Study title

An influential body of work has identified a ‘welfare-state paradox’: work–family policies that bring women into the workforce also undermine women’s access to the top jobs. Missing from this literature is a consideration of how welfare-state interventions impact on women’s representation at the board-level specifically, rather than managerial and lucrative positions more generally. This database includes data that contribute to addressing this ‘gap’. It compiles existing secondary data from various sources into a single dataset. Both the raw and 'fuzzy' data used in a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 22 industrialised countries are available. Based on these data, analyses reveal how welfare-state interventions combine with gender boardroom quotas and targets in (not) bringing a ‘critical mass’ of women onto private-sector corporate boards. Overall, there is limited evidence in support of a welfare-state paradox; in fact, countries are unlikely to achieve a critical mass of women on boards in the absence of adequate childcare services. Furthermore, ‘hard’, mandatory gender boardroom quotas do not appear necessary for achieving more women on boards; ‘soft’, voluntary recommendations can also work under certain family policy constellations. The deposit additionally includes other data from the project that provide more context on work-family policy constellations, as they show how countries performance across multiple gendered employment outcomes spanning segregation and inequalities in employment participation, intensity and pay, with further differences by class.While policymakers in the UK and elsewhere have sought to increase women's employment rates by expanding childcare services and other work/family policies, research suggests these measures have the unintentional consequence of reinforcing the segregation of men and women into different 'types' of jobs and sectors (Mandel & Semyonov, 2006). Studies have shown that generous family policies...