Women's Labor Force Participation Research Articles

Free, full‐day programming for four‐year‐old children in Nova Scotia and women's labour market outcomes

AbstractDespite significant changes in gender norms over the 20th century and a substantial increase in women's labour force participation, women continue to provide the majority of unpaid child care. This poses a barrier to further improvements in women's labour force participation, especially when child care is limited, inaccessible or unaffordable. This paper explores the impact of substantial increases in child care accessibility and affordability on women's labour market outcomes by exploiting the rollout of free, full‐day programming for four‐year‐old children in Nova Scotia from 2017/18 to 2020/21 using a staggered difference‐in‐differences approach. The program led to a 21 percentage‐point increase in the labour force participation of mothers with four‐year‐old children in Nova Scotia, via increased employment. Unsurprisingly, these impacts are significantly larger for women whose youngest child is four years old.

An Overview of Women Entrepreneurs in India

Women participation in the labour force and admittance to well-mannered occupation is immensely crucial for a wide-range and sustainable progress of any nation. At the comprehensive level, larger contribution of women in the labour force is fine for the whole economy. In India, women labour force participation rate is increasing appreciably in recent years. Even though, the women labour force participation rate is lower than universal average, but it shows an increasing pattern. On the other hand, a range of socio-economic factors that affect the female participation in labour force cannot be ignored. This article throws light on the trends and growth of such women labour participation in the job market. Hefty number of hurdles and obstacles prolong to subsist for women community to get into the labour market and acquire well-mannered and civilized occupations. The women community is excessively put through a extensive range of challenges concerning with easy ingress to employment opportunities, alternative jobs, working circumstances, unforeseen situations, safety of jobs, equivalence in wages, prejudice and inequality treatment and work-life balance and family responsibilities.

The impact of female education on fertility: evidence from Malawi Universal Primary Education program

Abstract This paper examines the impact of female education on fertility outcomes by using the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program in Malawi as a natural experiment. The finding indicates that the UPE policy improves rural women's educational attainment by 0.42 years and an additional year of female education decreases women's number of children ever born and the number of living children by 0.39 and 0.34, respectively. An analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the decreased fertility rates are likely driven by the reduction in women's fertility preferences, the postponement of marriage, and the delay of motherhood. Contrarily, the study finds no evidence that increased female education affects women's labor force participation and the use of modern contraception.

Pengaruh Kesehatan Reproduksi Wanita dan Pemberdayaan Wanita Terhadap Tingkat Partisipasi Angkatan Kerja Wanita di Indonesia

This study aims to find out and analyze how the influence of women's reproductive health and women's empowerment on the participation rate of the female workforce in Indonesia. This study used secondary data sourced from the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics with the research variables grouped into two parts, namely the bond variable which in this study was determined as the female labor force participation rate and the independent variables consisting of women's life expectancy, young women's marriage, female mother, female education level, female per capita income and female involvement in parliament. This study uses panel data regression analysis with the selected method, namely the Common Effect Model (CEM). The results showed that women's life expectancy, young women's marriage, women's fertility rates and women's involvement in parliament each had a negative and insignificant effect on women's labor force participation. Women's education level has a negative and significant effect on female labor force participation and women's per capita income has a positive and significant effect on female labor force participation.

Recent Dynamics of Women Labour Force Participation in India

Recent Dynamics of Women Labour Force Participation in India

Women's Representation in Canadian Municipalities

This research note uses a new and comprehensive data set of 22,333 municipal elected positions in 3,363 municipalities across Canada to provide a systematic analysis of women's presence in municipal office. Drawing on findings from cross-national research about women's representation in local governments, we examine whether district type, council size, urban setting, women's workforce participation, and degree of conservatism among voters account for variation in the proportion of women elected as councillors and mayors. We find support for most, but not all, of the relevant factors in previous studies. Urban municipalities and municipalities with at-large and hybrid elections are associated with larger proportions of women mayors and councillors. Ideology also matters: the proportion of women in municipal office is smaller in conservative municipalities. Finally, we find no evidence that council size or women's labor force participation is related to women's representation among mayors or councillors.

