WP 36 - Women's Preferences or Delineated Policies? The development or part-time work in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom

Within sociological and economic analyses of working time, important questions remain regarding women’s ability to combine paid and domestic work. While there is a growing body of research in this area, our knowledge and understanding of the relationship between working, social and private time, often remains limited, in particular regarding the formation of preferences among women with different family statuses. In this paper, we consider the phenomenal growth of part-time work and the emergence of the one-and-a-half earner model in the Netherlands, comparing this to the growth and high levels of part-time work evident in Germany and the United Kingdom. Despite cross-national differences in the development of part-time work, many working mothers, in all three countries, exhibit a preference for part-time work as a second best option for combining paid work and motherhood. This led to a ‘normalisation’ of part-time work in the Netherlands. We show that despite a similar gendered employment pattern and a strong “breadwinner” welfare state tradition, part-time work in Germany and the UK developed under different conditions, making it more difficult to overcome “marginalisation.

WP 45 - Diversity in work: The heterogeneity of women's labour market participation patterns

Employment patterns are gender-driven, yet analyses of women’s employment often fail to recognize the heterogeneous patterns evident within women’s labour market participation itself. This article examines the variation in women’s labour market participation in light of Hakim’s heterogeneity argument. It focuses on the effects of individual differences in educational level, marital status, motherhood and cohorts in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK for the period 1992-2002, disregarding Hakim’s focus on individual attitudes and preferences as the cause of this heterogeneity. Results from a quantitative study using panel data show that women’s labour market participation patterns vary greatly, and that educational level and motherhood are the strongest determinants of this variation. At the same time, cross-country variation is evident. Not only do the results of this study confirm the variation in women’s employment patterns, they raise questions about the theoretical understanding of women’s labour market participation. Therefore, this article also considers the consequences for future theoretical discussions of gendered labour markets given these significant individual differences among women both in and out of paid work.

Empowerment as Contested Terrain. Employability of the Dutch workforce

Sociological analysis has mainly portrayed empowerment as a manipulative masking discourse. However, various actors in society view it as the opposite of domination and espouse it as a goal. Empowerment can constitute a discursive field shaped by its internal contractions between autonomy and control, between ambition and risk of programmed failure – exacerbated by the emphasis on responsibility, and between focus and stigmatization. The paper presents a case study of employability policy in the Netherlands. Employability can be seen as empowerment in matters of career. The study is based on 41 interviews with policy makers, managers, union and employers’ leaders and politicians. It shows that actors drawing on the principle of empowerment as a goal in itself can reset or reclaim a drifting empowerment project in its inceptive phase and add their own twist during execution, evaluation and efforts to engineer improvements

Who are the job seekers? explaining unemployment among doctoral recipients

Despite increased attention for doctoral education in recent years, one particular phenomenon has received little attention—the unemployment of doctoral candidates following graduation. While the unemployment of doctoral recipients is relatively low in comparison to the general popula-tion, the absence of empirical studies means possible important patterns are being overlooked. Using survey data from four universities in the Netherlands, we investigate unemployment among recent doctoral graduates. By comparing the job seekers to employed doctoral recipients and fo-cusing on both structural and individual level variables, including demographic characteristics, previous research experience, job seeking activities, and differences in the PhD trajectory, we are able to discern a number of shared characteristics among the job seekers. Our findings suggest that unemployment among doctoral candidates is not random or evenly distributed. In contrast to the general population, where socio structural characteristics such as educational level and gender are integral in explaining unemployment, within this level of educational attainment primarily individual level factors are more salient in explaining unemployment among this group of job seekers

Сучасний стан нормативно-правового забезпечення формування облікової політики

У статті проаналізовано стан розвитку нормативно-правової бази формування облікової політики підприємства. Констатовано, що нормативно-правові акти, які визначають правові засади формування облікової політики в Україні, вимагають взаємоузгодження й урегулювання, а також мають відповідати міжнародним стандартам обліку. Запропоновані напрямки подальшого вдосконалення законодавчого регулювання облікової політики в Україні.The article analyzes the state of the regulatory framework of formationac counting policies of the enterprise. Suggested areas for further improvement of legal regulation of accounting policy in Ukraine

The disconnection between policy practices and women's lived experiences: combining work and life in the UK and the Netherlands

Combining work and family life is central to women‘s participation in the labour market. Work-life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women‘s lived realities of combining work and family life in the UK in comparison to the Netherlands as a possible ‗best practices‘ model. We argue that women in both countries experience work-life balance as an ongoing process, continually negotiating the boundaries of work and family, and that there needs to be a more sophisticated appreciation of the differing needs of working parents. Whilst policy initiatives can be effective in helping women to reconcile dual roles, many women in both the UK and the Netherlands still resolve these issues at the individual or personal level and feel that policy has not impacted on their lives in any tangible way

Workers’ well-being in the context of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

In this Voices article, we use emerging evidence to reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for various aspects of workers' wellbeing. This brief review emphasises how COVID-19 exacerbates existing, well-understood inequalities, along the intersections of community, work, and family. Workers on the periphery of the labour market, including non-standard workers and the self-employed, but also women and low-paid workers, are experiencing significant losses in relation to work, working hours and/or wages. Even once the pandemic is contained, its impact will continue to be felt by many communities, workers, and families for months and years to come

Twenty years of social policy research on gender

In this overview chapter I will discuss social policy research on gender during the timespan 2000-2020. Understanding social policy research as a multidisciplinary academic field, the focus will be on the question of how gender inequality has been defined, as a social and economic problem or otherwise, how it is framed, what causes it, what policy responses are implemented, and what outcomes it generates. Acknowledging that gender is a heterogeneous category, the chapter will also look at intersectionality. Finally, I will go beyond Clasen and Siegel’s outcome criterion –defined here as gender equality – to see if and how gender is present in social policy research that does not, per definition, take that outcome for granted