The article deals with the phenomenon of the sexual harassment in the working place in the Czech Republic. The authors analyze sexual harassment as one of effects of men's symbolic power over women causing cultural misrecognition of women and at the same time as one of factors supporting economic inequality between men and women in western societies. They apply the two-dimensional theory of justice by Nancy Fraser and argue that the existence of sexual harassment confirms Fraser's notion of gender as bivalent category as well as the necessity for combining the cultural politics of recognition with politics of redistribution. Furthermore, the article presents the research's results on incidence and forms of the sexual harassment in the population of the Czech Republic which was realized by the Public Opinion Research Center and by the department Gender & sociology of the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Science of the Czech Republic. The research confirms the existence and high significance of the phenomenon of sexual harassment within the working relations in the Czech Republic.
The intersectional perspective represents, in Czech sociology, an untapped opportunity to examine the interaction between the different lines of inequality in the process of constantly changing social structure. This article aims to enrich current Czech sociological research in two ways. Firstly, it analyses and describes the impacts of the economic crisis on labour market relations in the Czech Republic. Secondly, it applies the intersectional perspective in a quantitative analysis of structural inequalities. In this perspective, we analyse the changing structure of the labour market between 2008 and 2012 at the intersection of gender, class (education), age and parenthood, using statistical indicators. Moreover, we use event-history analysis to capture the risk of job loss in the first phase of the crisis (2008–2010). Our analysis shows that the economic crisis deepened existing inequalities in the labour market, further differentiated female labour market prospects by educational attainment, especially in interaction with parenthood, and also rapidly deteriorated the labour market situation of men with low education, including fathers of small children., Alena Křížková, Lenka Formánková., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
Work-life balance is a popular topic both in European and gradually also Czech sociology and in European strategies for employment and for dealing with population ageing. The article explores the topic of work-life balance from a theoretical perspective, in the context of contemporary European and world sociology, and from an empirical perspective, on the basis of a representative sociological survey of a population of parents conducted in 2005. The hypothesis of the pressure people experience to combine work and a family and gendered culture (Van der Lippe, Jager, Kops 2006), which puts the Czech Republic in the ranks of not very progressive countries in terms of gender equality, is verified in this survey, because, even though the majority of parents claimed that they are able to combine work and a family, there are nonetheless clear structural obstacles stemming from the design of public policies and institutions, which obstruct this balance. The Czech labour market is not parent or family-friendly, and parenthood (especially motherhood) is a handicap in the Czech labour market. Work-life balance is not the subject of any public or political discussion, and consequently Czech parents do not usually have a comprehensive view of the problem and regard it as serious. Mothers and fathers know that combining work and family is the reality of their lives and at the same time a private problem that they try to solve by means of various strategies.
The study focuses on motivations for going into business which proved to be significantly differentiated according to gender. Women cited as one of the main motivation for going into business the possibilities for combining work and family responsibilities. Conversely, businessmen make a clear separation between their professional and family lives, and for them business is almost exclusively a mean for their own professional development. The study revealed that the structure of company management, from the perspective of gender and from the perspective of the particular line of business, has a fundamental influence on the distribution of work and responsibilities between partners and on the strategies whereby this distribution is reasoned and arranged. Author considers that the way of managing the company is dependent on sex of people associated in business, on their relationship (marriage) and line of business they work in.