Women In Labor Market Research Articles

Rising marital disruption in Italy and its correlates

Most of our knowledge on divorce pertains to the USA and northern Europe, while demographic studies from southern Europe are relatively scarce. Our study looks at this knowledge gap through an analysis of the correlates of marital instability in Italy.

Female labour market participation and economic growth

This paper investigates the impact of economic growth on the dynamics of gender inequality in the labour market. Economic studies suggest a positive impact of female labour market participation on growth but the impact of growth on women's labour market participation is not as clear. Recent cross-country studies assume that economic growth first lowers female labour market participation and then increases it in the long-run ( the 'feminisation U') but do not give precise estimation results. This study tests the hypothesis of the 'feminisation U' based on a panel data set (combination of cross country and time series data) which allows to control for problems of endogeneity. The econometric analysis confirms the hypothesis of a 'feminisation U'. This indicates that it is not sufficient in the short-term to rely on the equalising effects of economic growth to increase the entry of women into the labour force. Active labour market policies are needed particularly in developing countries to promote women's labour market participation in the interest of overall economic growth.

The New Economy, Class Condescension and Caring Labour: Changing Formations of Class and Gender

An argument about the declining significance of class and gender as structural constraints in British society has become common in mainstream sociological theory. Mobility, reflexivity, and detraditionalization are seen as key characteristics of a post‐Fordist, post‐structural society. In feminist theory, however, debates about the reconstitution of class and gender, as well as the symbolic meaning of class, challenge assumptions about detraditionalization. I assess these arguments through an exploration of the consequences of women's changing labour market position and the contradictions between employment and caring responsibilities. I argue that emerging class differences and widening inequalities between women, as well as new class relationships in the home, should be explored further.

Pension norms and pension reforms in Europe – the effects on gender pension gaps

Pension levels in the EU15 are significantly gendered. Various reforms to pension systems explicitly aim at improving women's opportunities to build up pension entitlements. These reforms differ from country to country. We see so-called work–life balance policies to increase women's labour market participation by facilitating part-time employment in particular as well as pension entitlements for care periods outside the labour market. At the same time, however, other seemingly gender neutral reforms generally tend to have the opposite effect. These measures include changes in pension calculation norms and pension composition, increasing the importance of non-public pensions. Therefore, future female pensioners will not be significantly better off. However, for women to be better off is necessary in times of pension retrenchments and individualization. Based on recent life-course theories and studies, this article analyses the multiplicity of reasons for gender differentiated pension levels. It shows that the numerous direct and indirect pension determining factors related to life courses and welfare arrangements are interlinked on many fronts. Their cumulative effects finally result in (continued) significant gender gaps. It is argued that there are no quick fixes for reducing the gender gaps in pensions but that this will require attention to the degendering of labour market and the reformulation of life course norms.

Women, Labour, and Public Policy: Female Labour Market Integration in OECD Countries. A Comparative Perspective

AbstractThis article investigates the influence of political measures and instruments on women's employment in OECD countries. The policy dimension builds the central explanatory category filling the ‘black box’ between political institutions and the decision-making process on the one hand, and policy outcome on the other. Unlike former comparative studies on the relationship between women's employment and public policies, this article analyses a much larger country sample, looking at 28 OECD countries as well as a broader range of policies. Additionally, path analyses are conducted, modelling direct and indirect causal effects on women's labour market integration. The analyses show that while the cultural, economic and political framework can create a positive environment for women's employment in general, ‘women-friendly’ public policies are important, and are necessary for the more intensive and egalitarian labour market integration of women compared to that of men.

