In recent years family arrangements have pluralised and the traditional bourgeois family model has lost much of its former force. At the same time, normative images of fatherhood and motherhood have started to shift, too.

With regards to men, the changing societal norms become especially evident in the clash between traditional bourgeois understandings of masculinity and new imaginaries of fatherhood. On the one hand, gainful employment is still a key constituent of men's identities and of how men care for their families. One the other hand, a growing number of men reject the traditional bourgeois family model and strive to have more time to care in their families.

With regards to women, we find a parallel trend from a different starting point. While men try to reconcile occupation with family, women seek to reconcile family with occupation. For many women, being a mother and caring for family members are still key constituents of their identity. However, growing numbers of women do not want to give up their gainful employment when they become mothers and strive to continue their careers.

In their attempts to combine occupational and family life in new ways, women and men are confronted with institutional constraints of the labour market. New forms of parenthood are often difficult to reconcile with dominant occupational cultures. Additionally, people mostly don't see difficulties with reconciling occupational and family life as a structural problem. Adopting a neoliberal logic, they assume that it is the responsibility of the individual family to make their preferred family arrangement work.

Taking this social diagnosis as a starting point, our symposium analyses the everyday practices of mothers and fathers in a postindustrial, capitalist work environment that often clashes with the needs of families.

In our research project "Anticipated parenthood and vocational pathways" we explored the question, how relevant is gainful employment for the identities of women (and men) all aged around 30 and to what extent does its meaning change with the anticipation of motherhood (resp. fatherhood). Our analyses clearly show that the women we interviewed have a strong conflict between a high ideal of motherhood on the one hand and a professional orientation in a lifelong perspective on the other. A difficulty seems to be to formulate self-consciously the right to employment during motherhood. Presenting first results, I will show how difficult it is for women to develop new female identity forms in which motherhood is not the only feature. We will discuss the question what the persistence of traditional gender stereotypes causes and why women in Switzerland seems so little adventurous finding new forms of sharing care work.

Based on decades of feminist and masculinities scholarship it is increasingly clear how hegemonic masculinities are underpinned by a carefree gender ideology and related social practices which write out nurturing and primary caring relationality from the script of masculinity. Many ongoing economic, political and cultural inequalities experienced by women are facilitated by persistent inequalities in affective relations (Lynch et al., 2009). Numerous constraints shape both the affective inequalities experienced by men whilst supporting male domination in society overall. How can the hegemony of carefree masculinities be challenged? How are men positioned within relations of (un)caring? How do men negotiate nurturing masculinities within the context of the hegemony of carefree masculinities? This presentation addresses some of these challenges based on the author’s own research as well as other contemporary studies (Hanlon, 2009, Hanlon and Lynch, 2011, Hanlon, 2012).

Based on our research project "Anticipated parenthood and vocational pathways" my presentation explores the meanings that 30 years old men in different occupational fields attribute to fatherhood and gainful employment. My analysis focuses on how the interviewees reconcile the conflicting demands of being an engaged father and the main provider of the family at the same time. The question which will be examined is, which strategies do fathers adopt in these contexts? Why are some attempts at reconciling work and family sucessful while others fail? How do gender norms matter in this respect and how are they connected to contemporary societal structures?