Women out, children out : the effect of female labor on portuguese preschool enrollment rates

This article tests whether Portuguese female activity rates have increased preschool enrollment rates. Particularly during the last 20 years, Portuguese women have assumed new roles in the marketplace and have become active workers outside of the home environment. This change has encouraged more sensible decisions with respect to preschool enrollment. Using cointegration techniques, we concluded that female activity rates and real income per capita caused a long-term increase in preschool enrollment rates. Although the percentage of agricultural gross value added to the gross domestic product and the number of preschool institutes were also found to be significant in the estimated vector error correction model, their causal relationship with preschool enrollment was only short term.COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

The Hassle of Housework: : Digitalisation and the Commodification of Domestic Labour

© 2019 The Author(s) .The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Feminist Review by Sage Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. It is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778919879725This article revisits materialist second wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms to deliver social reproductive labour via the market in a context in which reproductive labour sits at the centre of an intense time squeeze. It reflects on the implications the commodification of domestic labour for feminist strategy. The author points to the inadequacy in this context of traditional feminist strategies: for the socialisation of domestic labour through public services; wages for housework; or labour-saving through technological solutions, concluding that new strategies are needed that address the underlying social relations that perpetuate unequal divisions of labour in contemporary capitalism.Peer reviewe