Don’t Leave Them Out: An International Comparative Analysis of Parental Leave Policies for Multiple Family Structures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how unequal social and material privileges are reinforced through seemingly progressive public policy. In a multi-national comparison, I investigate how queer families fit within parental leave policy compared to their heterosexual counterparts, the extent to which various national parental leave policies support or exclude queer families, and how Canadian leave policy can be modified to better affirm and accommodate queer families. I define queer families, or multiple family structures (MFS), as those family units whose composition is “non-normative.” Based on this context, there are two main objectives of this work: The first is to interrogate normative understandings of the family and the formation of public policy via Queer Theory by providing a theoretical overview and tracing the socio-historical significance of the family, especially throughout the development of early capitalism. The second goal is to produce an overview of parental leave policy across various comparable countries—Canada as the primary source of analysis, and the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden as cases for comparative analysis. This work contributes to the dearth of existing literature analyzing leave policy for MFS with a particular focus on the limits and shortcomings, as well as the seemingly best practices, of respective leave practices. I find that the extent to which MFS are accommodated for in leave policies is varied: Although queer families may be eligible for leave in these various countries, this inclusion is often limited to particular types of family units—typically those that more immediately resemble the traditional nuclear family. I conclude by posing policy suggestions based on international best practices to guide future Canadian policymaking in the direction of better accommodating “non-normative” families.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".