ABSTRACT This article examines psychosocial harm at work as a sociological problem of inequality rather than only an issue of individual stress. Drawing on Acker's concept of inequality regimes together with minority stress and intersectionality, and based on 60 in‐depth interviews with workers in Portugal, it analyses how overload, insecurity, work‐family conflict, poor leadership, and weak reporting systems are organized through gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and migration‐related relations of power. Reflexive thematic analysis developed three themes: the organization of harm through workload, insecurity, and leadership; recognition, legitimacy, and the cost of difference; and conditional belonging through redress, informal networks, and compounded exclusion. Across these themes, diversity initiatives organized around single categories left a structural gap for workers marginalized on several dimensions at once. Psychosocial harm was not evenly distributed but produced through labor‐process intensification, unequal legitimacy, conditional belonging, and the individualization of coping. Diversity and well‐being initiatives offered limited protection when unsupported by workload regulation, accountable management, and credible mechanisms of redress. The article contributes to sociology of work debates through an integrative framework that links inequality regimes and minority stress as complementary levels of a single account of psychosocial harm, showing how the proximal mechanisms of minority stress operate through the organisational arrangements that inequality regimes analysis identifies, and how recovery, credibility, and redress come to be distributed unequally through those arrangements across workers' intersecting positions. Workplace well‐being, on this account, requires structural reforms designed around workers' unequal and intersectional exposure to risk.
ABSTRACT Masculinity is often portrayed as a barrier to shifting away from fossil fuels because jobs in extractive industries represent a nostalgic masculine breadwinner identity. Accordingly, proposals for a just energy transition have provoked backlash aimed at protecting against perceived threats to manhood. Yet even though many men in blue‐collar jobs work with green technologies, their roles and perspectives are often overlooked in gender and environmental scholarship. Likewise, little is known about the occupational health and safety risks they face in these roles. We introduce the term teal‐collar job to describe the combination of blue‐collar and green‐collar work. We find that teal‐collar workers are embracing a shifting workplace culture characterized by respect for health and safety, camaraderie, and a desire to be emotionally present for family. However, enthusiastic environmentalism is not a prominent feature within participants' expressions of masculinity. Thus, our study challenges assumptions that working in blue‐collar trades broadly reproduces hegemonic, domineering forms of masculinity.
ABSTRACT Mismatches between preferred and actual work hours are widespread. Previous research has found that they can impact mental health and financial stability and can additionally indicate work–life imbalance. Despite established gendered patterns, little is known about how these vary by gender constellation within couples. Addressing this gap, we examine mismatches among women and men in same‐sex and different‐sex couples through a feminist institutionalist lens. Using German Microcensus data from 2012 to 2019, we first show descriptively that around 10% of respondents in our samples express a wish to change their working hours. Based on pooled OLS regressions, we then find that women experience higher levels of underemployment, whereas men, particularly in different‐sex couples, successfully actualize their preferred hours. Women in same‐sex couples, however, exhibit dampened gender effects, suggesting that gender inequality in mismatches depends on the partner's gender. Conversely, for men, being in a same‐sex couple tends to amplify overemployment slightly. These differences are modest in absolute size, but they are systematically patterned by gender and couple type. In conclusion, we argue that work‐hour mismatches are catalysts of social inequality sustained by engrained gendered dynamics. This implies that gendered institutional mechanisms in the labor market are deeply connected to gender relations in the private sphere, calling for an expansion of the feminist institutionalist perspective.
ABSTRACT Unpaid domestic labor, primarily performed by women, remains largely invisible and undervalued despite its critical contribution to social and economic well‐being. Drawing from the disproportionate burden of household work on women, this paper examines the growing recognition of unpaid domestic labor within the Indian legal and economic discourse, particularly in cases related to compensation and property division. Drawing on feminist economic theory and time‐use surveys as frameworks, the study performs a qualitative analysis of purposively selected legal verdicts to examine how they signal a shift toward acknowledging the economic contributions of homemakers while traditional economic metrics marginalized unpaid labor, perpetuating structural gender inequalities. This article positions the implications of the process of monetization of unpaid domestic labor along with examining the ethical concerns surrounding the monetization of intimate familial labor, which presents complex challenges. Findings indicate a growing judicial trend, moving from assigning “notional income” in compensation cases toward more explicit recognition of unpaid domestic labor's economic value. This paper argues that evolving legal discourse provides a crucial foundation for recognizing and valuing unpaid domestic labor, and is essential not only for advancing gender equity but also for reconfiguring policies on economic and legal frameworks.
ABSTRACT The adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping the very nature of work, yet its social meaning and evaluative implications—particularly for women—remain underexplored. Although existing research has mainly examined GenAI adoption, use, and algorithmic bias, less is known about how the use of GenAI shapes how individuals are evaluated by others. Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model, Role Congruity Theory and techno‐feminism perspectives, this study examines how women's use of GenAI influences perceptions of competence and warmth in academia. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental vignette design [gender*GenAI adoption*task type (teaching vs. research)] with 651 participants, we examine how evaluations vary by academic gender, GenAI adoption, and task domain (teaching vs. research). We find that GenAI adoption generally enhances perceived competence. Women, however, gain the most in research tasks, where technical skills challenge gendered expectations. Conversely, GenAI use reduces perceived warmth, disproportionately penalizing women, especially in research. These findings reveal a “double bind,” highlighting how GenAI adoption may reproduce and intensify gendered evaluative tradeoffs within academic prestige hierarchies and the need for institutional strategies to mitigate relational penalties while recognizing competence.