Putting women back into the early modern economy: Work, occupations, and economic development

AbstractA dataset of just under 10,000 work tasks gleaned from court depositions that records women's as well as men's work, and unpaid as well as paid activities, prompts a reassessment of the transformation of the early modern economy and women's role within it. Rather than sectoral change in production activities with a growth of manufacturing at the expense of agriculture, the evidence suggests that work tasks changed little over time despite occupational specialization increasing. Women's labour force participation is shown to contribute 44 per cent of work in the economy, rather than 30 per cent as in previous estimates. This is partly because of the importance of commercialized housework and care work, which has been largely overlooked in existing models of the early modern economy. Turning to waged work, findings confirm that men's and women's participation in paid agricultural work were linked, with women being employed in greater numbers when men were not available. However, these trends had a strong relationship with access to land, a factor that has been neglected in comparison with demographic trends and the cost of consumables. The organization of work was transformed in the seventeenth century as the number of completely landless households increased rapidly.

The Role Of Women's Labor Force Participation In Decreasing Aceh Province Poverty Rate

The poverty rate can decrease if there is a dual role of working women, the development of the times has proven to have implications for shifting the role of women in reducing poverty. Acehnese women, who used to be a social construction built on the basis of people's understanding of cultural values ​​and interpretations in the Islamic religion, have shifted to a new era where Acehnese women can take part in the household production process. This paper wants to analyze how big the role of women is working towards poverty reduction in Aceh Province. The results of the study show that the variable number of industries directly (X4) has a negative and not significant effect on wage estimates for Aceh Province

Dilemmas and Solutions for Women in the Workplace

Nowadays, many women are discriminated in the workplace because of their gender. Equal employment for women is at the centre of this study, and the dynamic equilibrium between the reproductive policy and the related supporting policies, especially the public service policy, together constitute the policy background to the issue of women's employment, while at the same time the social has some negative evaluation of women's employment. At present, China's traditional labour division model of "men focusing on the outside and women focusing on the inside" has been turned into a labour participation model in which females devote themselves to both work and family, i.e., internal and external labour participation, while men still continue to "focus on the outside" one-dimensional labour model. The increase in women's labour force participation rate has, on the contrary, put women in a more unequal situation. This paper first describes the current situation of gender-based discrimination against women in the workplace in terms of three aspects: recruitment, promotion and pay. It then analyses the causes of these phenomena and looks for ways to address them to better protect women's equal rights in the workplace.

How Marriage Policy Affects Womens LFP

With technological advancement coupled with the recent pandemic, perceptions of womens societal roles have undoubtedly evolved over the recent decades. Often, their social role is measured through their employment status, with rising labor force participation indicating an elevated social standing. While most of the previous research tends to link womens labor force participation with factors including wage rates, childbirth, and education, the correlation between their labor force participation and marriage has remained underexplored. Given the profound impact marriage can have on womens employment, it is crucial to adopt innovative research approaches that reflect modern shifts in womens social roles. This paper seeks to unravel the link between marriage and womens labor force participation in the U.S., focusing specifically on the influence of legal marriage age via a difference-in-difference design. The goal is to inform the government of better policy decisions, such as pushing for enhanced economic and marriage policies that could further facilitate womens role in the professional realm.

Gender (in)equality at the kitchen table: A diary study on how Parents' coordination facilitates an equal task division and relationship quality.

Although women's labour force participation has increased, women still lag behind in financial independence and men in spending time on parenting. Insight in individuals' explicit conversations with their partner about how to coordinate daily household, childcare and paid work may help to overcome these persistent inequalities. Using a daily diary design, the present study examined to what extent daily conversations with the partner about household, childcare and paid work can boost a more equal, fair task division and relationship quality among Dutch mothers and fathers in a heterosexual relationship (N = 1235 daily reported conversations nested in 157 participants; 66.2% female). Mixed model results showed that (1) on days when participants conversed more with their partner about household tasks, they reported a more egalitarian task division and higher satisfaction with and fairness of the task division, and higher relationship quality (2) this higher daily satisfaction with and perceived fairness of the task division (but not egalitarianism) were, in turn, associated with higher relationship quality and (3) conversations had limited spill-over effects to the next day, stressing the importance of daily coordination. Together, these findings imply that daily household coordination helps parents to overcome traditional gender roles and align with their desired work/family division.

