Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment
Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the
revised employment guidelines and the re-launch of the Lisbon Process. However,
advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment
rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to
help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad
view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market
type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using
data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality
along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude
that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as
working time and sector, have more influence on an individual’s job quality than the
country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the
value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and
derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU
policy and academic debate on this topic
