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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Norwegian parental leave policy for fathers, the father’s quota, which has reached a mature age of 26 years, asking how gender equality has been affected in working life.

Based on interviews with 28 fathers who have used the father’s quota, the paper analyzes the connection between leave design, its use and impacts by using the design elements of individualization, generosity and non-transferability.

Findings show that in granting fathers an individual, earmarked and non-transferable right, the welfare state has contributed to turning leave taking into a norm for modern fathering. The generosity in terms of length and full wage compensation strengthens it as a right in working life. Fathers being paid their full wages for staying at home taking care of their child emphasize the dual-carer norm. The analyses show that the collision between fatherhood and the ideal of the unencumbered employee has weakened in many types of organizations.

The paper addresses the request put forward by Lewis and Stumbitz (2017) and Moss and Deven (2015) where they state that there has been little research addressing how parental leave is implemented in working life.

The paper criticizes current directions in research on women and management. The purpose of this paper is to propose new directions for such research.

The paper is conceptual and is based on a review of recent literature on elites and the gendering of elite positions internationally and in the Nordic countries. This literature is discussed using studies of changing power dynamics and the development of welfare state services in a context of globalization.

The paper argues that one needs to move away from the focus on individual traits and “female management” to study the processes and practices that (re)produce power differences between men and women in the organisations where they take place. Two contextual factors make new directions in research necessary. The first is the knowledge economy changing organisations from bureaucratic towards democratic forms at the level of production and the financialization of the economy centralizing power at corporate level. The second is the challenging of Nordic welfare states by globalization of the economy. The welfare state results in a “democratization of motherhood” that increases women's participation in the economy, but may limit their opportunity to obtain elite positions.

To understand women's exclusion of elite positions, new research should combine multidimensional analyses of gender and power to explore the symbolic connections between masculinity and “big money”.

From a post-colonial feminist perspective, this chapter explores how themes of gender and ethnicity combine to produce an embodied narrative of the everyday lived experience of one immigrant woman in a small country town. Her story was told to me as part of an interpretive study via a face to face interview. Her personal history of trauma and dislocation influenced by the wider cultural frameworks and expectations that inform her way of doing gender and ethnicity shape the way she experiences the pleasures and pains of a rural life. In this rural place, she finds that her embodied narrative does not conform to the set of socially constructed meanings that lead to inclusion so her body is reconstructed as “other” and as such is subjected to covert and overt practices that exclude and marginalize her. The discussion is situated within the field of rural studies as the settlement of immigrant women in rural places is seen as a process of social restructuring contextualized and influenced by the social and cultural meanings attached to those places.