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The traditional male breadwinner model, where men are responsible for economic provision while women are responsible for the home, is in decline across the western world as women are increasingly taking up paid employment. However, the meaning of breadwinning in the context of people's everyday family lives has received little academic attention. Based on qualitative interviews, this article analyses how the adult children of Pakistani immigrants in Norway understand and justify women's employment, with particular attention to how the economic aspect of women's work is conceptualised. The study finds that women's employment is accorded distinctively different meaning, and it is argued that the key distinctions are captured in two analytical dimensions: (1) the extent to which the economic contribution of women's work is recognised; and (2) the ideal gender division of participation in paid work. The male breadwinner ideal is more explicitly challenged along the second dimension, than the first.

A pertinent question in contemporary Europe is whether the children of immigrants will reproduce the gender-complementary practices and ideals of the immigrant generation, which often include strong expectations that women should prioritize family obligations over the pursuit of paid work. This article analyses the cultural and moral understandings at stake in second-generation women's reflections on and practices of combining motherhood and paid work, and explores the space for negotiating such understandings in the family. The study is based on in-depth interviews with second-generation women of Pakistani descent in Norway, and interviews with some of their husbands. The findings show that the moral understandings and practices of the parent generation are not merely passed on to the second generation; rather they are challenged and reinterpreted in ways that support mothers' participation in paid work. The article argues that this change is facilitated by the cultural and institutional context that the Norwegian welfare state represents.

Using longitudinal register data from Norway, the article examines the impact of having a child with intensified care needs on maternal and paternal employment, within a gender equality promoting welfare state. The hypothesis is that parents with a chronically sick or disabled child will have lower employment probabilities, lower labour earnings and higher sickness absence than parents with a healthy child, and that mothers are more affected than fathers when having a child with extra care needs. A quasi-experimental difference-in-difference regression model shows that the employment probabilities of parents with a sick or disabled child are comparable to those of parents with a healthy child, both for mothers and fathers. The analyses further reveal that having a chronically sick or disabled child reduces labour earnings and increases long-term sickness absence among mothers, while fathers' labour earnings and sickness absence are less affected.

Across Europe, children of low-educated migrants are entering high-status occupations. While the research literature has accounted for the determinants of this social mobility, few studies have explored how social mobility affects the lives of second-generation immigrant men and women in different ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 62 descendants of migrants in high-status occupations in Norway, this article asks how second-generation women and men experience their gendered opportunities and constraints after achieving upward social mobility. The analyses show how social mobility brings the second generation into social milieus where their majority Norwegian colleagues become their most relevant references for how to do work and family. Both the second-generation women and men share a strong dedication to work, however, while this requires the women to challenge gender-complementary expectations, the men largely rely on gender-complementary arrangements. The analyses thus suggest that social mobility changes the lives of women more than those of men.

A large body of work has demonstrated the substantial intergenerational mobility experienced by children of immigrants, yet the institutional determinants of incorporation are poorly understood. Building on insights from neo-classical assimilation theory, this article analyzes in-depth interviews with 62 high-achieving children of labor immigrants from Pakistan, Turkey, India, and Morocco and investigates how they maneuvered through Norway's educational system and reached their current positions as medical doctors, lawyers, and business professionals. We show that these children of immigrants from low-income households capitalized on a series of institutional opportunity structures provided by Norway's egalitarian welfare state, such as a school system with high standardization and low stratification, free higher education, and a cultural and institutional context that supports women's employment. In line with neo-classical assimilation theory, we argue that the specific institutional structures and cultural beliefs in the Norwegian context shape the strategies and forms of adaptation chosen by ethnic minority groups. However, our analyses suggest the need for careful consideration of how such strategies and adaptations vary across national contexts.