UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference
Inclusion Exclusion
Saturday 18 February 12:00 – 1:30: Panel J3: Mothers and Wives
Klará Janoušková (Masaryk University, Brno): ‘Transformation of the parental leave in the Czech Republic: careless mothers and heroes’This paper presents some of the results of two qualitative researches concerning the parental couples who have opted for the alternative arrangement of gender roles. The mothers went back to work short after the birth and the fathers went on the parental leave.
For over three generations the Czech Republic has belonged to countries with the highest women´s employment rates. At the same time, only three percent of mothers are, what could be called, career-oriented. The Czech society expects women to be the primary childcarers and to conform their job aspirations to the family care. This logic is reflected in the Czech social system, where the possible maternal/parental leave lasts up to four years. Academic literature talks about the great danger of exclusion of these mothers. Typically, the mothers do not stay in contact with the employment organization and are stereotyped as people losing their professional skills. On the other hand, we can witness the exclusion of Czech fathers from the family space. Policies of reconciliation between the working and family life are developing very slowly.
One of the implementation steps of the working and family life reconciliation policy was the transformation of the maternal leave to a parental leave, which also men are allowed to take.
The aim of this paper is to present some of the aspects of the social reality experienced by the couples where the woman left her primary parenting role. In the analysis, which was built on non-structured interviews with these couples, I concentrated on the presence of traditional gender stereotypes, reflections on the danger of exclusion of the mothers, and the change of the father-child relationship as reflections on the benefit of the exchange of the traditional roles, that is as an impuls supporting the inclusion of fathers into the family space.
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