Northern Ireland has been without a Childcare Strategy for more than a decade – the only region in the United Kingdom (UK) that does not have one. As a devolved responsibility, progress in childcare has been significantly limited, and there is currently no government-funded childcare provision available. This is compared to England, Scotland, and Wales, where investment to expand provision has been introduced to help parents meet the cost of childcare by providing funded entitlement. This article examines and discusses policy developments in early education and childcare in Northern Ireland and the other UK nations. It is argued that the lack of progress by the Northern Ireland Executive to develop a Childcare Strategy overlooks it’s economic and social importance and reflects how childcare continues to be underfunded and undervalued.

The care crisis intersects with economic, social, and refugee crises, necessitating focused attention to bolster care infrastructure and address the multifaceted challenges. Women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work, exacerbating gender inequalities in labor markets and education. This paper applies the International Labour Organization–UN Women (2021) policy tool to Turkish data, estimating coverage gaps in education and healthcare, associated costs, and employment generation potential in the care sectors and related sectors. We identify a coverage gap in education affecting 5.8 million children. The required investment to address this gap is estimated at 2.28 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In all, 303,000 healthcare workers are needed, requiring an investment of 1.23 percent of GDP. These investments have the potential to generate 1.740 million direct and 152,000 indirect jobs. This would result in a substantial 6.7 percent increase in total employment. Considering the current gender composition, women are expected to fill 65 percent of these jobs, leading to a 14 percent improvement in female employment. Incorporating 3.7 million Syrian refugees, Turkey’s investment cost rises to 3.74 percent of GDP, creating 1.878 million new direct jobs – an 8 percent boost over the non-inclusive scenario. Prioritizing public investments in care services promises to promote gender equality, human development, and inclusive economic growth.

This paper describes four methodological proposals for rescuing from oblivion and highlighting women writers in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. In workshops employing a variety of active methodologies, students become acquainted with Greek writers like Sappho, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia, and their Roman counterparts, including Sulpicia and Agrippina the Younger, while also becoming aware of the authorship of these women writers and their lack of visibility. The proposals take the shape of activities aimed at fostering a vocation for science among baccalaureate students in Spain but can also be easily adapted to secondary and even higher education in other educational contexts.

This study investigates the nexus between the rise of female leaders and the appointment of women to cabinets and how family ties, crucial for women’s political ascendance, impact these appointments. Using a unique dataset across 160 countries from 1966 to 2021, we find that female leaders generally appoint more women to their cabinets and key cabinet roles. However, this effect is significantly moderated by the “Goldilocks” principle, defined by the nature of a leader’s family ties. Specifically, female leaders with moderate family ties are most likely to appoint women. In contrast, their counterparts from political dynasties and those without familial political ties are less inclined to do so. The exploratory analysis suggests potential mechanisms driving this dynamic: female leaders with a “just-right” degree of political lineage are more likely to have advanced degrees and Western education, potentially aligning them more closely with liberal and feminist values.

The apparently contradictory co-existence of high levels of gender equality and intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) found in Nordic countries has been termed the Nordic Paradox. The aim of this study was to examine how the Nordic Paradox is discussed and explained by Spanish professionals working in the IPVAW field. Five focus groups (n = 19) and interviews with key informants (n = 10) were conducted. Four main categories of possible explanations for the Nordic Paradox were identified: Macro-micro disconnect (i.e., discordance between individual beliefs and behaviors and macro-social norms of gender equality), IPVAW as multicausal (i.e., IPVAW defined as a multicausal phenomenon that does not necessarily have to be associated with gender equality), cultural patterns of social relationships (i.e., the role of social relationships and the way people relate to each other in the Nordic countries), and backlash effect (i.e., men’s reaction to greater equality for women). Although this study does not provide a final explanation for the Nordic paradox, its results provide us with a better understanding of the phenomenon and can help to advance research in this field.

Sweden and West Germany have had persistently high divorce rates in recent decades, but these two welfare states were differently equipped to mitigate the economic consequences of divorce for individual security in old age: Sweden followed a gender-equal policy approach to enable women and men to achieve economic autonomy, while West Germany, following the male-breadwinner model, introduced the system of ‘divorce-splitting’ to account for differences in women's and men's income. Against this background, this study uses large-scale register data from the German Public Pension Fund and the Swedish population registers to examine how divorce is related to the monthly public old-age pension income of women and men. The main comparison groups are divorced and (re)married individuals who entered retirement between 2013 and 2018. We descriptively show annual income histories from ages 20 to 65, and calculate monthly public old-age pension income with respect to lifetime income and pension regulations, such as the supplements/deductions for ‘divorce-splitting’. Multiple ordinary least square regression models further examine how family status relates to monthly public old-age pension income by gender. The results reveal that women and men in Sweden experience similar working histories, although women's incomes are lower. This is also reflected in women still having lower pension incomes than men. However, divorced and married women show comparable pension incomes, while divorced men receive approximately 26 per cent less pension income than married men. In West Germany, divorced women have significantly higher pension incomes than married women. The system of ‘divorce-splitting’ increases women's and decreases men's pension incomes, which seems to equalise their pension incomes. However, both stay below a married man's pension income. The findings indicate economic inequality in public old-age pension income by family status in Sweden and West Germany.

Public procurement is often used to achieve policy goals beyond the purchase of the required goods and services. These goals include the economic advancement of minorities, the promotion of fair labour practices and climate action. In the last two decades, many countries have used public procurement to advance gender equality. This is referred to as gender-responsive procurement and is often implemented through the award of public contracts to women-owned businesses. While many countries have legal provisions designed to increase the award of public contracts to women, gender-responsive procurement is extremely limited and women-owned businesses are not fully integrated into public sector supply chains. This is unfortunate, given that gender-responsive procurement can improve women's economic empowerment, with implications for sustainable development. This article adopts a gender equality and women's economic empowerment lens to examine the legal, policy and cultural barriers to gender-responsive procurement and recommends measures to improve the award of public contracts to women-owned businesses.

In the recent years, there has been an upsurge in the number of countries that are mainstreaming gender equality concerns in their trade and investment agreements. These recent developments challenge the long-standing assumption that trade, investment, and gender equality are not related. They also show that gender mainstreaming in trade and investment agreements is here to stay. However, very few countries – mostly developed countries – have led this mainstreaming approach and have made efforts to incentivize other countries to negotiate gender-responsive trade and investment agreements. The majority of developing countries are yet to take their first steps in negotiating such policy instruments with a gender lens, and their hesitation can be grounded in various reasons including fears of protectionism, lack of data, paucity of understanding and expertise, and, more broadly, constraints relating to their negotiation capacity. Moreover, the inclusion of gender-related concerns in the negotiation of such agreements has deepened and widened the negotiation capacity gap between developed and developing countries. In this article, the authors attempt to assess this widening negotiation capacity gap with the help of empirical research, and how this capacity gap can lead to disproportionate and negative repercussions for developing countries more than developed countries.