Household employment and the crisis in Europe

The 2008 crisis had a significant impact on household employment in some European countries. An analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions generated a new cross-national typology of household employment structures and showed how these changed during the crisis and austerity period, capturing the experiences of high and low qualified households. Findings indicate that dual earning households are not always a consequence of gender equality but result from economic necessity or employment opportunities. The re-emergence of traditional male breadwinner households is often the result of female unemployment, especially for lower educated women. An increase in female single earners and workless households is evident in countries hit hardest by the employment crisis. The value of this cross-national typology, rooted in the interaction of educational effects and employment opportunities, is allowing comparison both within and between European countries, going beyond established typologies based on policy frameworks or gender cultures

Parental Leave policies, gender equity and family well being in Europe: a comparative perspective

Leave policies and the protection of working parents' rights have changed significantly in Europe during the last few decades. While policies introduced immediately after World War II were largely based on a male-breadwinner model, the post-1970s policies have recognised the increase in maternal employment, the growing diversity of work/family arrangements and working parents' needs for state support in caring for young children. Paid maternity leave and paid or unpaid parental leave are now available throughout Europe - Western, Central and Eastern - and policy developments have encouraged more gender-neutral leaves and longer periods of paid leave (Deven and Moss 2005)

Family and gender values in contemporary Europe: The attitudinal gender gap from a cross-national perspective

Drawing on data from the International Social Survey Programme 2002 survey ‘Family and changing gender roles’, this article looks at the diversity in attitudes towards gender relations and family values in contemporary Europe from a gender perspective. Rather than the idea of a one-dimensional move from tradition to modernity that would gradually erase the attitudinal gender gap, the findings corroborate that gender differentiation plays a key role in attitudinal patterns. Furthermore, the attitudinal gender gap is path-specific and varies according to country-specific societal modernisation. Hence, I examine differences in the statements of men and women to portray attitudinal gender gaps on the national level. I follow the idea that wide gender gaps are associated either with women’s financial autonomy or with greater societal equality in education and political participation, since they allow for greater female awareness of masculine domination. I also argue that family deinstitutionalisation also correlates with greater attitudinal gender gaps

Age, retirement and health as factors in volunteering in later life

Volunteering in later life attracts attention because its benefits older volunteers, voluntary associations, and society. Unfortunately, researchers and practitioners struggle with the complexity of predicting who volunteers. The authors ask whether a rough identification of older volunteers solely based on age is possible. The authors answer this question by means of structural equation modeling, analyzing international survey data. The findings show that the direct effect of age on the time older people spend volunteering is negligible. Moreover, the age patterns in volunteering created by retirement and declining health are weak. Those findings make age an unsuitable indicator for volunteering in later life. The authors recommend that voluntary organizations and policy makers use personal characteristics, such as health status, when defining their target groups for programs that encourage volunteering. In addition, researchers should not use an age group when referring to the third age, meaning the active and productive part of old age

A Step in a New Direction? The Effect of the Parent's Money Reform of 2007 on Employment Rates of Mothers in Germany

Increasing maternal employment rates engage policies and people for decades. It is pushed but also questioned at the same time depending on whether women are regarded in first line as mothers or workers. In Germany, the male breadwinner model is traditionally favored. The parent's money reform of 2007 is regarded as a first step towards the dual earner - dual carer model by some scholars. Compared to previous reform, it introduced a shorter time span of receiving a child-raising benefit, a higher benefit and two additional months extending the reference period if both parents participate in child raising. This paper addresses the question what is the effect of the parent's money reform of 2007 on maternal employment rates? Using the SOEP, an ex-post impact evaluation with difference-in-difference estimator and propensity score matching is done to investigate causal effects of the reform on the employment rates of mothers. The results reveal that the mothers giving birth under the new reform start significantly earlier working than mothers bearing a child under the old reform, but the number of working mothers did not increase. This observation results in the conclusion that the parent's money reform did not fulfill its role as a driver towards a shift the dual earner - dual carer model. Future policies should have an explicit holistic approach to improve the reconciliation of work and family life

Informal and formal reconciliation strategies of older peoples’ working carers: the European carers@work project

Faced with a historically unprecedented process of demographic ageing, many European societies implemented pension reforms in recent years to extend working lives. Although aimed at rebalancing public pension systems, this approach has the unintended side effect that it also extends the number of years in which working carers have to juggle the conflicting demands of employment and caregiving. This not only impinges on working carers’ well-being and ability to continue providing care but also affects European enterprises’ capacity to generate growth which increasingly relies on ageing workforces. The focus of this paper will thus be a cross-national comparison of individual reconciliation strategies and workplace-related company policies aimed at enabling working carers to reconcile both conflicting roles in four different European welfare states: Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom

Recent evolutions of gender, state feminism and care models in Latin America and Europe

Production of INCASI Project H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 GA 691004This chapter presents and characterises the way in which, in the twenty-first century, after years of feminist struggles inside and outside of institutions, gender relations are organised in the different countries of the INCASI project (on the European side, Spain, Italy, Finland, France and the United Kingdom, on the side of the South American Southern Cone, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay). It pays special attention to the implementation of feminist issues on political agendas, and in particular the assignment of women to unpaid care work-an aspect of the power continuum that we look to relate to other aspects. Gradually and for almost a century all countries in both continents have granted women the status of subjects, citizens and employees. However, the conditions, challenges and timelines of this process differ considerably from one continent to another, so they need to be addressed separately. The neoliberal era did not have the same impact in Europe as it did in South America (nor was it exactly the same between particular European countries or among South American ones)

The Effect of Gender Policies on Fertility: The Moderating Role of Education and Normative Context

In this paper, we aim to assess the extent to which individual-level completed fertility varies across contexts characterized by policies supporting different gender division of labor models. We examine key labor market and care policies that shape gender relations in households and in the public domain. We also consider the role of gender norms, which can act as both a moderator and a confounding factor for policy effects. We hypothesize that, by facilitating role compatibility and reducing the gendered costs of childrearing, policies that support gender equality lead to an increase in fertility levels and to a reduction in fertility differentials by the level of education. Using individual-level data from the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions for 16 countries, combined with country-level data, we analyze completed fertility through multilevel Poisson’s models. We find that the national level of childcare coverage is positively associated with fertility. Family allowances, prevalence of women’s part-time employment and length of paid leaves were also found to be positively associated with completed fertility, though the associations were not statistically significant. These variables show a significant positive pattern according to education. A high number of average working hours for men are negatively associated with completed fertility and show a strong negative pattern by educational level. The prevalence of gender-egalitarian norms is highly predictive of fertility levels, yet we found no consistent evidence of a weaker association of gender-equality policies in countries where egalitarian values are less prevalent