Working time flexibility components and working time regimes in Europe: using company-level data across 21 countries

Working time ?exibility comprises a wide variety of arrangements, from part-time, overtime, to long-term leaves. Theoretical approaches to grouping these arrangements have been developed, but empirical underpinnings are rare. This article investigates the bundles that can be found for various ?exible working time arrangements, using the Establishment Survey on Working Time and Work–Life Balance, 2004/2005, covering 21 EU member states and 13 industries. The results from the factor analyses con?rmed that working time arrangements can be grouped into two bundles, one for the employee-centred arrangements and second for the employer-centred arrangements, and that these two bundles are separate dimensions.Wealso tested the stability of the factor analysisoutcome, showing that although we ?nd some deviations from the pan-Europe and pan-industry outcome, the naming of the components as ?exibility for employees and ?exibility for employers can be considered rather stable. Lastly, we ?nd three country clusters for the 21 European countries using the bundle approach. The ?rst group includes the Northern European countries along side Poland and Czech Republic, the second group the continental European countries with UK and Ireland, and lastly, the southern European countries with Hungary and Slovenia

How Gendered Institutions Constrain Women’s Empowerment

Since the 1980s, gender policies at the international level have emphasized women’s participation in the economy. In particular, international gender policies tend to concentrate on the promotion of women’s access to resources, such as jobs, education, land, other assets, and credit. Recent literature acknowledges that women’s empowerment involves more than access to resources but also implies agency and an enabling institutional context, which together help women to achieve better well-being (Kabeer, 2001; Narayan, 2005a; Alsop et al., 2006; Ibrahim and Alkire, 2007). In light of the recent literature on women’s empowerment, this chapter undertakes an innovative exploratory analysis of the role of resources relative to women’s agency, captured by gendered institutions that limit this agency. Non-market institutions that constrain women’s economic position as well as economic development in general are measured, like all other variables, at the macro level. Whereas most scholarship on women’s empowerment is at the micro level, the empirical analysis here is cross-country. The advantage of a cross-country empirical analysis is that it allows for much more variation in institutions, and, hence, it helps to understand more fully how these affect women’s agency and access to resources. (At the micro level, for example, a negative effect of gender norms on women’s bargaining power has been demonstrated, even to the extent that it overrides a positive effect of resources.) In support of a macro-level analysis of empowerment, a useful database has become available with indicators for gendered institutions for most countries of the world (OECD, 2006). Obviously, data on institutions that are qualitative have their limitations for quantitative analysis and require a careful assessment in terms of measurement and multi-collinearity. These limitations will be discussed. The next section will briefly discuss the literature on empowerment. The two sections thereafter will introduce exploratory models and the data as well as the empirical analysis. The chapter ends with policy implications. I conclude that we need to transform formal and informal gendered institutions throughout society