The article is devoted to the analysis of gender regimes in welfare states from the angle of alarmist fatherhood discourse, which appeared in the 80s. Gender regime is a set of rules and norms which create stable expectations re-garding gender relations and assign specific rights and responsibilities to men and women. The theoretic frame of the comparative analysis consists of the clas-sification of social welfare regimes by G. Esping-Andersen and the model of gender policy regimes by J. Sainsbury. In the welfare states, that can be classi-fied as belonging to liberal, social-democratic and conservative regimes, there were different reasons of the fatherhood crisis. In the liberal regime states (the UK and the USA) “fatherless society” was the source of public social alarm, along with the weakening moral authority of fathers. In the social-democratic regime of Scandinavian countries the strengthening of egalitarian family relations was in the focus of family social policy. In the conservative regime countries like Germany the traditional male-breadwinner model became socially and economically out-of-date. The author comes to the conclusion that in all the countries which were being analyzed real fathering practices lag behind the public discourse and conducted social policy.read in PDF>>>
