Labour Market Gender Research Articles

Demographic Dynamics in Poor Countries: Labour Market Conditions and Gender Inequalities

This article analyses a Stackelberg differential game in which households' labour supply and fertility decisions are taken assuming husbands as leaders and wives as followers. The model solution yields the optimal number of children and labour supply of male and female. In equilibrium male and female labour supply increases with wage and decreases with children costs and time preference, and the optimal number of children increases with male wage and decreases with cost of children, husband's time preference, and female's wage and time preference. We test the model using Ghana Living Standard Survey Round 4 and find that women are more sensitive to changes in the labour market conditions than males, and better labour market opportunities for women may lead to a strong reduction in fertility.

Why so Few Women in the Labor Market in Turkey?

Turkey has one of the widest male–female employment gaps in the world. The post-1950 interplay between economic growth strategies and the male-breadwinner family led to distinct gendered labor market outcomes in the import-substitution versus the export-led growth periods. Examination of aggregate employment data in the 1955–2009 period, as well as regression analyses of household survey data for 1988, 2000, and 2008 and qualitative data from a 1997 field study, show that the lack of a demand-side challenge to the male-breadwinner family resulted in the institutionalization of the gendered labor division and roles as binding constraints on women' labor supply. The prevalence of informal sector employment and absence of paid work–family reconciliation measures magnify these supply-side constraints. Social conservatism is a more limited constraint, while men' unemployment emerges as a counteracting factor. Nevertheless, women' desire for increased autonomy emerges as the primary motivation for entering the labor market.

Social Epidemiology and Eastern Wisdom

Social epidemiology is the field of study that attempts to understand the social determinants of health and the dynamics between societal settings and health. In the past 3 decades, large-scale studies in the West have accumulated a range of measures and methodologies to pursue this goal. We would like to suggest that there may be conceptual gaps in the science if Western research models are applied uncritically in East Asian studies of socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic inequalities in health. On one hand, there are common concerns, including population aging and gendered labor market participation. Further, international comparison must be built on shared concepts such as socioeconomic stratification in market economies. On the other hand, some aspects of health, such as common mental disorders, may have culturally specific manifestations that require development of perspectives (and perhaps novel measures) in order to reveal Eastern specifics. Exploring and debating commonalities and differences in the determinants of health in Oriental and Occidental cultures could offer fresh inspiration and insight for the next phase of social epidemiology in both regions.

Structural Change in Developing Countries: Has it Decreased Gender Inequality?

This paper examines the evolution of female labor market outcomes from 1987 to 2008 by assessing the role of changing labor demand requirements in four developing countries: Brazil, Mexico, India and Thailand. The results highlight the importance of structural change in reducing gender disparities by decreasing the labor demand for physical attributes. The results show that India, the country with the greatest physical labor requirements, exhibits the largest labor market gender inequality. In contrast, Brazil's labor requirements have followed a similar trend seen in the United States, reducing gender inequality in both wages and labor force participation.

Norme, ruoli e credenze nel divario pensionistico di genere

Individual pension benefits are significantly gendered. The causes of this are known: the female employment rate is low, moreover women have discontinuous professional careers and they reach high and well-remunerated positions less than men. The aim of this work is to provide an analysis of the gender pension gap phenomenon in Italy depending on a large range of variation sources. First we define and describe the gender pension gap. Secondly we examine some sources of variation concerning labour market (gender differences linked to participation in the workforce, to contracts, to positions and wages) and features of pension and welfare systems. Finally, using the AGING dataset (sample of 2502 Italian workers), we look at the subjective dimensions that mediate action (the preferences that guide the women’s choices and the beliefs about the means available to them).

Childhood General Mental Ability and Midlife Psychosocial Work Characteristics as Related to Mental Distress, Neck/Shoulder Pain and Self‐rated Health in Working Women and Men

Psychosocial work characteristics including high demands, lack of control and poor social support have consistently been linked to poor health as has poor general mental ability (GMA). However, less is known about the relationships between stable individual factors such as GMA, psychosocial work characteristics and health. The present study investigated how childhood mental ability and psychosocial work characteristics relate to health in terms of mental distress, neck/shoulder pain (NSP) and self-rated health (SRH). Data on childhood GMA, occupational level, self-reports of demands, control and social support and health (mental distress, NSP and SRH) in midlife came from working women (n=271) and men (n=291) included in a Swedish school cohort. Hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for occupational level, were used to examine associations between childhood GMA, self-reports of high demands, low control and poor social support and the three health indicators. Taking into consideration the gendered labor market and variations in health patterns between women and men, gender specific analyses were performed. There were no significant associations between childhood GMA and health indicators. Further, there were no significant interactions between GMA and psychosocial work factors. As regards the strength of the associations between GMA, psychosocial work factors and health, no consistent differences emerged between women and men. In a cohort of healthy and working middle-aged women and men, self-reports of current psychosocial work characteristics seem to be more strongly linked to health, than are stable childhood factors such as GMA.

