Women In Labor Market Research Articles

Gender as More Than a Dummy Variable: Feminist Approaches to Discrimination

To avow that gender is more than an independent--or dummy--variable is to posit the centrality of gender (as well as race and class) in economic analysis. Conventional economic methods tend to neglect the process by which gender interacts with and shapes other social forces and institutions. The basis for a feminist alternative is the assertion that the social construction of gender permeates men's and women's labor market experiences. A feminist definition of discrimination is proposed which emphasizes process as well as outcomes; measurable as well as unquantifiable repercussions. Labor market discrimmation is a multidimensional interaction of economic, social, political, and cultural forces in both the workplace and the family, resulting in differential outcomes involving pay, employment, and status. Several propositions toward developing feminist approaches to labor market discrimination are illustrated with examples of feminist research. These propositions delineate feminist work on: the importance of praxis-based research; the necessity for methodological pluralism; the role of power in wage-setting within the firm; the impact of macro-social institutions; and the intersections of gender, race, class, and other social forces.

Comparing inequalities in women's and men's health: Britain in the 1990s

Data on over 20,000 women and men aged 20–59 are analysed from the British General Household Survey for 1991 and 1992, showing the importance of separately analysing educational qualifications, occupational class and employment status for both women and men. Own occupational class and employment status are the key structural factors associated with limiting long-standing illness, but educational qualifications are particularly good predictors of women's self-assessed health. Class inequalities in health are less pronounced among women who are not in paid work. Women's limiting long-standing illness relates solely to their own labour market characteristics, whereas self-assessed health relates to wider aspects of women's everyday lives, including their household material conditions, and for married women, their partner's occupational class and employment status. Men's unemployment has adverse consequences for the health of their wives, which occurs through the mechanism of the family living in disadvantaged material circumstances. Women's labour market position and role in the family have undergone substantial changes since the 1970s. Approaches to measuring inequalities in women's health need to reflect changes in women's employment participation and changes in marital status and living arrangements.

The position of women in the Hungarian labour market after the regime change

Abstract This paper examines changes in the position of Hungarian women in the labor market since 1989, arguing that women are disadvantaged in a competitive market because of specific features in their social position and their lack of means of defending their interests. Drawing on surveys and other government statistics, women are compared with men in terms of unemployment, their opportunity to do wage work, returns to schooling (which are low, and women are more likely to possess formal educational qualifications), mobility, wage and income differences, and the consequences of sex segregation of jobs. In response to unfavorable economic conditions, households have increased domestic work and decreased consumption. Financial problems are damaging family relations, according to recent surveys.

Tax Policy and Feminism: Competing Goals and Institutional Choices

Despite the dramatic increase in women's labor market participation in recent decades, women continue to perform a disproportionate share of family labor. Feminists have long been concerned that the gendered division of family labor reduces women's wages and circumscribes women's life choices and economic power.This article considers what tax policy might contribute to a feminist legal agenda that aims to redress the gendered division of labor. It argues that tax policy can make an important contribution but that some prior scholarship has overlooked the normative and institutional complexity of translating feminist goals into concrete policy prescriptions.

FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together

FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together. Don Mills, Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1994, 294pp., $32.95 softcover. In the mid-nineties in Canada, child care is a topic on which there has been much scholarly and policy thinking, but virtually no political action. A plank of three federal election campaigns (in 1984, 1988 and 1993), child care is more of a predicament now, according to Friendly, than it was in the 1980s. The contradictions apparent in contemporary concern about balancing work and family, about equality of women in the workplace and in society, and at the same time, the policy neglect of child come alive in Friendly's book, the essential thesis of which is that Canada needs a system of child not as a welfare program, but as an essential public service. The book is organized into four sections: Part 1 addresses what child care is and is not, and how high quality child care benefits children, families, women, and the broader society. Part 2 explores how the absence of a national child care policy in Canada has contributed to uneven and unreliable availability of services. Part 3 provides a history of the development of child care in Canada from the nineteenth century, through the advocacy groups of the past few decades, and into current national debates. Part 4 brings together the pieces of a proposed policy framework for a Canadian child care system including universal accessibility, public funding, comprehensiveness, and high quality. Care Policy in Canada consists of twelve chapters in addition to preface and introduction. The book's cover shows several advocacy buttons including one that captures the essence of the need for a child care system in Canada, as argued by Friendly. It simply states, Child Care Keeps Taxpaying Parents Working. A 1991 Daily Food Bank of Toronto survey, cited in the book, indetifies child care responsibilities as the reason for not working among almost one-quarter of food bank users. With eroding social services, including child care accessibility since 1991 with cuts to programs in several provinces, it may well be that those not working because of problems with child care has risen. It has become clear in recent years, paralleling the Social Policy Review, that those not working create a double challenge to the Canadian economy: they do not contribute income taxes which public coffers much need in the 1990s, and they often need public support (unemployment insurance and/or social assistance) which create demand on those same public coffers. If the reason for unemployment for such a significant proporation of food bank users is lack of child then providing child care would be a cost-effective solution to an expensive, and likely growing, social problem. Equality for women cannot be achieved without access to child care, states Friendly, without equivocation (p.22). She provides compelling evidence and argument in support of this conclusion throughout the book. For example, analyses of the National Care Survey find in 1993 that despite the dramatic increase in women's labour market participation in recent years, even among mothers of young children, the rate of labour market participation among single mothers with pre-school children remains considerably lower than comparable rates among married women. This suggests that it is the presence of children younger than school age who do not have child care options that prevents many single mothers from working for pay. A telling graphic (p.43) reveals the degree of potential need for child care in Canada (numbers of children with mothers in the paid work force) in relation to the numbers of regulated child care spaces (where governments establish, monitor and enforce legal requirements)-- a quick calculation suggests that the need/supply ratio is about 5.411 for children aged 0-5. Among children aged 6-12, the ratio of need to supply is 22/1. Friendly is careful to caution the reader that need for child care and demand for it are not identical, with need being assumed if both parents are in the paid workforce, but demand being a function of other options for care and the family's values. …

Gender, Work Time and Flexible Employment

The aim of this article is to analyse how differentiation in men's and women's work time arrangements in the Danish market has changed in recent decades. This is a time period characterized by profound restructuring in the economy. On the one hand, the Danish labour market has been characterized by a decline in part-time employment for women and growth in the proportion of part-time work in the male labour force. On the other hand, a growth in non-standard forms of employment - e.g. temporary work, multi-job-holding and variable working hours - has taken place in the Danish labour force simultaneously with the decline in part-time employment. The article gives a short overview of the literature on flexibility and work time and analyses the impact of part-time and other forms of non-standard employment relations on women's labour market position and employment stability.

Comparative Analysis Using Large Scale National Data Sources of Women's Employment

This paper considers two main questions. First, how do the various theoretical frameworks for carrying out comparative research help us to gain a better understanding of the role women are playing in the labour markets of advanced industrial economies and are some better suited than others for this task? Secondly, we ask whether research practice can lead to better theorising on comparative research. The paper discusses the usefulness of various theoretical frameworks through the experience of using a number of cross-national data sets including a European Science Foundation network of Household Panel Studies and a number of two-country cross-sectional comparative studies. The paper argues that there may be things which can be learnt from engaging in the process of doing comparative research which are relevant to theorising about such research, and which are to some extent independent of the theoretical approach taken up at the outset. Cross-National Research, Cross-cultural Research, Comparability, Women's Labour Market Behaviour.

Bargaining with fundamentalism: Women and the politics of population control in Iran

An examination of the Islamic Republic of Iran's policies on family planning, women's education, labour market and personal status law demonstrates the regime's flexibility and sophistication in co-opting competing ideologies and all that modernity can contribute to the regime's survival. In the process, the religious-political leaders have revised many of their Islamic stances, particularly on the issue of family planning. This revisionist atmosphere has opened new avenues for women advocates, particularly Islamist women activists who, despite their support for the regime, have rejected its vision ofMuslim women's role and rights as ‘patriarchy in Islamic clothing’. Instead, they have developed and lobbied for their own visions of women's role and rights within a women-centred interpretation of Islamic texts. These strategies have led them into an often uneasy, conflictual and compromising alliance with the regime, but they have managed to attain some reforms and are pushing for more. These processes have introduced a new form of pragmatic feminism into Iran's political arena, which challenges fundamentalism from within.

