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Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; employment; families; gendered impact EN COVID-19 pandemic employment families gendered impact 1927 1934 8 10/04/22 20221101 NES 221101 The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of women in the labor market and the unrecognized value of essential occupations such as care and education (Queisser et al., 2020). At the intersection of work and family, how has the COVID-19 pandemic affected work-family balance among working men and women? Overall, this paper extends previous work on changes in gender attitudes during the pandemic (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021) by identifying some pandemic-related factors that may have triggered these changes as well as demonstrating variations across family and work contexts. Academically, how does the COVID-19 pandemic extend or challenge our theoretical knowledge about gendered labor markets, gendered workplaces, and/or gendered distributions of paid work, care tasks, household tasks, and leisure?. [Extracted from the article]

The papers in this Special Issue Part I "Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work: Quo Vadis Gender Stereotypes?" focus on the current state of gender inequality, particularly stereotypes. We present studies showing that differences in gender stereotypes still exist, confirm disadvantages for women in male‐dominated roles and sectors and when the employment sector is not specified, but also disadvantages for men in female‐dominated roles and sectors. In contrast to this general trend, one paper in Part II of this Special Issue found a preference for women over men as job candidates in their study. Incongruence emerged as a striking common theme to explain these gender differences, whereby some studies focused on the perceived incongruence from the actor's perspective and how external factors contribute to these perceptions, whereas others looked at the perceived incongruence from the observer's perspective. We summarize the papers and briefly discuss the key points of Part I at the end of this editorial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in Part II of this Special Issue on "Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work" emphasize the factors contributing to gender stereotypes. These papers share the aim of understanding the relevance of individual factors, boundary conditions, and of broadening the scope beyond heterosexual women and men. We summarize the papers of this Special Issue Part II and discuss the key takeaways from the whole Special Issue, including Part I "Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work: Quo Vadis Gender Stereotypes?" and Part II "Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work: Contributors to Gender‐Role Stereotyping", and implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on women's employment, care responsibilities, and access to services have motivated an unprecedented level of advocacy around strengthening national social protection systems from a gender perspective. Yet very little empirical evidence exists about what a gender‐responsive social protection system entails in practice. This paper addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of 52 national social protection strategies from primarily low‐and middle‐income countries. To analyse the gender responsiveness of these strategies, we developed an analytical framework based on international human rights standards and social policy, gender and development literature. Through presentation of the framework and our findings, this paper makes several contributions to scholarship and practice. First, our framework―the first of its kind―offers a novel conceptual and methodological contribution by enabling a systematic, comparative assessment of national approaches to social protection from a gender perspective. Second, the framework enables the systematisation of empirical evidence on the degree to which gender is integrated into social protection systems. By applying it to national social protection strategies, we identify which gendered risks and vulnerabilities are most commonly acknowledged and addressed in countries' efforts to create gender‐responsive social protection systems. We also highlight a concerning gap between rhetoric and response when it comes to gender equality in the strategic plans that governments lay out for these systems. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic cross‐country assessment of such documents. We conclude with future directions for research and practice, including the gap between recognition and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the socioeconomic impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Cambodia--a prominent place-based policy established in 2005. The paper employs a database on existing and future SEZs in Cambodia with matched household surveys at the district level and documents stylized facts on SEZs in a low-income country setting. To identify the causal effects of the SEZ program, the paper (i) constructs an alternative control group including future SEZ program participants and districts adjacent to SEZ hosts; and (ii) employs a propensity score weighting technique. The study finds that entry of SEZs increases employment and leads to a decline in income inequality at a district level. Gains in female employment is the key channel explaining rising employment rates. The paper also finds that school drop-out rates are higher in districts with clusters of multiple SEZs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of work argues that the entry of women into public spaces can promote political and institutional change. The COVID‐19 provides an opportunity to investigate whether and under what conditions women's political representation in rural local governments deliver effective local governance? Drawing from two rounds of data collected in 174 local governments and 1051 households in three Indian states, the paper shows that women Pradhans in the Gram Panchayats had no differential impact on the governance response to COVID‐19 compared to the unreserved ones. Analyzing the heterogeneity in these responses suggests that institutional factors like the proportion of women in village council