<i>Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 Jennifer Fronc Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945. By Elizabeth Alice Clement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 344. $59.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). When I was about thirteen, a cousin decided it was time to teach me about the world of dating. I distinctly remember she warned me not to order the most expensive item on the menu during a date because the boy might then expect (and maybe even pressure) me to "put out." Where did this concept of tit for tat come from? In Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945, Elizabeth Alice Clement demonstrates how changing courtship patterns in the early twentieth century served to marginalize prostitution, resulting in the monetization of sexual behavior and its instantiation in dating. Clement's stated aim is to expand on Kathy Peiss's now classic and pioneering Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Peiss describes how young, working-class women ("charity girls") traded sexual favors for "treats," such as clothing, stockings, theater tickets, and dinners. For young women, despite low wages and responsibilities to their family's economy, "treating" permitted them to participate in New York City's emerging leisure culture. However, Peiss contends, treating served as "a source of autonomy and pleasure as well as a cause for [women's] continuing oppression."1 [End Page 387] Clement wants to nuance our understanding of the treating exchange. In Love for Sale she argues that, in the decade and a half before World War I, treating opened up a new middle ground between chastity and prostitution. Because it fit squarely "in the context of working-class sexual norms and understandings of morality," treating allowed "young women to avoid the label of prostitution but still engage in sexual exchange for material gain" (46–47). Clement's most important contribution is her discussion of treating, prostitution, courtship, and dating as part of a continuum of sexual behaviors and practices; she claims that treating not only transformed courtship but also "disturbed the place that prostitution held in American urban culture," which held unexpected consequences for young women (3). The changing conditions of prostitution affected the context in which sexual behavior in dating and courtship occurred. Treating, according to Clement, was "an ingenious compromise in a world where most women earned little but increasingly attempted to seize economic and social freedom" (48). However, in the early twentieth century, this social freedom could only be achieved through men. Though Clement acknowledges that for men, treating "emphasized [their] masculinity" and confirmed women's passivity (48), she also claims that "women clearly had the upper hand in the treating exchange" (73). This seems to be an optimistic interpretation of treating at best and a contradiction at worst. Clement regards treating as a liberating shift in working-class sexual mores, one that had positive benefits for young women. Yet the practice should also be understood as a Faustian bargain. Treating cannot be separated from the gendered labor market in which its participants worked, and the practice was one of a very few choices for women seeking to obtain luxuries or simply make ends meet. Although treating may have been more attractive than prostitution for young women, it was still not an exchange among equals—or an equal exchange. Moreover, women were not always entirely in control of treating, and the consequences could be as dire as physical or sexual assault. Clement nods in this direction, stating that "men might threaten, bluster, or simply refuse to participate," but, she continues, "there is little evidence they did anything more" (73). However, my research in the same sources has uncovered evidence that men did do more than merely threaten or bluster. For example, a Committee of Fourteen investigator reported on a conversation he had with a bartender named Henry. Henry confided to the investigator that he took a married woman "to Inwood where he forcibly had sexual intercourse with her." Henry also remarked on how "simple it was to 'get to' women...

Social Security and Gender in Uruguay: An Analysis of the Differences in Pension Access (Seguridad Social y Género en Uruguay: Un Análisis de las Diferencias de Acceso a la Jubilación) (Spanish)

In Uruguay, the pension programs cover over 90% of the elderly. Men are more likely to be eligible for the contributory pensions, while women are over-represented in the assistential and survivor pension programs. This difference is linked to the fact that women tend to have longer spells out of the labour force than men. In this context, we analyze the difference in contributory pension access between men and women. First, we present the gender labor market and demographic differences. Second, we document the social security reform implemented in 1996. Lastly, we estimate the probability of complying with the requirements to access a contributory pension. Although the punctual estimations have certain limitations, they suggest that there are gender differences in access.

Family Stability and Labor Market Gender Convergence

The present paper examines the historical development in the structure of the family in terms of marriage, divorce, fertility and labor 1886-2007 in order to map quantitative changes. The paper draws new information from novel Norwegian data. Along with the changing family relations we also quantify the closing of the gender gap by converging trends for both labor participation rates and wages. The paper concludes that there is a clear correspondence between gender convergence in the labor market and less stable family relations.