Keuze of belemmering? De arbeidsmarktparticipatie van vrouwen

Choice or impediment? The labour participation of women Choice or impediment? The labour participation of women This article researches the influence of individual preferences on women's labour market behaviour in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, addressing the question, to what extent do individual preferences have a causal effect on women's average weekly working hours? Using longitudinal panel data from all three countries, a fixed-effects model is applied to measure the effect of preferences in year t-1 on women's average weekly working hours in year t. The data are pooled from 1992 to 2002. After controlling for a number of individual, household and job characteristics we see that individual preferences are most influential in the Netherlands. However, the data do not support the idea that choice is more important than constraint because individual, household and job characteristics remain visible, even in the Netherlands. The results also demonstrate that it is important to understand individual preferences within the institutional context. Therefore, within the policy debate on increasing women's labour market participation we must consider possible barriers that hinder women when making labour market 'choices'.

Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility within Developed Nations

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home production. We observe three distinct phases in women's status generated by the gradual increase in women's workforce opportunities. In the earliest phase, characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, women earn low wages relative to men and are expected to shoulder all of the child care at home. As a result, most women specialize in home production and raising children. In an intermediate stage, women have improved (but not equal) labor market opportunities, but their household status lags. Women in this stage are still expected to do the majority of child care and household production. Increasing access to market work increases the opportunity cost of having children, and fertility falls. Female labor force participation increases. Working women in this phase of development have the strongest disincentives to having additional children since the entire burden of child care falls on them. In the final phase of development, women's labor market opportunities begin to equal those of men. In addition, the increased household bargaining power that comes from more equal wages results in much higher (if not gender-equal) male participation in household production. Female labor force participation is higher than in the intermediate phase. The increased participation of men in the household also reduces the disincentives for women to have additional children, and fertility rates rise compared to the intermediate phase. The intermediate, low-fertility phase might describe Japan, Italy, and Spain in the present day, while the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and the modern-day United States may be entering the final phase. After presenting the empirical evidence, we predict that high-income countries with the lowest fertility rates are likely to see an increase in fertility in the coming decades.

Evaluating the impact of the French tax credit on the employment rate of women

This paper investigates the employment impact of a new tax-credit programme that was put in place in France in 2001. According to the theoretical labour supply model, tax credits will have a positive effect on individual labour market participation as they increase the rewards from work. However, tax credits may discourage married women's participation mainly due to income effects. We analyse the introduction of the French measure by adopting a non-experimental evaluation method. Various treatment and control groups are defined. The first specification adopted relies on the policy eligibility rules for the construction of the control and treatment groups. The others hinge, respectively, on marital status, for women in couple-households, and on the presence of children, for single women. We find evidence of a negative employment effect for married women, with a reduction of about three percentage points in the employment rate after the introduction of the policy. In particular, it seems to be the conditioning on total household resources that discourages married women's labour market participation. On the contrary, the employment impact of the measure is positive for cohabiting women and twice as large. The policy effect is very small and statistically not significant for single women. The net impact of the introduction of the tax credit on the total employment of women is very marginal, amounting to the creation of about two thousand new jobs.

The Provision of Home Care as a Policy Problem

The problem of home care for the growing number of elderly people no longer able to take of themselves has long been overshadowed by the debates on pensions and rising medical costs. Taking the feminist critique of the welfare state as point of departure, this article examines in how far the breadwinner-caretaker model still informs ageing policies in the Netherlands (a prime example of this model) and takes women as carers for granted, despite changes in the family and women's growing labour market participation. Overall, policies since the 1990s have shown remarkable continuity, defining informal care, mainly done by women, as the cornerstone of home care policy, with state-provided care seen as strictly supplementary and rationed to cut costs. This is consistent with the welfare mix of the conservative welfare state, but contradictory to a more individualized welfare state in which women's labour market participation is becoming essential to maintain welfare state benefits in the face of the ageing issue.

‘Docile Oriental Women’ and Organised Labour

This article attempts to understand women's labour market behaviour in the context of export-oriented garment manufacturing in India, particularly women's decision to work and their alleged aversion to unionism. Asian women's submissiveness in the labour market can hardly be the result of ‘Oriental docility’ in every case. We question this assumption by looking at a small sample of 25 women in garment manufacturing firms in Hyderabad, India, and seek other explanations for women's lack of interest in unions, and note the pressures that affect them.

