1,721,046 research outputs found
Women, Men and the Financial Crisis. Seven Lessons from Europe
Full text linkMore than four years after its inception, the great European recession is still a work in
progress. While this makes any stock-taking exercise a tentative affair, four full years are
enough to draw some lessons from how women, men and gender equality fared in this crisis
and on what may lie ahead. Seven such lessons are set out below focusing primarily on work
– paid or unpaid – and welfare. The source material is the joint report on women, men and
the crisis commissioned by the EC and available at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/tools/experts/index_en.ht
THe Pros and Cons of Occupational Gender Segregation in Europe
No full textThis paper reviews European policy towards occupational segregation and the gender earnings gap in the light of some basic stylised facts. Using three sources of comparable data for European countries it shows that (i) segregation associates positively with female employment; (ii) redistribution of female employment between occupations towards the male pattern has low and contradictory effect on the gender gap whereas within-occupation redistribution up the hierarchical ladder has some significant impact; and (iii) dispersion of earnings associates negatively with the gender gap. It is argued that these facts may imply trade-offs when de-segregation, closing of the gender gap and high female employment are simultaneously pursue
Women’s Continuous Careers in Italy: The Education and Public Sector Divide
Full text linkCross-sectional data on the role of education show that low-educated Italian women have one of the lowest rates of participation in Europe, and that their gap vis à vis the highly educated is very wide. Also wide is the gap in the shares, between high and low educated working women, of those employed in the public sector. By adopting a life-course perspective and using retrospective longitudinal data from the last wave of ILFI (2005), this study analyses how in Italy education and public employment differentiate women's entries into and exits from paid work, observing three cohorts of women born between 1945 and 1974 from the time they leave fulltime education to their forties. The findings confirm for Italy what has been shown for many other countries, namely that highly educated women have more continuous careers around motherhood than do low educated women, regardless of their occupational position, their contract, and their employment position in family-friendly sectors such as the public sector. However, we also find that in Italy highly educated women tend to be over-concentrated in the public sector and that, when they work in that sector, they tend to have more children and to bear them earlier compared with equally highly educated women in the private sector. In the Italian context where protection in the public sector has also been used as a surrogate measure for universal work-family reconciliation policies, and where traditional gender norms still persist, these results are consistent with the possibility that education is so important for women's labour market continuity because it represents an investment in 'reconciliation' and 'work legitimacy' over and above investment in human capital
A Mediterranean Perspective on the Breakdown of the Relationship Between Participation and Fertility
No full textIn this paper we address two related questions: first, why does the inverse relationship between female participation and fertility appear to have broken down on a cross-country basis in the Western industrialised nations and, second, why has Mediterranean Europe contributed to this breakdown with its combination of record low fertility and low participation? We re-examine the cross-country fertility-participation nexus from a long-term perspective and verify that there are no longer reasons to expect a systematic inverse relationship to hold for developed countries. We argue further that differences in participation and fertility reflect differences in the 'economics of the family' across countries. In Mediterranean countries, the combination of low fertility and low participation is favoured by a family-centred welfare system, a family-biased production system and a family-oriented value system. And, contrary to widespread expectations, a very cohesive family has encouraged very low fertility
The future of care in Europe. Exploring the trade-offs that are driving change
No full textThis paper updates the mapping of care provisions in Europe and examine change therein. The main line of argument is that change under way in the organization of personal care stems from the often conflicting goals of ensuring sustainability
of public finances and affordability of services for the family
Aspettative salariali disattese. Il divario Nord-Sud
Full text linkThanks to the debate on the so called "reservation wage parado", it is fairly well known that job seekers in Southern Italy report, on average, higher reservation wages than in Central and Northern Italy, despite much higher unemployment in the South. It is less well known, however, that upon entering a job, Southern job seekers accept wages that are significantly lower than their own wage expectations as well as lower than the wages accepted by their counterparts in Central and Northern regions. According to the European Community Household Panel, the entry wage of 81% of those Southern workers who have found employment in the eight-year period covered by the survey is lower than the reservation threshold indicated in the latest survey interview. The median value of the reduction of entry wages with respect to reservation wages is 40% on an hourly basis for the Southern group of unemployed who found a job while the corresponding figure for the Centre-North is only 14%. In this article we revisit the debate on the role of wage expectations in influencing unemployment and its regional distribution by documenting North-South disparities in entry wages as well as in reservation wages. We show that not only is the regional disparity in entry wages larger than in reservation wages but also that this finding persists after controlling for statistical selection and the time elapsed between the survey interview and actual entrance into employment
- …