"A Female … Will Not Be Available Here": Gendered Labour Markets in Northwest Pakistan's Rural Development Sector

While Pakistan has legally binding mechanisms to promote gender equality in employment, labour markets are shaped by the highly gender-segregated society they are embedded in. Based on the conceptualisation of labour markets as gendered institutions, I explore how gender generates unequal access to the labour market for social organisers—a term referring to a type of development practitioner—in the Hazara region, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan, making it difficult for women to participate in an occupational field where they are urgently needed to work with village women. Drawing on a comparison of job announcements and employees’ profiles, I argue that social norms generate gendered inequalities of access to jobs as social organisers by regulating access to information, ability to travel, and eligibility for employment. In this article, I contribute to a better understanding of the gendered nature of this specific labour market, the impediments to gender equality in employment, and the need for an improvement in the work contexts of the female labour force in rural Pakistan in order to make it possible for women to do the job.

The "Rosies" of Rockford: Working Women in Two Rockford Companies in the Depression and World War II Eras

The Great-Depression -era image of the Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange and the Riveter from WWII became iconic images of their respective eras. These pictures represent the lives of women during these two time periods. The poor mother with her children shows the difficulties that women and families faced during the Depression. Women struggled to feed and clothe themselves and their families with meager wages while society discouraged mothers from working to preserve the ideal of bread -winning fathers. In Rosie, promotional image by the United States government, women were promoted as strong individuals and productive citizens because their labor was needed to replace the men who went to war. Despite how memorable these images portrayed the women of their times, they did not reflect women's entire experiences. Historians have shown how deceptive these images were in respect to women's actual lives. Despite the difficulties involved in finding job, many women during the Depression era had to work to help their families survive; they could not just be stay-at-home mothers. During the war, many Rosies in the nation also worked to feed and clothe their families, and many more women took pride in the work they did. Yet Rosie does not show how these women's household duties, or the second shift remained unchanged even though they worked jobs. After the war, women were expected to return to their roles as mothers and wives regardless of their need or desire to work. Historians such as Alice Kessler Harris and Ruth Milkman have shown how employment was gendered by the early twentieth century. Women's jobs in the economy as whole were segregated from men's jobs and were also segregated within factories. The rationale was that men needed family wage and women were only secondary earners. This conditioned women's encounter with all jobs and institutionalized the labor market gender structure and popular prejudice that relegated women to low-pay, dead-end jobs. Women's limited job opportunities and the segregated labor industry have been documented in Nancy F. Gabin's, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, and Ruth Milkman's Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Yet, micro-level analysis of women in city such as Rockford, Illinois, then the state's third largest city, has been largely neglected. Rockford women's employment reflected both national and corporate expectations for women in the 1930s and 1940s and challenged local ideas of married and single women's role in the home and workplace.1 By looking at women in Rockford, Illinois, an industrial city transformed by World War II, it is possible to look beneath the iconic images to uncover the real lives of women as they lived and transitioned between these two eras. Rockford had its own history of generating strong, independent women. In 1849 Anna Peck Sill started the Women's Seminary, which eventually developed into Rockford College. One Rockford newspaperman of the era had declared it a women's rights hotbed. The college did influence several notable graduates, such as Julie Lathrop, the first woman to head federal agency, Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, and other champions for women's rights. Most women of Rockford, however, lived according to the conventional expectations of the times. It would take nationally transformative events, such as the Great Depression and World War II, to change the lives of these women. Did job opportunities for Rockford women in the late 1920s to the middle 1940s change? If so, what did this mean for women? How did the Depression and war years economic boom affect Rockford businesses and who they hired? How did societal ideals rather than the free market impact companies' hiring policies regarding women? …

Sue Yeandle (ed.) (2009), Policy for a Change: Local Labour Market Analysis and Gender Equality. Bristol: Policy Press. £65, pp. 218, hbk.

Sue Yeandle (ed.) (2009), Policy for a Change: Local Labour Market Analysis and Gender Equality. Bristol: Policy Press. £65, pp. 218, hbk.