Balancing family and work: The effect of cash benefits for working mothers

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.

Work Orientation and Wives' Employment Careers

This article uses work-life history data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2001) to examine married/cohabiting women's work histories and their gender-role attitudes. Findings suggest that women's employment careers are affected by both preferences and constraints. The presence of dependent children poses less of a barrier to full-time work for women with work-centered attitudes than other women. Nevertheless, women having a continuous employment career tend to be childless. Finally, there is a reciprocal relationship between gender-role attitudes and women's labor market participation, suggesting that preferences are changeable according to labor market experience.

United by Gender or Divided by Class? Women's Work Orientations and Labour Market Behaviour

Recent debates on the relationship between women's work orientations and their labour market behaviour have been marked by a polarization between those who emphasize personal choice and those who argue that constraint is equally, if not more, important. However, in both approaches ‘orientation’ is understood primarily as a choice between prioritizing paid work or family (understood almost exclusively in terms of childcare responsibilities) for all women regardless of socioeconomic class. Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interview data, this article outlines some of the similarities and differences in the work orientations of women in professional/managerial, intermediate and routine/manual socioeconomic classes in Oxford. It develops the concept of ‘work orientation’ to include the meaning of paid work as well as labour market behaviour for women with and without children. The data presented here suggest that there are important class‐based differences in women's attitudes and that apparently similar work orientations may have very different causes and labour market consequences.

From Public to Private Maternalism? Gender and Welfare in Poland and Hungary after 1989

This paper compares the political processes and gendered outcomes of welfare state formation in Hungary and Poland. We find both differences and similarities in the extent to which family and maternity policies in the two countries encourage women's paid work, support women's care giving work in the home, guard women and their families against poverty, and differentiate among women based on ethnic/racial classifications and class status. We argue that while welfare states in Western Europe may be increasingly characterized by a retreat from maternalist policies, Hungarian and Polish welfare policies support distinct forms of maternalism. While maternalism is privatized in Poland, it is publicly supported and subsidized in Hungary. We attempt to explain the divergence between the two countries by pointing to differences in class-based and gender-based political mobilization around family benefits as well as the timing of welfare reforms. Despite differences in the substance of the policies, however, we find that both regimes limit women's labor market opportunities.

Tax Structure and Female Labour Market Participation: Evidence from Ireland

How great an effect does the structure of income taxes have on women's labour market participation? This issue is investigated using a discrete choice static labour supply model for married couples in Ireland. The model incorporates fixed costs of working and simultaneously explains participation decisions and preferred hours of work. Details of the tax system are fully incorporated, and key elements of the welfare system are also taken into account. The model is estimated using data from the 1994 wave of the Living in Ireland Survey. The results are used to analyse the labour supply effects of a move to greater independence in the tax treatment of couples. The influence of tax structure on participation is reconsidered in the light of trends in women's participation in the labour market and two key changes in the structure of taxation: a shift from a joint or aggregated basis of assessment to an system in 1980 and a further substantial shift from income-splitting towards greater independence from 2000 onwards.

Gender, employment and social security in Norway

Authors Espen Dahl and Axel West Pedersen in this article analyze how social policy and welfare reforms affect women's socio-economic position and living conditions The central question is how “gender blind” reforms influence women's labor market activity and wellbeing, in both the short—and the long-run, in a situation where important gender differences exist at the outset. In this article, the authors address the question of whether gender differences in welfare in Norway will change as the result of recent reforms in Social Insurance, family policies, and old age pensions. Dahl and Pedersen approached this question by describing the ways in which the socio-economic structures are gendered combined with a description of recent social policy reforms and an analysis of how these reforms will affect labor market activity and welfare differences between men and women.