and local entrepreneurship diversity can enhance women Pradhan's capacity to respond to the pandemic. We explore two channels that enable women Pradhan to govern effectively during the pandemic: improving women's participation in the labor force and reducing household's vulnerability to poverty in the pre‐COVID period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effort to close the gender gaps in employment is one of the priorities worldwide to help address the disparity that exists between men and women in terms of rights and opportunities and to grow the economy in a sustainable way. Several academics and international organizations are interested in understanding its evolution, as well as the reasons and consequences of its existence. In this sense, the crisis alters the labor markets, affecting male and female employment ratios to varying degrees. To determine the foundations and consequences of the COVID‐19 in the labor sphere: we first discuss the most relevant international analysis of employment in pre‐and post‐COVID‐19 times. Second, we synthesize the state of the art of the most relevant literature on gender gap in employment and its drivers, especially those related to the impact of the coronavirus. To achieve this, we revised 731 papers since 1989 until January 2024. The reports of different organizations, as well as scientific studies indicate that the coronavirus has represented a setback for female empowerment. This is evident in higher rates of destroyed employment due to the pandemic impact on more feminized sectors, and women have assumed greater responsibilities at home compared to males. With a sample of 394 articles published between 2020 and January 2024, we employed a bibliometric approach to understand the evolution of scientific research on the subject. Our results provide a theoretical and conceptual framework that facilitates academic progress in understanding gender inequality, as well as practical guidance in identifying gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes". This paper surveys Goldin's contributions, analysing women's labour force participation from the late 1700s through to the present. To document women's participation in the workforce, Goldin uncovered rich data from varied sources, from government reports and city directories to health surveys and university registration cards. She combined these data with economic theory to identify the factors affecting women's employment and to explore how we might achieve gender equity today. Her work has had an immense influence on how we understand the labour market, household decision‐making, and gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dried fish—here defined broadly as aquatic animals preserved using simple techniques, such as sun‐drying, salting, fermentation, and smoking that permit storage as foods at ambient temperature for extended periods without specialized packaging—have received little direct attention in fisheries research. This lack of visibility belies their historical and contemporary importance. Prior to the introduction of refrigeration, dried fish were the main form in which fisheries catches were traded and consumed. Dried fish products remain a core component of production, trade, diets, and cuisines across the world, particularly in the Global South. The dried fish sector provides employment for millions of people, particularly women, who comprise most of the fish‐drying workforce in many locations. However, the sector also confronts and creates significant challenges including food safety concerns and exploitative labour conditions. This paper is the first systematic assessment of the global literature on dried fish, comprised of a sample of >1100 references. In contrast to the general fisheries literature, which is dominated by studies of ecology and governance and focusses mainly on primary production, the dried fish literature is dominated by studies from food science and concentrates on the processing segment of fish value chains. As such, it offers valuable reference point for fisheries research, which is becoming increasingly attentive to food systems. This paper uncovers a wealth of insights buried in this largely unheralded literature, and identifies key thematic intersections, gaps and research questions that remain to be addressed in the study of dried fish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific rhetoric can have a profound impact on the perception of research; it can also drive and direct further research efforts. What determines whether results are discussed in a neutral or a judgmental way? How precise and convincing do results have to be so that authors call for significant policy changes? These questions are in general difficult to answer, because rhetoric on the one hand, and content and methodology of the paper on the other, cannot be separated easily. We therefore used a unique example to examine this question empirically: the analysis of gender wage differentials. Here, the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition represents a standard research method that compares male and female earnings, holding observable factors constant. We analyzed close to 200 papers to investigate what drives authors to talk about discrimination, whether and when they call for policy activism, or when they are more hesitant to do so. Our results show that American authors are more reluctant to refer to discrimination. So are women, but only with respect to the titles of their papers. Furthermore, we find that the better the data and method used in a paper, the more likely an author is to assign his/her estimate of unequal wages to discrimination. The contrary is true the higher the prestige of the author or the research outlet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds to the literature studying the substitution and complementarity between corruption and the shadow economy by focusing on the differential effects of various informal employment categories, by gender (informal employment by men vs. women) and across industries (informal employment in the agriculture vs. non‐agriculture sectors). Using cross‐national data, we find evidence of complementarity between corruption and informal employment, after accounting for possible simultaneity. This complementarity