Description
Women and men should have equal career opportunities. Different traditions in Norway and Poland and lack of knowledge about individual rights and opportunities may hinder this. The project aims to improve work-life balance and gender equality. The research will provide insight into a number of psychological and sociological factors operating at micro, meso and macro level in Norway and Poland. The factors and the interplay between them will be addressed by analyzing: 1. What happens when people migrate from less egalitarian (Polish) to more egalitarian (Norwegian) culture? 2. What facilitates and hinders the shift towards improved work-life balance and gender equality? Knowledge from the project will be useful for policy making within gender mainstreaming both in Poland and Norway and Norwegian immigration politics. All partners constitute a consortium having renowned expertise in the issues of migration and gender equality. Bilateral relations will be strengthened by distant cooperation, joint workshops and common participation at the international and national conferences.
Summary of project results
Promoting Work-Life Balance (WLB) and gender equality (GE) mainstreaming, enabling equal opportunities for women and men in advancing their professional careers, are suggested to build the effective economy of Europe in 21st century. Our research project aimed to explore WLB and GE issues asking 1. What happens when people migrate from less egalitarian (Polish) to more egalitarian (Norwegian) culture and 2. What facilitates and hinders the shift towards improved WLB and GE. Our results show that in Norway, the welfare state has become a central institutional actor in forming parenthood and work-life balance practices by introducing state incentives for paternal care such as the father quota. We have identified factors that constitute a form of cultural capital enabling family roles to become more egalitarian in both Poland and in Norway and they were announced during several meetings and conferences with local NGOs and practitioners working in the field of gender equality and work-life balance (overall 11 conferences, workshops and seminars were organized and 68 presentations on project results were made). Our project members have become actively involved in groups working closely with models on national level that are aimed at improving the quality of life of migrants in Poland – the practices observed and analyzed within our research scheme in Polish-Norwegian studies will be now used in Poland and in Norway. The project was overall of both academic and application value, as its results are well documented in national and international publications (29 publications) and used for trainings and advisory recommendations aimed at: (1) immigrant couples, (2) couples in general, and (3) institutions working with immigrants or organizations promoting gender equality and work-life balance.
Summary of bilateral results
Our partnership allowed us to continue the cooperation between institutions as we have submitted new proposal to Polish National Science Center. We have also increased Polish-Norwegian deeper understanding which allowed us to have a more nuanced model explanation of the results achieved. We have also established important networking groups in both Poland and Norway to be connected with different groups working within both work-life balance and gender equality issues. We are being invited as experts presenting the results of our project to events both targeted at practitioner and academics working in the similar fields. We have prepared more publications than planned and we have attended more conferences than planned as the project’s results have raised such higher interest. We strengthened skills in establishing and managing the cross-cultural collaboration. We have also supported innovative approach in our study through learning other-culture perspective. We also raised awareness of different approaches to migrants in each other teams. We have also developed common interest and work connected to the Child Protective Services as it turned out to be important issue regarding situation of Poles in Norway. The partnership has given us international experience in terms of collaboration within larger projects, which is important in order to build a research career. The project leader of WP4 received in 2015 a research grant for “Young Research talents” (7 millions NKR) from the Research council in Norway and we believe that one of the factors that were decisive here was her experience from a larger international project (PAR Migration navigator). Through this project, our researchers acquired key competence regarding Polish migration and they are all working within these topics still today (within WP4: one of employment advisor for Polish migrants in Norway, one as a PhD candidate within Polish migration and one as project leader for a local project dealing with Polish teenagers). We also believe that an added value of the project is the link we have been able to make between teaching and research. The findings from the project have been presented to students at different levels, have been also implemented in curriculum of our respective institutions, giving students insight to differences between Norwegian and Polish societies and families, both in Poland and Norway. Our results and publications will be an important input into professorships of WP leaders.