‘When flexibility meets rigidity’: sole mothers' experiences in the transition from welfare to work
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the dynamics of flexibility experienced by sole mothers involved in a welfare-to-work program, and the strategies they use to retain their identities as caregivers and family providers. Based on individual interviews with 120 work-tested sole mothers on social benefits in New Zealand, we make three arguments. First, despite the constraints experienced by these mothers, welfare rules permit considerable flexibility in fulfilling work requirements. Second, this flexibility can contrast sharply with sole mothers' experiences in the labour market, where slightly higher income is traded for conformity to the rigidities of the low-waged part-time workplace. Third, sole mothers' lack of resources and strongly-held moral codes about ‘good mothering’ make them vulnerable to work/family tensions but also make them less valued employees in the current labour market. As labour markets and welfare regimes are being restructured in similar ways in ‘liberal welfare states’, these New Zealand findings are relevant to other countries such as Australia, Canada and the UK.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it