Intimate relationships and changing patterns of money management at the beginning of the twenty‐first century1

Drawing on British data from two annual sweeps of the ISSP eight years apart in 1994 and 2002, for modules focusing on 'Family and Changing Gender Roles', this paper examines the extent to which changes in women's labour market participation, changing ideologies/discourses of gender and changing forms of intimate relationships are affecting the ways in which couples organize household money, and the implications of such changes for recent theories of intimate relationships. The analysis indicates that by 2002, the type of relationship respondents had established, together with their social class position, were both independently related to the ways in which they managed money, after controlling for socio-economic and cultural or discursive factors. Our findings also provide a degree of support for the thesis of a partial decline in the male breadwinner model of gender, as indicated by small declines in the use of the relatively inegalitarian female whole wage and housekeeping allowance systems which were most likely to be used by married couples and cohabiting fathers, expressing relatively traditional ideologies/discourses of breadwinning - and a slight increase in the use of the partial pool, which was most likely to be used by childless cohabiting couples in which male partners expressed less traditional ideologies of breadwinning and women were in middle-class jobs with incomes high enough to facilitate partially separate finances. We also suggest, however, that in so far as cohabiting couples earning different amounts define equality as contributing equally to household expenditure, it is possible that rather than being associated with shifts to greater equality in access to money for personal spending and saving, the partial pool may be associated with marked inequalities, because it may enable gender inequalities generated in the labour market to be more directly transposed into inequalities within households, despite the decline of traditional discourses of male breadwinning and the increasing importance of egalitarian ideologies of co-provisioning.

Reconfigurations of Gender and Class Relations: Class Differences, Class Condescension and the Changing Place of Class Relations

This paper addresses the question of class: its significance, construction, representation in official policies and the changing place and nature of class relations and struggles in contemporary Britain. It argues that both changes in women's labour market participation patterns and a new rhetoric of class condescension and symbolic violence have significant implications both for widening class divisions between women and for the nature of class contacts in contemporary cities. As ties of love and affection and mutual exchange that (purportedly) characterise the home are being transformed by the growing importance of the home as a locus of commodified domestic labour, the home is a new site of inter-class contact and conflict. Thus “private” households are increasingly becoming the sites of class struggle, adding strength to feminist arguments about the inextricable connections between class and gender relations.

Child Care Costs and Employment Decisions of Greek Women

We investigate the effects of child care costs on women's labor market decisions. Decisions regarding labor force participation and non-maternal child care are jointly estimated. Employing data from the 1998/99 Household Budget Survey and using a bivariate probit with sample selection and a binomial probit for labor force participation, a strong negative relationship between participation and paying for care is identified. The results indicate that the estimated hourly cost of child care affects negatively the probability of participation. Nevertheless, it appears that offered market wages and the financial situation of the household play a more vital role than the cost of child care in the labor market decisions of Greek mothers, ceteris paribus.

Global rankings and domestic realities: Women, work and policy in Australia and New Zealand

At the beginning of the 1990s, according to the UN gender-sensitive Human Development Index, Australia was ranked sixth and New Zealand was eighth. A decade later, Australia ranked second while New Zealand ranked seventeenth. In other words, according to the United Nations, gender equality is more advanced in Australia than New Zealand. Yet a closer look reveals that in recent years New Zealand's public policy developments have been significantly more ‘woman-friendly’ than has been the case in Australia. In this article we seek to explain this dissonance between the global rankings and the policy reality. We review the similarities and differences in the nature of women's labour market participation and the way Australian and New Zealand national governments have attempted to support that participation. While the policy environment in both Australia and New Zealand is dominated by discourses associated with free-market activity and global competitiveness, there are significant differences in the positions held by the Labour government in New Zealand and the (conservative) Coalition government in Australia around women's rights. We conclude that the UN ranking reflects only part of the story around women's equality in Australia and New Zealand. While a strong economy can facilitate women's economic well-being, this does not equate with a commitment to gender equality. A range of supportive policy mechanisms are needed to continue to ensure that well-being, including wage-setting mechanisms that incorporate a commitment to pay equity. In addition, it is likely that because of the time lag, current policy developments around labour market (de)regulation are yet to have an impact on UNDP calculations.