Navigating complex systems: the persistence of gender inequality in work-life balance

Abstract

In this talk, Professor Mara Yerkes will present findings from her European Research Council project CAPABLE, which unpacks persistent gender inequalities in work-life balance. This interdisciplinary, comparative project offers new insights into a well-studied topic. Yerkes will highlight several key findings, including how the increasingly complex web of multi-level, multi-layered social systems makes navigating such systems increasingly difficult. And therefore, how difficulties in navigating this complexity helps to maintain and exacerbate gender and other forms of inequality.

Speaker

Mara A. Yerkes is Full Professor of Comparative Social Policy in relation to Social Inequalities at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is also Research Associate at the Center for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality", University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research broadly centres on comparative social policy including national and local welfare state policy and industrial relations), social inequalities (related to work, care, communities and families, in particular relating to gender, generations, and sexual orientation) and their interplays. Yerkes was the principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project CAPABLE, a comparative study on gender inequalities in work-life balance in eight European countries, and of CoGIS-NL (COVID-19 Gender 0n)equality Survey Netherlands), a longitudinal research project involving researchers from Utrecht University and Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Transforming the Dutch Welfare State: Social Risks and Corporatist Reform (2011; Policy Press) and Solidarity and Social Justice in Contemporary Societies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Social Inequalities (from Palgrave), and Social Policy in Changing European Societies: Research Agendas for the 21st Century (Edward Elgar), both co-edited volumes.