Norms that matter: Exploring the distribution of women’s work between income generation, expenditure-saving and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India

Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In developing countries, women who are engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers, whereas the men are. We show that for women, not being in paid work is not synonymous with not being in the labour force. Women are often involved in expenditure saving activities i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work that leads to mismeasurement of women’s work and suggest methods to improve measurement. Counting women’s expenditure-saving activities yields a substantially higher estimate of women’s participation in economic work. On social norms, we show that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lowers the probability of “working”, after accounting for all the conventional factors. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for paid work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we find that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores. We demonstrate the existence of ‘virtuous cycles’ within families: a history of working women in the family (mother or mother-in-law ever worked) increases the probability of being in paid work between 18 and 21 percentage points. This suggests that the positive effects of increasing women’s labour force participation today are likely to have positive multiplier effects on the prospects for work in future generations of women.

Husbands' wages and married women's labor supply in urban China

In this study, we examine the impact of husbands' wages on married women's labor force participation (extensive margin) and hours worked (intensive margin) in urban China from 1995 to 2018. We emphasize that changes in a husband's wages alter each spouse's relative contribution to the household, thus highlighting the important role of gender identity norms in the association between husbands' wages and married women's labor supply. We find that a 1% increase in husbands' wages is associated with a 0.018 percentage point decrease in married women's labor force participation and a decrease of 1.45 h worked annually. When gender identity norms are controlled, these numbers increase to 0.024 and 1.94, respectively. Additionally, we observe significant heterogeneous effects for wives of different ages and education levels and with varying numbers of children. The negative association between husbands' wages and women's hours worked has become stronger over time.

The Relationship between Women's Labor Force Participation and Unemployment: An Evaluation in terms of 1950-1989 Cohorts in İzmir Province

Bu çalışma, İzmir ili düzeyinde kadınların işgücüne katılım oranı ile işsizlik oranı arasındaki ilişkiyi araştırmaktadır. Bu ilişkiyi etkileyen ve düzenleyen faktörler, özellikle işgücüne katılımda belirleyici olan cinsiyet ve eğitim düzeyi değişkenleri, 2004-2017 yılları arasında karşılaştırmalı olarak ele alınmaktadır. Yaş, kohort ve yıl bakımından kadınların işgücü durumunun izlediği seyir, Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu (TÜİK)’ndan elde edilen ikincil verilerin analizi yoluyla incelenmiştir. Yapılan analizler sonucunda İzmir ilinde; 2008 yılında yaşanan küresel ekonomik krizin en çok gençleri etkilediği, kadınların işgücüne katılımının eğitim ile doğrudan ilişkili olduğu, özellikle düşük eğitim seviyesindeki kadınların işsizlik oranının işgücüne katılım oranından bağımsız olarak artıp azaldığı, kadınların işsizlik oranının konjonktürel değişimlere karşı erkeklere nazaran daha hassas olduğu sonuçlarına ulaşılmıştır.

Trajectories of Unpaid Labour and the Probability of Employment Precarity and Labour Force Detachment Among Prime Working-Age Australian Women

Worldwide, women are over-represented in precarious and insecure employment arrangements. Importantly, the high unpaid labour demands women experience over the life course compromise paid labour force participation for women. This study explores the way different trajectories of time spent in unpaid labour throughout women’s prime working and child-rearing years (from baseline age of 25–35 yrs to 42–52 yrs) are associated with indicators of precarious employment and labour force detachment later in life. We applied group-based trajectory modelling to 17 waves (2002–2018) of data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to identify trajectories in unpaid labour. We then examined associations between these estimated trajectories and employment outcomes in wave 19 (2019). Our study shows that chronic exposure to high amounts of unpaid labour over prime working-age years (compared to lower exposure levels) increases women’s probability of precarious employment and labour force detachment later in prime working life. This provides evidence that ongoing inequity in the division of unpaid labour has considerable long-term implications for gender inequality in the paid labour force, and underscores the importance of urgently addressing how men and women share and prioritise time across both paid and unpaid labour domains.