Wage Structure and Gender Earnings Differentials: An International Comparison

Using microdata to analyse the gender pay gap in ten industrialized nations, we focus on the role of wage structure-the prices of labour market skills-in influencing the gender gap. We find wage structure enormously important in explaining why the US gender gap is higher than that in most other countries. We conclude that the US gap would be similar to that in Sweden and Australia (the countries with the smallest gaps) if the United States had their levels of wage inequality. This finding reflects the larger penalty in the United States for those with low skill levels or employed in low-wage sectors. 650/o-75%. The United States was amoung the countries with the largest differ- entials (OECD, ILO, USBLS). This paper uses microdata to analyse inter- national differences in the gender pay gap among a sample of ten industrialized nations. We focus particularly on explaining the surprisingly low ranking of the United States in comparison with other industrialized countries. An advan- tage of an international perspective is that countries vary considerably with respect to governmental policies, women's relative labour market qualifications and wage-setting institutions. Such variability allows one to infer reasons for differences in the pay gap and, by implication, the impact of alternative govern- ment policies. Empirical research on gender pay gaps has traditionally focused on the role of gender differences in qualifications and on differences in the treatment of otherwise equally qualified male and female workers (i.e. labour market dis- crimination). Analyses of trends over time in the gender differential within countries as well as inter-country comparisons of gender earnings ratios have tended to emphasize these types of gender-specific factors. An innovative feature of our study is to focus on the role of wage structure as an additional factor influencing the gender gap. To analyse the impact of wage structure, we adapt a framework developed by Juhn et al. (1991) to analyse trends over time in race differentials in the United States. Our findings suggest that labour market institutions that affect overall wage inequality have an extremely impor- tant effect on the gender earnings gap. 'Wage structure' describes the array of prices set for various labour market skills (measured and unmeasured) and rents received for employment in par-

Investments in Women's Human Capital.

How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility and training? Presenting 13 empirical analyses, this text explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family. The first section considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining topics such as: the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labour market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children. The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, discussing issues such as: the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.

Black Women's Labor Market Status: Occupational Segregation in the United States and Great Britain

An initial exploration of the comparative labor market situation of black women in the United States and Great Britain reveals that race and gender play similar roles in allocating people among broad occupations in both nations despite differences in historical circumstances. However, a closer examination based upon measures of occupational segregation shows that labor market dynamics are quite different. Public employment and education do not reduce racial segregation in Britain as they do in the United States, and the immigrant status of many black Britons does not explain these differences. Only youth is associated with reduced segregation in both countries.

Mothers' Labor Force Participation in New York City: A Reappraisal of the Influence of Household Extension

