as well as flexible working arrangements for care purposes, especially for fathers.

Supporting fathers’ take up of existing policies is a topic also explored in the paper ‘What do prospective parents know about family welfare incentives? Evidence from Hungary and the United States’ by Mildner (2023). This article uses semi-structured interviews of 26 prospective parents from Budapest (Hungary) and (primarily) New York (US) to explore their knowledge of family welfare. The two country cases provide the author with an interesting comparison, as they share similarities regarding national cultural and policy contexts but differ on key elements of family welfare policies. Hungary not only has a more generous level of child benefits and national parental leaves, but also the Hungarian government introduced a series of policies specifically geared to push families to have more children. On the contrary, the US falls behind significantly, especially when considering federal level policies, although large cross-company variations exist in the provision of family policies. The results show that both men and women in Hungary had a good understanding of the existing policies, especially with regards to the benefits they can receive when they have more children. Their knowledge was linked to the on-going political debates on the issue as well as public campaigns. On the other hand, not only was there a lack of such knowledge among the American interviewees, the author finds a clearer gender gap in parents’ knowledge. This paper evidences the deeply engrained gendered assumptions around whose responsibility it is to carry out child rearing and childbearing as well as whose responsibility it is to think about it (i.e. the mental load). In fact, one of the key contributions of this paper is that it provides evidence of how gender inequality in the mental load of household and family management starts even before childbirth and even before family formation (see also, Dean et al., 2022). Moreover, as Mildner (2023) argues, this inequality pattern emerges especially in countries where there is a complexity of family policy infrastructure due to the lack of government policy provision. The lack of national level policies leaves the brunt of the planning and understanding of the complex company/local level policies to women, further adding to their mental load burden.

Continuing the theme on care, gender, and equitable policy, the article ‘Beyond the womb: A mosaic of organizational advocacy for reproductive justice,’ by Dillard and Cavallo (2023) emphasizes the need to broaden the definition of reproductive justice beyond a focus on abortion. The authors advocate for a return to the origins of reproductive justice to reflect a more holistic understanding of reproductive rights. They promote a Comprehensive Framework for Reproductive Justice (CFRJ), informed by Black feminist epistemologies, that highlights four central tenets: personal bodily autonomy, the right to have or not have children, parenting in safe communities, and birthing or parenting with dignity. The paper explores how organizations in the US have supported reproductive justice during significant socio-political moments, including the pathway to marriage equality, immigration policies, and the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the complex experiences of employees with intersecting identities.

Dillard and Cavallo (2023) acknowledge structural determinants that affect choices. Advocating for greater representativity in reproductive justice topics and the populations that it affects through their intersecting identities, they highlight the value of organizations, scholars and practitioners leveraging intersectional Black feminist epistemology in their efforts to create inclusive and equitable work environments. They propose pathways to engage more intentionally, to protect reproductive health through multiple actors’ powerful capacity for leadership, and to serve employees more fully through recognizing the complexities of intersecting identities.

The final article in the special issue, ‘Pandemic impacts, cultural conflicts and moral dilemmas among faculty at a Hispanic-serving research university’ by Blair-Loy, Reynders, Mitchneck, Baraki, Lewison, and Crockett (2023) extends frameworks that consider intersectional identities and equitable policies by examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic among STEM faculty. Their research highlights the tension between three culturally constructed commitments: the professional culture’s demand for research, intensified mothering demands due to caregiving responsibilities at home, and a sense of increased responsibility toward students who are disproportionately Latinx and first-generation college students, many of whom faced higher health and financial risks during the pandemic. The article discusses the concept of ‘cultural schemas’ and analyzes the moral judgments related to the intensified work-work conflicts in work devotion, scientific excellence, mentoring and teaching in times of crisis. Through this paper they create a heightened awareness of injustices concerning students and faculty and highlight how these moral dilemmas reinforce inequalities among faculty. Blair-Loy and colleagues (2023) also show that mothers experienced amplified challenges, leading to reduced research hours, declines in article submissions, and widening gender gaps in scholarly production. The gendered decline in research output was most notable among mid-career women. The authors call for policy interventions that address these disparities, including those for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), to better support students and faculty who support underrepresented students.

Conclusion: toward work-family justice

We live in a time where we have experienced profound changes in how we work, significant demographic and structural changes linked to family life, and an increasing attention to issues of those more marginalized in society, including by racialization and class, and location in the world. In such a context, the issues around work-family justice not only present themselves as important issues we need to address to achieve equity, but also as a concept we need to reconsider and redefine to fit the changes we see in our world today. Building from our previous special issue (Chung et al., 2022), where we called for new ways to carry out research to incorporate diverse voices, this special issue of the Work and Family Researchers Network aimed to both highlight emerging issues in work-family justice and to focus on continued problems in the field. The five selected papers from our 2022 conference serve to illustrate these issues in work-family research. We invite you to reflect on the meanings and possibilities of work-family justice through these contributions. We hope that altogether, the scholarship in this special issue moves toward underscoring issues that are linked to work-family justice for all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa A. Milkie

Melissa A. Milkie is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the tri-campus Graduate Department, at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Canada. She served recently (2021-2022) as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network. Professor Milkie’s research focuses on structural and cultural changes in gender, work and family life over recent decades and how work-family configurations are linked to mental health and well-being.

Heejung Chung

Heejung Chung is Professor of Sociology, at the School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent, UK. She has served on the WFRN executive board from 2019-2022. Professor Chung’s interest lies in exploring gender, class and racial inequalities patterns both in the labour market and at home, focusing on the role contexts – namely institutions/policies, culture and other socio-economic factors – have in changing these relationships. She is the author of the recently published book The Flexibility Paradox (Policy Press).

Ameeta Jaga

Ameeta Jaga is Professor of Organisational Psychology and the Deputy Dean of Transformation and Inclusion at the faculty of Commerce, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is the serving secretary of the WFRN (2021-2023). Professor Jaga’s work navigates the work-family interface drawing particularly on matters of culture and gender. Her works draw on southern theories to prioritise context while underlining global inequalities in knowledge production.

Notes

1 https://hrnews.co.uk/88-of-uk-workforce-have-experienced-burnout-in-the-past-two-years/.

2 https://www.axa.co.uk/newsroom/media-releases/2023/the-true-cost-of-running-on-empty-work-related-stress-costing-uk-economy-28bn-a-year/.