The dynamics of traditions and women’s employment: Evidence from a developing country

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 8pt; line-height: 14pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Cambria',serif; mso-fareast-font-family: '等线 Light'; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The workforce participation rate, and hence the level of employment, for women in Pakistan is among the lowest in South Asia – standing at 25 percent in 2023. Conventional explanations attribute this to poor skills and cultural norms of families and society at large. Empirical work has established that low levels of education, and community attitudes regarding gender roles, hinder women's labor force participation. Ethnographic work suggests that household rules – family culture – on who makes decisions about opportunities for married women to work outside of the home for pay – profoundly impact female employment. This is due to the limited availability of data pertaining to explicit assessments of familial traditions that are pertinent to women's participation in the workforce beyond their domestic sphere. Drawing on data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM): 2005-2006 – which provides information, from married women, on who in the family decides if they can work – we address this shortcoming in the literature. We find that in families where the decision lies clearly, and exclusively, in the hands of males, married women are 18-19 percent less likely to be employed than if the family culture is for married women – alone – to make this decision. Moreover, this is a much larger deterrent to work than poor education and residential location.</span></p>

Gendered familialism in a Mediterranean context: women’s labor market participation and early childhood education and care in Turkey

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between women’s labor market participation and early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Turkey within a broader Mediterranean context. Since the 1990s, there have been significant changes in the familialist models in the Mediterranean region driven by women’s increased labor market participation and the expansion of ECEC services. The transformations in the region have unveiled a significant link between the expansion of preschool education and an increase in women’s labor market participation. Turkey missed this critical juncture in the 1990s, as indicated by the low employment rates of women and below-the-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-average preschool enrolment. Through a comparative perspective that examines the slow progress in both areas in Turkey as well as the gendered feature of its familialist model, the article emphasizes the need for closer analysis of the link between ECEC and the low labor force participation of women. Given that the expansion of ECEC in the 2000s has taken place through market-driven services, the article concludes that the link between ECEC and women’s labor market participation exhibits a class dimension. Thereby, women from lower socio-economic groups are increasingly experiencing the impact of the gendered characteristics inherent in the familialist regime in Turkey.

Experiences of Poverty Around the Time of a Birth: A Research Note.

While research highlights that, on average, women's income and labor force participation fall around the time of a birth, little is known about how women's experiences of poverty around childbirth vary by birth parity or race and ethnicity. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (a comprehensive measure of poverty), this research note examines the poverty rate of mothers overall and by birth parity and racial and ethnic group in the six months before and after childbirth. We also assess the role of current government support programs in moderating financial losses during the time around a birth. We find that poverty rates among mothers increase after childbirth, with the magnitude varying by birth parity and racial and ethnic group. While current government programs help reduce poverty among mothers around childbirth, these programs do not protect mothers from falling into poverty after childbirth nor do they reduce the inequities in poverty by race or ethnicity. Our results highlight the need for greater public assistance for mothers with recent births to ensure improved child and family well-being and also call attention to the need for policies to address long-standing racial and ethnic inequities in child and family well-being.

Women's Career Challenges and Opportunities (A Study of Career and Job Satisfaction among Bangladeshi Women)

The purpose of this research is to learn more about women in Bangladesh and their perceptions of career options and job satisfaction. Women's labor force participation has increased dramatically in Bangladesh, as it has in many other developing countries. But despite these improvements, women still face several roadblocks in the workplace. Women's professional development and job happiness can be aided by policies and environments that take into account the unique obstacles they confront. The study uses a Univariate, Bivariate, and multivariate method, collecting information through both quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. Participants are professional women from a wide range of fields in Bangladesh. Quantitative surveys analyze issues including work-life balance, gender bias, education status, women's violence in the job sector, support from family members, promotion prospects, and job satisfaction. The qualitative interviews dive more deeply into the women's lived experiences, shedding light on the difficulties they face and the strategies they use to overcome them. The study has both theoretical and practical significance. For practical purposes, this research will improve our understanding of the most significant obstacles to women's careers and participation in development processes and the most effective ways to overcome them. This paper will also be useful as a source of information for feminist groups and other organizations with the goal to advance women's rights and equality.

Caste, religion and the labor force participation of women: evidence from India

This study examines the origins and evolution of labor force participation rate differences between women from different ethnic groups in India. The data comes from the Indian National Sample Survey covering the period from 1983 to 2012. I use parametric and semi-parametric methods to study inter-group participation gaps and find that the caste gap has been narrowing over time, while the religion gap remains high. I find that Muslim women’s concentration in areas of low economic activity is the main driver of their low LFPR. I also test the role of culture in explaining inter-group gaps, using the India Human Development Survey. There has been a general fall in female participation in the labor market globally in recent years. These methods could advantageously be applied to data from other countries to investigate the employment and livelihood opportunities of women in other multi-ethnic contexts and regions.