This article discusses women's political representation in Central and Eastern Europe in the fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the adoption of liberal democratic political systems in the region. It highlights the deep-seated gender stereotypes that define women primarily as wives and mothers, with electoral politics seen as an appropriate activity for men, but less so for women. The article explores the ways in which conservative attitudes on gender roles hinders the supply of, and demand for, women in the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. It also discusses the manner in which the internalisation of traditional gender norms affects women's parliamentary behaviour, as few champion women's rights in the legislatures of the region. The article also finds that links between women MPs and women's organisations are weak and fragmented, making coalition-building around agendas for women's rights problematic.
The article analyses the most current myths regarding the sexual harassment in the Czech Republic. Specifically the authoress examines firstly the myth of non-existence and insignificancy which does not respect its latent nature; secondly she speaks about the myth of subjectivity and selfhood which denies the role of symbolic power and existence of unequal relations between men and women. Thirdly she identifies the myth of irrelevancy and impossibility to define the limits that denies equal moral value of all people; and finally she discusses the myth of malfeasance that denies possible serious harm caused to victims, the most frequently women. These myths are identified on the basis of qualitative analysis of focus groups with representatives of labour union. The authoress aims to confute these mentioned myths that contaminate the representation of the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the public discourse in the Czech Republic. For defence of significance of sexual harassment she elaborates the parallel with domestic violence and highlights common tendency to deny these gender based inequalities and oppression on the basis of the idea of 'natural sex relations'. (www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2006020602)
As we can support with objective evidence, the position of men and women on the Czech labour market is not equal: (i) There is an obvious gender pay gap. (ii) Women are overrepresented in lower-paid professions with lower social prestige. Many authors (e.g. Cermáková, Crompton, Bradley) concerned with explanation of the reasons of the gender inequalities on the labour market emphasize the role of structural barriers and gender stereotypes. In this paper the authoress is trying to answer the question whether it is either the existence of structural barriers or different attitudes of men and women towards work that is the cause of the obvious gender inequality on the Czech labour market. The analysis revealed that the differences in attitudes of men and women towards work are marginal and that many gender stereotypes according to which women are less ambitious employees than men are untenable. The structural barriers and gender stereotypes are thus possible to be considered as the principal causes of the gender inequalities on the Czech labour market. The findings are based on a quantitative analysis of data collected in a study of 5 510 respondents in 2005 in the Czech Republic.
The article deals with the questions of the (in)visibility of women in Slovak political life. The material presents statistical data on women's participation in Slovak national, regional and local politics with the support of qualitative data from interviews with women politicians and activists. The authoress looks at the reasons for the low political representation of women and the unsuccessful attempts to increase it by introducing positive mechanisms such as quotas. The primary focus is put on the representation of women in municipal politics. The authoress analyses the main reasons why women are more successful in local politics than in 'high' politics.
The paper examines the demographic situation in contemporary Czech society and its roots in the past. In the late 20th century there are two key development trends. Demographic model originated in 1950s (characterised by high fertility rates, high marriage rates (95%), high divorce rates (40%), low marriage age and so on) was left after the decline of socialism and the revival of original interwar model has occured since early 1990s. The second trend is approximating to the model of reproduction usual in Western Europe. This new ways of reproduction are characterised by postponing the marriage and parenthood, so called informal partnerships or unmarried (consensual) couples are becoming more frequent which also results in a growing number of birth of extra-marital children. The increase of divorce rates occurs and hence both number of incomplete families and of households including just one individual constantly grow. The improved medical care and healthier regime have led to longer life expectancies over the last fifteen years. The infant mortality figures has further improved. The authoress concludes that population development significantly influences current economic, health, legal, environmental and political conditions which create together a social environment where the demographic development occurs. (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2005120402)
The author looks at the dichotomy between shame and honor through references to traditional societies of the Mediterranean culture. Anthropological studies in the 1950-1980s define both concepts as morally determined social regulators. Emotions related to shame are etymologically feminine, those related to honor are masculine. Consequently, gender seems to determine what is moral. Therefore, one can venture that social expectations with regard to women evolve around notions related to shame: modesty (particularly sexual), passivity and submission. For men they evolve around notions related to honor: activism, courage and usefulness. In contemporary discourse this division translates into attaching women to the household related private sphere and placing men in the public politico-economic sphere. Such a distinction solidifies traditional social order whose role is to assist in proper functioning of the family.
Researches on human mobility have ignored the role of gender in migration processes for a long time. In the 1970s, feminist scholars started criticising the gender blindness and male bias in this domain. New researches focusing on the position of women declared the need to adopt gender as a useful category in migration studies. This article describes the genealogy of the feminist reflection of migration and shows how the conceptualisation of gender in migration studies has changed over forty years. It focuses on one type of women's mobility: the migration of care workers, domestic workers, and nurses. Many researchers refer to these women as 'global' and 'globalised' and show how globalised migration penetrates everyday life and generates new types of inequalities or hierarchies based on class, gender, and ethnic or generational differences.
