This article analyses the generation gap in the duration of long-term career interrup-tions due to childcare among mothers of two children and how are these differences moder-ated by a country’s dominating family policy regime. The outcomes of the multilevel analysis reveal that mothers born after 1960have significantly lower odds of interrupting their career for longer than ten years compared to older women. A country’s dominating family policy model plays a significant role in explaining propensity of long career breaks. Mothers from countries with post-socialist, Southern European and pro-egalitarian models exhibit lower odds of experiencing long-term career interruptions than those in pro-traditionalist countries. Differences between generations are moderated by countries’ family policy models. Among younger generation, the propensity of experiencing long career breaks is smaller in the post-socialist and non-interventionist regimes than in countries with a pro-traditionalist family policy legacy.

The focus of this study is on women and men managers’ career-spouse dynamics. A narrative approach is utilized to investigate how the managers make meaning of the support they receive from their spouses for their careers and how they produce discursively gender relations between the spouses. In particular, we are interested in how the women’s and men’s narration is similar and different. The research data consists of 58 interviews of Finnish women and men who both are having a demanding managerial career and are parents. A narrative analysis provided by Gergen and Gergen (1988) is applied. In the analysis, four groups of narratives by women managers were identified: quitting deficient spousal support, harmoniously flourishing support, inconsistent spousal support, and irrelevant support. The same analysis procedure with male managers produced three groups of narratives: negotiated spousal support, enriching spousal support and declining spousal support. The results indicate that both women and men managers construct their spousal support as changing along the course of their career, however the spousal support is constructed more often non-existent in the narratives of women managers. It is suggested that spousal support in which traditional gender relations are produced seem to be less problematic for male managers’ careers than for those of women managers. Additionally, more fluid and equal gender relations seem to be advantageous for subjective career success and work-family integration for both women and men managers. More information about the work-family relationship in top levels of organizations is needed.

In recent years, productive and reproductive work have become subject to demographic and social changes that are embedded in neo-liberal policies and framings. Neo-liberalism articulates demands, standards and expectations due to new forms of political government and a revaluation of societal values (Lemke 2006) - following Foucault practices of ‘self-governance’. Entrepreneurial universities as increasingly and highly competitive institutions and work places follow neo-liberal interests, p.ex. when fighting to keep the best researchers in their country, when implementing New Public Management strategies, when addressing women to activate female ‘human resources’ and when implementing so called dual career services.

The mixture of neoliberal economic interests in academia and of family interests and concerns becomes important when scientists decide to have children. Based on processes of transformation and reconfiguration within work and family spheres this paper deals with neoliberal modes of the subjectification of dual career parents engaged in science. Using an analytical governmental perspective, discursive and biographical research results of two projects are linked and assessed to trace the interdependencies between the spheres of production and reproduction and current developments of gender relations concerning the compatibility of scientific work and family. More specifically, the empirical data of a discursive analysis and of an interview analysis are intertwined (Tuider 2007), leading to findings concerning the subject and identity formations (of scientists and parents) and adressing the question how gendered subjects locate themselves within their specific subject positioning.

Subject positionings are defined as discursive effects within a social field, while discourses as practices systematically shape the objects they are talking about (Foucault 1973). Current principles of economization guide and instruct (often indirectly, unconsciously) the subject as a neoliberal self in private and work contexts to act independently, autonomously and self-sufficiently (Sauer 2008) – to use the neoliberal rhetoric as an entrepreneurial self (Bröckling 2012). At the same time, neoliberal invocations and requirements seem to carry a subtext of restoring traditional gender relations (Sauer 2008). After analysing the discursive process and enforcement of neo-liberal modes of subject constructions of parenthood in academia, the insights and findings obtained will be discussed and evaluated in terms of its interdependencies between the spheres of production and reproduction in neo-liberalism.