This research explores working mothers’ decisions on combining paid work with looking after children and the implications these have for their pensions, and whether they have changed over time. Two cohorts of mothers are interviewed. The first cohort are working mothers aged between 30-40 years with the aim to explore their decisions’ to combine paid work with looking after children and their current situation of financial planning for retirement. The second cohort are mothers who are in receipt of state and/or non-state pensions and are aged between 60-70 years with the aim to explore how they combined paid work with looking after children and how they had planned financially for their retirement. Empirically, this research compares an earlier cohort of mothers who started to receive state and/or non-state pensions with working mothers whose retirement is expected to be around 2050. This research analyses pension provision for women in the United Kingdom through a critical review of Conservative and Labour Governments’ policies between 1979 and 2010 in addressing gender inequalities in pension provision for women. The period 1979 to 2010 covers the beginnings of the gradual and long term shift from state to non-state pension provision by 2050. Welfare state/regimes and sociological theories are used in this research study in order to explore working mothers’ decisions on paid work with looking after children and the implications these have for their pensions, given the policy shift from state to non-state pension provision. Working mothers’ experiences in combining paid work with looking after children show that mothers can hold different gendered moral rationalities and shift between the ideal types of social policy over time. This is shaped by whether they have a choice to decide how to combine paid work with looking after children. This in turn shapes working mothers’ orientations towards paid work and opportunities to contribute towards state and occupational pensions. Combining paid work with looking after children by members of both cohorts varied and was not a straightforward to fit one type of the ideal types of social policy, and the gendered moral rationalities held are subject to change in the lives of working mothers over time.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:719667 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Kazybekova, Ulzhan |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43269/ |
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