The article deals with the phenomenon of linguistic sexism in the Czech language. The authoress argues for the development of non-sexist strategies in the Czech language and proposes the list of possible strategies how to reach gender neutral form of language. Her main argument is that language disposes symbolic power to define the content of gender roles and thus it can naturalize socially constructed interpretation of masculinity and femininity. Furthermore, she proposes examples and unveils the subconsciously working gender unequal practises in using language. For example, it is common in the Czech language to use generic masculine when speaking about men and women together. However, the authoress gives evidence that these practices support stereotypes concerning the construction of men's and women's role in society. Furthermore, it is well-established to change the form of foreign women's surname according to Czech language practise. As a result of this the surname is changed and difficultly recognizable and loses its function as a 'brand' that consequently disadvantages women. ( www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2006013101)
The households of young adults can be viewed as a natural environment where gender role transformation models can be found. After experiencing gender specific socialisation in childhood and adolescence, men and women enter a stage in which this structure more or less reverts to universalising practical requirements. These include financial security, focus on careers, securing a home and providing for household duties. The context outlined above is addressed in the paper via selected theoretical arguments and the review of relevant theoretical and empirical literature. The objective is to theoretically justify the mechanisms or principles resulting from specific elements present in the lives of solo-livers that can logically impact specific elements of gender subjectivity.
The text links the spread of the 'solo' living with the unequal arrangement of traditional households (either regarding respondents' families of origin or in view of the experience with their partners) which is taken as the essential source of longer term advance of the individualizing habitus. The qualitatively indicated categories highlight the mechanisms of the emergence and social reproduction of individualizing habitus. If the traditional gender split of space - men's public space and field of power versus women's private space of household and reproduction (Bourdieu 2000:85) is taken into account, the logical expression of the emerging individualizing habitus rests in the sphere of the 'solo' living where this habitus may spread irrespective of this given traditional split of space since individualized household represents private sphere and the given public consensus is not violated.
The problem of sexual harassment at universities has been explored in western and mainly American sociology since the mid-1970s. Since then, anti-harassment policies and procedures (including follow-up victim care) have been introduced at most Anglo-Saxon universities designing how to deal with 'harassers' and 'victims'. In the Czech Republic, empirical research on this issue and on university anti-harassment policies is still lacking. The aim of this article is to introduce the methods and procedures employed at Anglo-American universities in an effort to tackle sexual harassment. The experiences of these academic institutions represent an indispensable source of information and inspiration for the Czech higher education environment.
While gender has gained serious credit on the international development research and policy agenda, this is not reflected in Czech development studies. Likewise, the situation of women living in the developing world has been tackled by Czech gender studies only occasionally. This lack of attention from both Czech academia and Czech civil society is owing to the slow reconstruction of both interdisciplines during the transition and to the prevailing liberalism of Czech society. Even though links between gender and poverty are reflected in the mainstream discourse of international organizations, the author criticizes their underlying liberal assumptions from the viewpoint of feminist economics without acknowledging the capacity of post-modern feminists to tackle lived poverty. While grassroots women's movements in the South reveal diverse theoretical backgrounds, in Czech development cooperation gender is only formally reflected in policy and operational documents. The author demonstrates this strong gender blindness through the example of a presumably gender neutral project on agricultural education in Angola. Czech development cooperation has supported only a few gender projects, which were intended especially for at risk women. In conclusion, the author advocates mainstreaming the gender perspective into Czech development cooperation and, by extending the scope of feminist standpoint theory, argues that the development constituency cannot be genuinely pro-poor without paying special attention to women and the gender constituency cannot pretend to defend women's rights without paying attention to the poor living in the South.
Throughout its entire history, Slovak animated film has had the form of figurative narrative art or craft. For this reason, the author of this study examines its post-1989 development through the prism of the body. Since the most visible change that has affected contemporary film aesthetics is the feminization of animated film in terms of authorship, the study primarily focuses on the ability of an animated body to represent gender and gender roles. It attempts to capture the most significant changes in the depiction of the body in authorial animated film before and after 1989, in more detail record the post-revolution changes in the body, and relate this to the changes in the institutional background of animated film. Animated bodies have developed from “ordinary people” from a dominant male point of view in socio-critical socialist production through female characters in interaction with clearly distinguished male characters in the films of female authors from the Academy of Performing Arts, the crisis of stereotypical masculinity in the production of male authors to independent women looking for their own identity inside themselves, without relating themselves to their male counterparts.
