The work-life balance directive: Towards a gender equalizing EU regulatory welfare state? Denmark and Poland compared
Caroline de la Porte is Professor in comparative and european social policy at Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on the Europeanization of public policy reform, especially in the area of labour market and social policy. She is currently CBS lead of the Nordforsk-financed project, ‘Reimaging Norden in an Evolving World’ (ReNEW) (2018-2023), and leads a WP on Fair labour markets in the EU-Horizon financed project ‘The Future of European Social Citizenship’ (EUSocialcit) (2020-2023)
​
Trine P. Larsen is an associate professor at the Employment Relations Research Centre (FAOS), Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Her main research interests are industrial relations, work-life balance, atypical employment, and segmented labor markets in Denmark and in an international comparative perspective.
Dorota Szelewa is an Assistant Professor in Social Justice at the University College Dublin and an Editor in Chief of Journal of Family Studies. Her research interests include comparative social policy, post-communist social policy transformation, leave policies and family studies, reproductive rights, migration, and institutional evolution. Personal webpage:
This article examines the implementation of the European Union’s (EU) work-life balance directive in Denmark and Poland through examining the earmarking of paid parental leave. This enables us to assess whether the EU could be emerging as a gender equalizing regulatory welfare state (RWS). Our analysis points to tensions arising when regulatory decisions are made at a higher level of governance but require implementation and funding at lower levels of governance. In both countries, there are similar parental leave schemes ex-ante, and major actors had similar initial stances on parental leave, favoring stagnation. Yet the plans to implement show how the actors’ positions changed, and the likely result is extended parental leave, with payment (known as double expansion) and more gender-equal participation (degenderization) in parental leave. Although in two different institutional settings, the similar outcome suggests that these changes are due to the European Union acting as an emerging RWS, which influences Member States’ regulatory instruments with fiscal elements.