Inside the Locker Room: Male Homosociability in the Advertising Industry

The use of the term homosociability by male employers and employees has been a key issue in the construction and maintenance of the gendered labour market, especially in senior‐level jobs. Male homosociability encompasses the formal old boys' networks and informal clubs or meetings, as well as humour and banter, referred to metaphorically in this article as the locker room. This article examines the locker room and its resulting forms of socializing, socialization, communication and rituals found in the advertising industry. To gain a clearer understanding of how the locker room constructs workplace opportunities, this article draws upon qualitative research and analysis and examines major service occupations in the advertising industry and the executives who inhabit them. Studying the relationship between the locker room and the production process provides additional perspectives on service work in the corporate sector, occupations and gender inequality.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Blended Learning Approaches to Enhance Gender Mainstreaming

At the German labour market gender inequalities exist with respect to occupation. In order to counteract these inequalities, it is important to establish a policy of gender mainstreaming also in the area of education and to orient training measures in a gender-sensitive way. But how? The authors introduce the blended learning concept of the further education measure Managementand show that the consideration of female learning characteristics is possible when developing training measures. The evaluation of E-Office Management illustrates that a gender-sensitive further education measure can contribute to the enhancement of gender mainstreaming. On the basis of the described aspects of blended learning scenarios as well as due to the evaluation results, a set of standard rules for gender-sensitive, computer-assisted learning concepts has been formulated.

The early inception of labor market gender differences

This paper analyzes gender differences in jobs while in school using school-class-based samples, a setting in which education differences, “glass ceilings”, and career interruptions due to parenthood are irrelevant. I find that in this early stage of life boys already earn substantially more than girls. The earnings gap cannot be explained by differences in participation rates and hours of work, nor by gender wage gaps within job types. It is entirely due to the fact that girls work more in job types with relatively low wages, in particular babysitting. During the period considered, 1984–2001, the gender patterns of jobs while in school largely remained unchanged.

Gender-Based Employment and Income Differences in Urban China: Considering the Contributions of Marriage and Parenthood

Previous research on China's labor market gender gaps has emphasized the human and political capital disadvantages of women and new discrimination in the reform era. Analyzing the China Urban Labor Survey/China Adult Literacy Survey, this paper shows that while women are significantly disadvantaged by various measures of human and political capital, these disadvantages explain little of the observed gender gaps in employment status and earnings. Instead, gender gaps in employment and earnings are strongly related to family status. It is only married women and mothers who face significant disadvantages. This finding is likely tied to the fact that wives and mothers spend much more time than husbands and fathers doing household chores, even net of controls for potential earnings. These results suggest that research on gender disparities in urban China would be complemented by additional attention to family-work conflict, a topic which looms large in research on gender and labor in most other countries.

Ability, Schooling Choices and Gender Labor Market Discrimination: Evidence for Chile

This paper analyzes gender differences in the Chilean labor market, formally addressing the selection of individuals into schooling levels and its impact on gender gaps. The paper utilizes a new and rich data set containing information on labor market outcomes, schooling attainment and schooling performance, as well as variables characterizing individuals’ family background. Although the results show statistically significant gender differences in several dimensions of the Chilean labor market, these gaps depend largely on individuals’ level of schooling. Nonetheless, these findings should not be taken as decisive evidence of discrimination in the Chilean labor market, as future research based on better information might explain some of the unexplained labor market gaps.

Niches, Labour Market Segregation, Ethnicity and Gender

The topic of this JEMS special issue is how the formation of ethnic niches is gendered. We combine theories on niching with those on gendered labour market segregation and show that there are similarities in the underlying processes and explanations. The interaction between niching and gendered labour market segregation takes place at four points. In the first place, entrepreneurship is less of an option for immigrant women than it is for immigrant men. Yet, in some sectors, immigrant women have more options for entrepreneurship than they had in their countries of origin. Their participation in the niche, as workers or as entrepreneurs, strengthens the niche and ensures its continuity. Secondly, women's participation in some niches leads to demands for highly flexible child-care and thus the development of a further niche. In the third place, the concentration of immigrant women in domestic work takes shape as a niche, especially as this sector becomes more ethnicised. The domestic sector, furthermore, is divided into sub-sectors, which leads to niching within a niche. Niches—including domestic work—offer an environment that is regarded as safe, and near to the private sphere. Fourthly, earlier studies have shown how the labour market is divided into a primary and a secondary segment. In the first segment, jobs are fixed and there is a career perspective. In the second, work is flexible and there is no career progression. Immigrants and women are more often found in the second segment. Research presented here indicates that work that is generally regarded as women's work proves also to be accessible to immigrant men. This implies that segregation occurs less between sexes and more between the second and the first segment of the labour market.

Guldpiger og Teknikdrenge – køn i teknisk skole og dets konsekvenser

The article shows how gender works as an unnoticed principle of organization at a Danish technical school. We point out how ideas of subjects studied and gender are interwoven. As a consequence of this students are given different possibilities at the technical school depending on their choice of subject and their gender mark and the way they do gender at the technical schools. These uneven possibilities can only be understood in relation to the gendered labour market.