Austerity, the Public Sector and the Threat to Gender Equality. FORTY-FOURTH GEARY LECTURE, 2014

Europe is in the grip of austerity policies. Some governments regard this as a medium term cyclical correction but others seek a long term shrinking of the social state. This shrinkage applies particularly to the state’s social roles as: a source of income support; a provider of free or subsidised public services; a direct employer; and a defence against the marketisation of society. All four areas have specific significance for women such that we cannot envisage progress towards gender equality in Europe, understood as a socially progressive objective, without a reversal of the austerity trends and an active social state

Is Mass Higher Education Working? An Update and a Reflection on the Sustainability of Higher Education Expansion in Portugal

The appeal of HE expansion has been particularly significant in the case of Portugal, whose levels of qualification of the labour force have been historically low. Over the last two decades the country has experience a massive expansion of its higher education system and the numbers of students enrolled and rates of enrolment have multiplied more than four times. This paper focus on the sustainability of this trend of higher education (HE) expansion in Portugal and attempts to update and rebalance a debate that is too often carried out exclusively from a supply-side perspective. The paper develops an empirical framework which incorporates the diversity of jobs currently carried out by university graduates and their changing skill requirements but that also provides a useful benchmark to refer to growing expectations mismatches among graduates. Using a new typology of graduate-level jobs and staff logs data collected annually by the Portuguese Government for private sector employees, the paper analyses the increasing dispersion of graduates’ relative earnings and relates this trend to the increasing diversification of their jobs. The paper also tests more directly the impact of over-education (relative to the graduate jobs’ current skill requirements) and finds that the relative penalty associated with this condition has increased during the 1995-2005 period. The paper then questions the extent to which Portugal can continue to be portrayed as a straightforward success story regarding the massification of HE and considers the implications regarding political and social support for continuing expansion in the system.human capital; higher education massification; demand for graduates; over-education; inequality

Indicators on Gender Segregation

The objective of this study is to analyse ways of measuring gender segregation, and to consider specifically how the different types of indices can be used and interpreted. The different indicators of segregation are calculated for the EU member-states and a comparative analysis of the situation of European labour markets is made using the different indices. This paper also intends to make a general discussion on the issue of gender segregation, to give recommendations as to how segregation should be measured using current tools and to suggest improvements to existing ways of measuring segregation.Labour market, gender, segregation

Working Time, Industrial Relations and the Employment Relationship

This article explores the erosion of the standard working-time model associated with the UK's voluntarist system of industrial relations, and argues that its renegotiation is likely to be a critical factor in shaping the employment relationship of the future. As numerous studies over the last two decades have revealed, organizations have increasingly seen ‘time’ as a variable that can be manipulated to increase productivity or expand service provision, through making workers work harder, longer or according to management demands. These studies have also drawn our attention to the wider consequences of the increasing demands that organizations place on their employees in the name of ‘flexibility’, impacting both on what workers do while at work and how they organize and plan the other aspects of their lives. This article brings together two literatures, one on time and the other on industrial relations, and suggests that new working-time arrangements are changing the wage-effort bargain and blurring the previously clearly demarcated boundary between work and non-work time. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in six large UK-based organizations, we argue that there is evidence of a move towards a new ‘temporality’ based on an employer-led model of working time, which differs significantly from both the traditional UK system of working-time regulation and that found in Continental Europe