Encumbered: a critical feminist analysis of why mothers want part-time employment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mothers are often viewed as encumbered workers, juggling multiple responsibilities in paid and reproductive work. In this article, we examine the paid and reproductive experiences of mothers with preschool children in Canada, using a socio-ecological framework and a critical-feminist lens to explore the micro and macro environments that shape women’s home and work lives. To do this analysis, we completed demographic surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews with 58 mothers of preschool children in the Province of Alberta, Canada. The key finding discussed in this article is that for many participants, regardless of current job status (full-time, part-time or opt-out), the idealized solution to work-family integration challenges was part-time employment. Results suggest that although part-time employment was viewed as an ideal for many mothers, in practice, it proved to be a less-than-perfect solution for mothers attempting to integrate paid and unpaid work. Because earned income is the key source of financial well-being for the vast majority of Canadian households, and mothers’ marginalization in paid work may impede mothers’ income security and wellbeing, we posit that maternal employment is a key facet of gender equality that needs more attention in the scholarly literature.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".