This study examines whether living with other adults enables married and single mothers in New York City to enter the labor market. Multivariate analyses of data on over 8,000 households revealed that living with coresident adults increased the participation of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Asian single mothers, and enabled all mothers of young children and all foreign-born mothers to enter the labor market. In a separate analysis of extended households, the proportions of elderly and employed coresident adults increased women 's labor force participation, while the proportion of coresident adults who reported child care/family responsibilities as their reason for not being in the labor force decreased women's paid labor activity. Our findings suggest that coresident adults serve different functions within the household, which in turn influence women's labor force decisions in various ways. In recent years attention has focused on the various ways in which families manage social and economic difficulties. One strategy that has received considerable research attention is household extension, or the incorporation of adults other than the husband and wife into the household. Incorporating other adults may benefit the household in a number of ways. Co-resident adults may contribute to the household's pool of financial resources, thereby potentially increasing the economic well-being of household members. Or they may provide domestic labor, which might enable the wife or female householder to devote more time to paid employment. Angel and Tienda (1982) argued that household extension may be an important adaptive strategy for minority families, in that additional income contributions may compensate for low earnings or sporadic unemployment. In this article we analyze the relationship between household extension and mothers' labor force participation among six racial and ethnic groups in New York City. In so doing, we largely replicate an earlier analysis by Tienda and Glass (1985) using current data from one of the nation's most diverse cities. However, we expand upon the earlier analysis in three ways: by including an indicator of the supply of child care in the household, by examining a broader array of racial/ethnic groups, and by analyzing the role that birthplace plays in influencing women's labor market behavior. DETERMINANTS OF WOMEN'S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION Family structure has long been recognized as an important determinant of women's labor force participation. Typically, family characteristics--such as marital status, the presence of young children, and the presence of coresident adults--affect the amount of time women can spend in domestic and market activities. Including other adults in the household may ease the strain of balancing domestic and market responsibilities, especially for single mothers and mothers of young children who may have the least flexibility in devoting time to the labor market. Prior research has shown that women who live in extended households are more likely than women who do not live with coresident adults to be in the labor force, yet this relationship varies by race/ethnicity (Barry Figueroa & Melendez, 1993; Stier, 1991; Stier & Tienda, 1992; Tienda & Glass, 1985). Moreover, women's labor force behavior appears to be influenced by the specific characteristics of coresident adults. For example, as the number of coresident adults increases, married mothers' participation decreases, suggesting greater domestic burdens; by contrast, as the proportion of female coresident adults increases so does single mothers' participation, suggesting that coresident women function as surrogate domestic workers (Tienda & Glass, 1985). Living with coresident employed adults increases labor force participation among young mothers, while living with coresident nonworking adults--presumably a source of child care--depresses paid labor activity (Parish, Hao, & Hogan, 1991). …

Sex Discrimination and Women's Labor Market Outcomes

The human capital explanation of sex differences in wages is that, owing to specialization in household production, women intend to work in the labor market more intermittently than men, and therefore invest less, leading to lower wage growth. An alternative hypothesis is that women experience labor market discrimination and respond with career interruptions, less investment, and lower wage growth. This paper explores the relationship between self-reported discrimination and subsequent labor market outcomes to test this alternative hypothesis. Some of the evidence is consistent with the feedback hypothesis. Working women who report discrimination are more likely subsequently to change employers, to have children, and to marry. However, the evidence is not consistent with the two implications of the feedback hypothesis that most directly challenge the human capital explanation of sex differences in wages; women who report discrimination do not accumulate less experience, nor do they have lower wage growth.

Leisure, Work and Gender

In this article, I address the question of the relationship between women's labour market position and their `objective' and `subjective' experience of leisure. With reference to a small-scale empirical study of the social time use of mothers in France, I argue that it is misleading to consider women's leisure experience as being determined by their labour market position. I attempt to show that it could prove more fruitful to examine the complex relationship between women's class and gender identities and their simultaneous experience of work, family and leisure.

The Structure of ‘Revealed‘ Preference: Race, Community and Female Labour Supply in the London Clothing Industry

ABSTRACTThis article takes as its starting point the overwhelming concentration of Bangladeshi women in the homeworking sector of the clothing industry in London. This pattern forms a contrast to the large numbers of male Bangladeshi workers also concentrated in the garment industry but who are to be found mainly in the factories and sweatshops. The article uses the accounts given by the Bangladeshi homeworkers themselves for their concentration in this form of work to explore different theoretical explanations of female labour supply behaviour, focusing in particular on questions of choice and constraint, culture and economy.The study suggests that the ‘preferences' revealed by the labour market behaviour of Bangladeshi women cannot be attributed solely to them, but must be seen in terms of bargaining and negotiation with other, more powerful members of the family. Furthermore, the intra‐household decision‐making process is itself embedded within a broader institutional environment which determines the access enjoyed by different groups to socially‐valued resources. For Bangladeshis, a key factor in this broader environment is the operation of racially‐based forms of exclusion from the mainstream opportunities. Consequently, community solidarity and networks represent important symbolic and material resources for members. However, these resources are distributed in highly gender‐specific ways, with very clear implications for women's place within the community. The article argues therefore that any attempt to explain Bangladeshi women's concentration in homework has to move beyond a focus on either individual circumstances or cultural norms to an exploration of the interaction of racism, community identity and gender relations in shaping women's labour market options.

