Under what conditions do motherhood penalties emerge in countries undergoing transition from state socialism to capitalism? This analysis identifies the ways managers in global financial firms employ gendered assumptions in constructing and implementing labor practices among highly skilled professional workers in Hungary. Relying on 33 in-depth interviews with employers as well as interviews with headhunting firms, labor and employment lawyers, and analysis of antidiscrimination cases brought before Hungary’s Equal Treatment Authority between 2004 and 2008, we identify several strategies global employers (...) use to shed, demote, and marginalize professional mothers. By demonstrating the salience of motherhood as a status characteristic in the postsocialist labor market, our work contributes to existing scholarship on motherhood penalties. Our work also extends this scholarship by showing how the salience of motherhood is strongly conditioned by state-level arrangements that shape the opportunity context in which employers design and carry out employment practices. (shrink)

The gendered assumptions embedded in the construction of the rational individual are well established in Western feminist thought but inapplicable to describe societies operating on different principles, such as East European state socialism. This article identifies the communist subject as the building block of communist political ideology and argues that this formulation was no less male biased than its counterpart, the rational individual under liberal capitalism. In state socialist Hungary this male bias came to be expressed differently: Women were integrated (...) into society through membership in a social group perceived as relatively homogeneous regarding interests and obligations and with gender-specific qualities and privileges. These qualities were considered inferior to men's since women—because of household responsibilities—were not capable of total devotion to the communist party. The author explores this construction of the female communist subject through a content analysis of classified materials from the archives of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. (shrink)

Generous parental leave policies are popular in a number of countries around the world and are usually seen as a sign of the ‘family friendliness’ of the state. Relying on in-depth interviews with mothers on parental leave in Hungary, the authors argue that the context in which the policies are implemented should be examined when evaluating their consequences. In semi-peripheral, resource-poor Hungary lengthy parental leave policies turn women into an invisible ‘reserve army of labourers’. While their employment is mostly unaccounted (...) for in aggregate statistics, and political discourse suggests that their ‘job’ is to look after children, nevertheless many women do end up doing some work for wages during the almost five years they spend on parental leave. However, given the rigidity of the labour market and rampant discrimination against mothers with small children, their chances of obtaining formal employment are small. They therefore resort to doing ad hoc, temporary, informal work, which is often underpaid and well below their qualifications. Thus generous family policies do not necessarily indicate the ‘women friendliness’ of the state and may not lead to the relatively favourable trade-off between stable public sector work and lower wages suggested recently by comparative researchers. Instead, in this specific context, which combines legacies of state socialism, a backlash against women’s emancipation before 1990 and a peripheral, vulnerable labour market, familialist policies are associated with a high degree of marginalisation for women with small children in which the state is at best complicit, at worst, an active agent. (shrink)