Gender plays a central role in the decision to migrate and the composition of the migration flows. Emigration is the process experienced differently by women and men. The experience of immigration profoundly impacts on the public and private lives of women - their participation in the labour force, their religiousness, their marital roles and satisfaction, and their autonomy and self-esteem. One of the possible effects of migration is the emancipation of women. There is a direct connection between emancipation and integration. In contrast to integrated western societies emancipated immigrant women, immigrants from traditional cultures are not interested in the integration. They risk not only the loss of cultural identity, but also their own identity.
The culture of computer games originates in hacker culture. Hackers were the first programmers and technology enthusiasts who developed a set of ethical rules which stressed that skills were more important than social and demographic features, including gender, and were independent of them. However, research shows that women are underrepresented in most popular computer games. Moreover, the relation of symbolic domination between genders may be seen in the roles women perform in gameplay. In the paper, I present the phenomenon of gender-based symbolic violence in computer games. I also analyze the symptoms of that violence and look for its causes in the social structure.
This article focuses on the constructions around body as gendered and sexualised within recent migration of Poles to the United Kingdom (UK). Poles migrate, as it appears, from an environment in Poland characterised by more conservative views on gender and sexuality to a more liberal environment in the UK. This article uses the feminist perspective and examines the influence of this migration on discourses around body and its potential to liberate conservative discourses. It also utilizes intersectionality framework as lens to examine issues around body and analyses how specific social categories such as gender and sexuality, seen as ‘social processes’, simultaneously influence construction of these issues (Nash 2008). This article uses internet forum discussions as data. Different views on body were identified through the analysis and it was found that debates contained a mixture of nationalist, patriarchal, conservative and liberal attitudes. The nationalist discourse is dominant in Poland and this analysis showed that this discourse in a way “travelled” with migrants. However, counter-discourses were created in the process such as the liberal one, which gives women choice in relation to their lives and does not prescribe strict gender and sexual roles. This article showed how bodies are becoming ‘gendered’ and sexualised within migration space (Jackson and Scott 2001). The analysis demonstrated that gender and sexual ideologies and environments have a great impact on people’s views on body, particularly on women’s bodies. It also demonstrated that gender and sexual ideologies and practices are negotiated and reshaped as part of the migration process (McIlwaine et al 2006; Datta et al 2008), where different views on gender and sexuality as well of intersections of these with ethnicity come into play.
The present study analyses the social representation of women and men in ten contemporary Slovak musical films aimed at children (Spievankovo, Fíha-tralala, Smejko a Tanculienka). An analysis of the internal and external features attributed to “men”, “women”, “boys”, and “girls” has revealed, in line with previous research, that men are associated with strength and courage and women with beauty and care. Gender also determines clothing, props. Contrary to previous findings, women in the analysed films, more often than men, display activity and dominance and take the role of moral and intellectual authorities. Men, on the other hand, are just as emotional as women. In conclusion, the author proposes a hypothesis to explain these discrepancies with the previous research.
The paper is a review of literature on gender aspects of social movement's protest against globalization. It divides the movements according to gender of participants to grassroots women's movements against globalization, gender-neutral anti-globalization movement and masculine movements that express anti-globalization stance. It focuses specifically on activism against sweatshop labor and its transnational networks, connections, and its positive and negative effects. It analyses the gender aspects of the anti-globalization movement and its relation to feminism and feminist movement. It deals with the problem why it is difficult to incorporate gender into the critique of globalization and at the same time to add anti-capitalist view to feminist movement. The authoress argues that neoliberal globalization activates on one side efforts to emancipate women from oppressive (working) conditions while it incites masculine, patriarchal reactions on the other side of the globe. The militaristic masculine movements together with the neoliberal global masculinity are threats for women's movements for liberation.
This paper brings an analysis of the impact of banning the use of gender in insurance, with special focus on supplementary pension saving called also third pillar pension, according to the requirements of the European Court of Justice. By means of actuarial formulas of monthly paid annuities and also mortality tables, it models and analyses the amounts of pension annuities in the designed products of the third pillar pension.
Identity is an awareness of being the same 'me' in the past, despite changes over time, as well as being clause to similar social categories in the present. One of the most important for self-identification categories of others are people of the same gender. Gender is a collection of roles recognised as being typical for representatives of a given sex, particular behaviour and personality traits. We describe them respectively as structural, symbolic and emotional dimensions of masculinity and femininity. The aim of the article is to provide an answer to the question of how gender affects the identity of singles - those who are neither parents or partners. Considered are independently: work, family, home and free time on the basis of information obtained from interviews and the European Social Survey. This leads to the conclusion that work and home are areas where sex has less impact on the life of a single than on that of other members of the society. Singles' femininity and masculinity manifest themselves mainly symbolically during their free time. Typical for people living alone is that they consciously shape their behaviour as feminine, masculine or neutral.
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