The gendered offer of personal solutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the residualising process described by Jamrozik and Nocella (1998) and the individualising mechanisms of masculinism outlined by Nicholas and Agius (2018), this chapter examines the dynamics of personal child support approaches. Such personal accounts exist in less well-developed systems where there are few administrative resources available to women, and within highly developed systems that have evolved to reframe child support as an individualised endeavour. Examples of these latter systems include such countries as Australia, Canada, the UK and Sweden, which have more fully realised child support as an individualised, neoliberal project. However, despite presenting private child support arrangements as the ‘conclusion’ of Jamrozik and Nocella's (1998) residualising process, this chapter positions the conversion of child support into a personal issue as returning to a prechild support policy state of affairs, and the situation that exists in many less technically developed systems existing in Asia, southern Europe and South America. Rather than contending that these arrangements are the inevitable result of neoliberal processes, I draw on Nicholas and Agius's (2018) account to foreground gender as a key explanatory mechanism for how child support has unfolded across contexts. By locating individualised child support action within Risman's (2004) account of gender as a social structure, the chapter notes which social hierarchies are preserved by the re-privatisation of child support and which are eroded by the personalisation of post-separation financial management. Nicholas and Agius (2018, p. 10) chart the logics, assumptions and effects of masculinism, which they pose as a ‘broader logic … internalised and operationalised by both women and men, as well as institutions, structures, and discourses, which inheres the subordination of women and other non-dominant groups to the masculine norm’. The authors illustrate how patriarchal structures are reproduced by masculinist logics that operate at individual, interpersonal, policy and international levels. Drawing on their framework, here I analyse child support policy as illustrating these same logics. I argue that the administration of child support serves to manage contestations over the gender roles of breadwinners and caregivers, but in diverse ways that are more or less explicit. First, I argue that the many points in legal or administrative processes where women fall out of ‘leaky’ child support systems, or are prevented from entering them, are sites where the idea of child support is being rejected.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.004 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".