Gender and Labour Markets in the EU (original) (raw)
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Gender, Jobs and Working Conditions in Europe
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications for the European Communities. 92pp., 2002
The growing proportion of women in employment in recent decades has been one of the major changes affecting the European labour market. However, despite the increasing presence of women in the labour force, gender segregation remains a persistent feature. There is still a 'glass ceiling' reinforced by workplace cultures and informal procedures that makes it difficult for women to break through into the higher levels of management. The unequal division of unpaid household work also persists, as women continue to bear the main responsibility for running the home and looking after children, even when employed full-time. This report examines the gender pattern of differences and similarities in working conditions in Europe, drawing on the findings of the Foundation's Third European Survey on Working Conditions 2000. It explains the reasons for the persistence of gender segregation and sets out policy recommendations for action aimed at decision makers in this field. The report also considers whether the established indicators of working conditions need to be revised to make them more 'gender-sensitive' to particular issues primarily associated with women's jobs, women's experiences in the workplace, or workload issues within households.
The gender(ed) division of labour in Europe: patterns of practices in 18 EU countries
Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas
Drawing on cross-national data from ISSP 2012, this paper aims to identify and characterize the patterns of gender division of labour in European families with children. Analysis focuses on gender role practices at country level, assuming that welfare regimes frame the gendered allocation of time to paid work, care work and household work. From a cluster analysis based on time-use (weekly hours and sex asymmetries) in 18 EU countries, six patterns are identified. Findings disclose the relevance of disentangling care work from household work in order to understand in more detail the diversity of patterns across Europe.
3.3 WORk-FAMILY POLICIES AFFECTING FEMALE EMPLOYMENT IN EUROPE
The Hungarian Labour Market, 2019
Female labour market participation is lower than male participation in each Euro-pean country, with great variance across member states. There are countries (for example Malta, Italy, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary) where the difference is striking, even though the average educational attainment of women has by now exceeded that of men. Factors affecting female employment at an individual leveland wage differences between genders--are influenced by demographic and structural effects alike, furthermore several differences stem from incentives determined by institutions, welfare systems, policies and tax regimes. The latter are described briefly in this subchapter. The access of women to employment and job opportunities is not only important for their individual financial independence, activity, parenthood, participation in public affairs and through these in a better quality of life and greater gender equality but it also has a considerable impact on better allocation of skills and thereby on economic growth.
Gender, jobs and working conditions in the European Union
2002
The rising proportion of women in employment in recent decades has been one of the major changes affecting European labour markets. This report examines the gender pattern of differences and similarities. It also explains the reasons for the persistent gender segregation of the European labour markets and draws up policy recommendations for action aimed at providing decision makers with the relevant information they need.
The Employment of Women in the European Union
2007
The increasing employment of women in Europe is not only a result of economic restructuring, but also a consequence of changing family structures, changing expectations, changing wage determination mechanisms and increasing urbanisation. Many of the services which have been outsourced from the household sector to the market sector tend to remain almost exclusively a female employment domain. Thus, the areas of production that constitute the domain of female work in traditional societies remain the same in the developed industrial societies; only the degree of marketisation differs. The extent to which domestic work is outsourced depends upon the welfare model. Thus, it is a different set of taxes, transfer payments and public services in the various models which impacts on the relative efficiency and direct and indirect costs of goods and services which can be produced in the household or the market sector. Different institutional settings impact on the opportunity cost of domestic ...
The persistence of gender inequality in the EU
Irish Marxist Review , 2019
Gender equality across the EU has stalled. Some would claim with the rise of far right anti-women parties, that the EU is experiencing something of a push-back against women's rights. This article examines the continued clustering of women into low-paid, 'atypical' work and how the policies of austerity have exacerbated this. As long as neoliberal capitalism outsources care work to private agencies or leaves individual family members to cover childcare care work, women will continue to be discriminated against in paid work .
Rethinking Gender, Work and Care in a New Europe
Rethinking Gender, Work and Care in a New Europe, 2016
Work-life balance became an independent scientific field within sociology during the 1960-1970s as more and more women entered the labour market. In the beginning, theories and models mainly focused on Western countries and their circumstances. In recent years, however, studies have been published that attempt to tackle the special case of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (e.g. Glass and Fodor, 2011). The main goal of Rethinking Gender, Work and Care in a New Europe edited by Triin Koosalu and Dirk Hofäcker, is to describe the processes that took place in these countries from a cross-national perspective and to analyse their social outcomes not only from the perspective of work-life balance but care, an under-researched area in post-socialist countries. Their main question is whether standard theoretical approaches or empirical evidence, mainly based in Western Europe, can be applied to CEE countries. The book offers a comprehensive approach; the authors examine all the postsocialist countries without presenting them as completely homogeneous. They not only look at them from a comparative perspective, but discuss (some of) them as stand-alone cases while building on Bohle and Greskovits's typology of postcommunist political economies (neoliberal, embedded neoliberal regime, and neocorporatist countries) (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012). The four main topics the authors cover are: family policies and norms, women's participation in the labour market, the balance between parenthood and paid work, and occupational and social mobility. As the authors emphasize, the most important conclusions of this volume are the following: there are intragroup differences between CEE countries and there are more similarities between Eastern and Western Europe than previously assumed. Furthermore, regional norms about parenthood have to be taken into account as the theories are based on Western European women's experiences, which indicates that a new theoretical background is needed. Lastly, findings on Eastern countries can still be ephemeral, given the high dynamics of changes the region is going through. Among family policies of post-socialist welfare states, the most important to understanding the dynamics of female employment are the public policies regulating parental leave and childcare. The first chapter, written by Sonja Blum, focuses on the effect of the financial and economic crisis on family policies as a part of the comparative approach. The current categorizations of welfare regimes (like Esping-Andersen's) are also criticized for not being able to recognize the prevalence of hybrid forms. As the families' reaction to the crisis could be an important element of the comparison between existing typologies and recent trends of family policies, it is slightly problematic that the most recent data on family spending is from 2010. The same concern applies to childcare services. In that case, the most recent data dates back to 2006 (and as the authors point out, makes no distinction between part-time Zsófia Viktória Kiss
Feminist Review, 2019
In light of recent developments that have occurred in the domestic sector in Europe and the debate on the externalisation of domestic and care activities, this article explores the impact of the gender regime on paid domestic work. The gender regime is defined here as the combination of two dimensions: gender equality outcomes and the ‘gender contract’. The aim is to investigate whether the gender regime can contribute to explaining cross-national similarities and differences, in terms of the size of the domestic sector, its workforce composition—with a focus on the proportion of women and migrants—and its working conditions. The article shows the results of quantitative analyses conducted at the European level, which include the construction of a typology of gender regimes, based on selected indicators, and a descriptive comparative analysis of the domestic sector at national level, based on data from the 2015 European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). The findings suggest that t...