International Conference: Rethinking Care Responsibilities - Using Market Mechanisms to Promote Gender Equality.
The conference will take place at TAU Buchmann Faculty of Law (January 8) and at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law (January 9).
Women’s disproportionate care work and the traditional division of care and household labor between the sexes is seen as one of the key hurdles for women’s equality in all spheres of life. Feminist scholars and reformers have mainly looked at the state as the most promising institution to provide solutions to promote gender equality in care and household labor provision.
Thus, states were urged by feminists and other policy makers seeking to promote gender equality and full and equal female participation in the workforce, to take responsibility for familial care provision. Indeed many states around the world have initiated a wide array of laws, policies and welfare programs to advance women’s equality through sharing familial care burdens. Yet, despite significant changes and innovations, care patterns, household division of labor, and gender discrimination in the market persist, even if in changed forms. The stickiness of gender inequality requires, we believe, thinking outside the state/family/market boxes. In order to do that we suggest expanding our institutional imagination by rethinking the traditional dichotomies between the market, the state and the family. This conference is an opportunity to engage scholars with different backgrounds in new and creative solutions to promote gender equality in relation to care provision.
To this end, the conference brings together researchers of families, welfare states, and of labor markets. In our conversation we will translate grand goals of gender equality, social justice and productive markets into novel and operative tax, welfare, and employment regulation and mechanisms. In particular, we will focus on market mechanisms’ potential to facilitate better solutions. In the conference scholars from a variety of disciplines and countries will consider the wide variety of policy tools on the spectrum between pure market-based policies and strictly state provided benefits and non-market family arrangements, seeking to investigate the myriad possible legal and institutional configuration available to policy makers, beyond the private-public dichotomy.