A Comparison of the Labour Market Position of Women in Spain and the UK with Reference to the `Flexible' Labour Debate

This compares women's employment in Spain and the UK in the context of very different historical and institutional developments in each country. A number of key variations in women's labour market position, for example, participation rates, part-time, temporary work and unemployment rates, are examined and in each area it is found that there are substantial differences in the patterns of women's economic activity. A contribution is also made to the debate on the non-standard or flexible workforce by focusing on the issue of recent changes in labour market deregulation in the two countries and the importance of the informal economy in Spain. In both countries the state has pursued policies of deregulation of the labour market to produce a more flexible workforce. Employers have drawn on a hidden labour supply of married women who in turn have been incorporated into the economy through forms of non-standard work, in the UK this has been part-time work and in Spain either temporary work or irregular or illegal forms of work in the informal economy. It is argued that these developments may have negative consequences for both countries with respect to training, skill and wage levels.

Work and its place in the lives of immigrant women: Garment workers in New York City's Chinatown

Working wives and mothers are traditionally considered secondary wage earners, and employment is not automatically accompanied by occupational attainment of individual workers. For immigrant women, the double burden is compounded by lack of English, transferable education and skills, and knowledge of the larger economy. In this article, we have illustrated the special meanings of immigrant women's work in the context of ethnic enclave employment and family responsibility. Based on census data and fieldwork in the garment industry in New York's Chinatown, we have found that the particularly high rate of immigrant Chinese women's labor market participation is largely accounted for by the availability of jobs provided by the ethnic enclave economy, that those women are overrepresented in low-wage menial jobs, and that they tend to perceive their work as meaningful, despite of low wages, long working hours and poor working conditions. These findings suggest that survival is more important for immigrant Chinese women than their own rights in the workplace, at least in the earlier stages of immigrant adaptation, and that their wage labor is an indispensable part of the collective family effort for social mobility. The results imply that, for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, it is difficult to achieve long-term social mobility merely through individual efforts. Therefore, policies dealing with those groups mired in poverty and confined to survival at the margins of society should put more emphasis on community development in connection to the promotion of individual education and job training.

Men's and Women's Incomes: Evidence from Survey Data

ABSTRACTThe article highlights the discordance between the reality and the perception of women's independence and equality. The changes in legislation and increased female participation in the labour market since the 1960s give the impression of considerable progress. Equal treatment of men and women has been proposed. Evidence from national survey data however, shows that women's income is still lower than men's with no matching increase with age and career. Social security policy has always been based on labour market participation but women's labour market participation is quite different from that of men. Because of childcare responsibilities many women work parttime at some time in their working lives. Equal pay legislation has had little influence on the incomes from part-time work. The failure of real income from part-time work to rise over time has been a major cause along with job segregation and the segmentation of the labour market in maintaining the difference between men's and women's incomes. Women's continued lack of personal income has consequences for the support for women and children, particularly evident in the case of lone mothers. The incomes available to a woman are unlikely to be high enough to provide an adequate independent living standard for herself and any dependent children.

Marital status, children and women's labor market choices

This article provides a test of the human capital prediction that women with more labor force intermittence hold occupations characterized by lower earnings penalties for intermittence. By using marital and family status as proxies of labor market commitment we find that, on average, married women with and without children spend more time out of the labor force than never-married, childless women. Results from earnings regressions fail to indicate that the occupations they hold are characterized by significantly lower penalties for time not working. However, results from a probit model indicate that a woman's marital status, the presence of children, and the level of the husband's education significantly affect the probability of working. The results reported here suggest that human capital theory explains a woman's decision to work, but does not necessarily explain her occupational choice.

Protective Legislation and Women's Labour Market Participation

Sex-specific protective labour laws are considered unacceptable by many analysts because it is presumed that they necessarily adversely affect labour market oppor tunities for women. This paper reviews United States research that has sought to assess the validity of this assumption and reports on the impact of these laws within Australia. It is shown that the assumption that sex-specific labour laws have a detrimental influence on female employment opportunities is not supported by United States research or Australian data. It is concluded that a reform strategy based on the assumption that these laws necessarily discriminate against women may involve loss of employee protection without necessarily producing any compen sating increase in employment opportunities for women. 1