Not just daycare: Nordic mothers in research, development and innovation navigating work and childcare

ABSTRACT

Nordic welfare policies mitigate work–childcare reconciliation; however, they are not enough for mothers working in intensive work cultures. In addition, there are differences among the three Nordic states in both work–family policies and cultural norms as to how they should be used. In this article, we study the resources mothers who work in research, development and innovation (R&D&I) in Finland, Norway and Sweden rely on in their work–childcare reconciliation. Thematic analysis of interviews with 74 professionals resulted in identifying four main resources: father involvement, parental leave system and daycare, flexible working, and grandparent help and networks. Our analysis brings to view the blind spots in work and childcare reconciliation that Nordic care policies and flexible work schemes do not cover in the case of professional R&D&I mothers. We find that the role of fathers is overarching, as it regulates which of the other resources are used and how. We also argue that the role grandparents play as a resource is understudied.

KEYWORDS:

• Nordic welfare state
• mothers
• work–childcare
• research, development and innovation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of Nordwit, the Nordic Centre of Excellence on Women in Technology Driven Careers, for all their help and support, and two blind reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A parental leave reform will come into force in Finland in 2022. The reform has been designed to address the facts that mothers still take the majority of parental leaves and that the share of fathers among parental leave takers is one of the lowest in the Nordic countries. The new family leave entitlements will be allocated equally between both parents if there are two parents in the family, except for 40 days of pregnancy allowance (KELA, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NordForsk: [Grant Number No. 81520].

Notes on contributors

Hanna-Mari Ikonen

Hanna-Mari Ikonen is a Senior Lecturer in Social and Public Policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include gender, working life and parenting issues. She is interested in how various changes in working life and the current work cultures are experienced by different groups of people, such as academic mothers, self-employed mothers or young women entering the labor market.

Minna Salminen-Karlsson

Minna Salminen-Karlsson, Associate professor in Sociology, works at the Centre for Gender Research in Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests are in the fields of organization studies, in particular gender equality in high-tech workplaces, including academia, and in science and technology studies, in particular gender issues in higher technical education, both at national and at European levels.

Gilda Seddighi

Gilda Seddighi is a Senior Researcher in Technology and Society at the Western Norway Research Institute. She has a doctoral degree in Gender and Media Studies from the University of Bergen (2017). Her research interests are in representations of gender, and constructions of identity and opinion in digital media and in processes of digitalization.