Across the rich democracies, social policy changes over the last two decades have been driven by a concern with "activation" and economic self-sufficiency, for women and mothers no less than for men and fathers. This is an epochal shift in social policy, politics and gender relations. Earlier family and policy systems supported women's caregiving and met social care needs in ways that were accompanied by gender inequality. Today, state policies are only partly successful in supporting care needs and facilitating mothers' employment, and have contradictory effects on gender relations.

What would it take to develop political and policy support for both social care needs and gender equality?

Ann Orloff is Professor of Sociology, Gender Studies and Political Science at NorthWestern University, USA and chair of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 19 on Poverty, Social Welfare, and Social Policy. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Harvard University.

Orloff's areas of interest include political sociology, social policy, sociology of gender, historical and comparative sociology, and social and feminist theory. Her research focuses on gendered social policies and feminist politics in the developed world.

Orloff is currently at work on a manuscript, Farewell to Maternalism? State policies, Feminist Politics, and Mothers' Employment, that examines the shifts in the gendered logics of welfare and employment policies in the U.S. and other capitalist democracies and the implications of those shifts for feminism.