The course is conducted in English。

How do governments support families in reconciling work and life choices? What choices do women take in terms of working life, reproduction, and political preferences? What are the consequences in terms of welfare institutions and gender inequality? This course aims to combine together the three strands of literature on political economy, welfare state studies, and gender issues to instruct students about the importance of a gender-based perspective in learning how different institutions, interest groups, and ideas contribute to gender equality. The course provides students with a series of topics discussed in PE, welfare, and gender literature. Students will become familiar with concepts such as bargaining power, discrimination practices in hiring, and motherhood penalty. The second part of the course focuses on specific examples from East Asia and Europe based on the three “I”s of PE studies: interest groups, institutions, and ideas, and how they improve chances for gender equality in different political economies. The third part of the course facilitates students’ direct involvement in specific cases by having them exercise their critical skills through discussions and presentations aimed at identifying policy solutions to problems of gender inequality.

At the end of the course, students will be able to: - Become familiar with concepts commonly used in comparative political economy studies - Categorize the main types of welfare states according to the welfare regime literature and their implications for gender inequality - Differentiate the structural aspects from the agent-based ones that determine gender inequality outcomes - Trace political economy data relevant to gender inequality research from main official sources - Build, with some guidance, a relevant research question for conducting applied social science research with relevant policy implications