holds across different informal employment categories, with some quantitative differences. These findings have policy relevance for the coordination of anti‐corruption and anti‐underground‐economy policies, and whether such policies should be sector specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While India's low female labor force participation in urban areas is often attributed to its demographic and labor market characteristics, education, and cultural aspects, attention is not paid to the labor market opportunity structure limiting women's labor market participation. We examine the role of transport infrastructure in gendergap in labor force participation and its variations by gender-norms across communities. Using India Human Development Survey and city-level data on transport infrastructure, the causal effects of differential employment status of women and men are related to size and quality of transport in twelve Indian cities. Interaction effects are explored to understand varying impacts of transport on employment by gender-context in communities. We find that an improvement in the size and quality of transportation infrastructure improves women's labor market participation more than that of men. In gender egalitarian communities, stronger positive effect of transport on female labor and reduction of gender gap in employment. Along with generation of new job opportunities suitable for women, it is important to encourage a gender-friendly institutional and social fabric to allow women to connect to new jobs. Using a novel data, the paper highlights the importance of ostensibly gender-neutral development policies for shaping gender inequalities in outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse how employment and wages change when a firm's trade status is altered. Using a detailed firm‐level dataset of Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises, the study finds that how firms trade matters for firm employment and wages in Vietnam. The average effect of one‐way trading (exporting or importing) is positive for both firms' total employment and female employment. Direct trading activities are associated with a higher level of employment than indirect trading activities by firms. The female employment effect of direct exports is nearly three times higher than direct imports. Indirect imports hurt firms' total employment and female employment. Both direct and indirect two‐way traders experience higher growth in firm employment than direct‐only traders. However, it is interesting to note that indirect two‐way trading activities have a positive impact on female employment. Furthermore, the commencement of direct import is also associated with greater labour cost advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In addition, through the reassessment of the importance of caregiving, women would not only be rewarded economically but also encouraged to feel proud of performing care work.[9] However, Van Parijs's claim that through the basic income the importance and value of care would become socially recognized differs from the position of care ethics. As a result, because care is a public value it is not enough to institutionalize the basic income, and there should be further focus on whether there are other initiatives that can respect and sustain care and care relationships, and promote the shared social responsibility to provide care. CARE ETHICS AND ITS POLICY IMPLICATION Care ethics has been presented as an alternative moral theory based on the undeniable human experience of the need for care and its value (Held 2006). The paper argues that the basic income does not constitute a sufficient response to the fact of universal human dependency and people's inevitable care needs, does not treat care as a public value to an adequate degree, and cannot adequately identify and address the structural inequalities of care produced by the current socioeconomic system. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, I examine leisure complementarities in the joint retirement decisions of couples by quantifying the effect of the 2011 Norwegian pension reform. The reform abolished an earnings test on early retirement benefits for private‐sector workers, but not for public‐sector workers. I analyze population‐wide registry data on labor market participation, and I consider couples where the focal partner works in the public sector with a spouse employed either in the private sector (treatment group) or the public sector (control group). I find that spousal spillovers account for over 40 percent of the aggregate employment effect for women. They claim fewer early retirement benefits, and both men and women pay additional labor income taxes. In total, government budgets improved by approximately $46 million as a result of the spousal spillover effect between 2012 and 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three years into the COVID‐19 pandemic, this article considers the longer‐lasting economic impacts on the Australian workforce through a gender lens. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, it analyses changes in employment, earnings and educational participation relative to the pre‐pandemic trends that were predicted to have otherwise occurred. Despite women's employment moving back towards pre‐pandemic levels more rapidly than men's, the pandemic also saw a widening of the gender gap in earnings and a larger fall in women's educational participation. This paper highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of labour market indicators through a gender lens to inform more responsive policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is resilience in the context of work environments where women face barriers as significant as career discrimination and harassment? In such a context, is resilience an individual responsibility? How can organizations contribute to and support employee resilience? And where is gender in this equation? This conceptual paper explores these questions using aviation, the skilled trades (i.e., carpentry, welding, plumbing) and the military as case studies to understand how gender inclusion could be better supported by resilient organizations. The barriers for women in male‐dominated industries include social exclusion, marginalization, discrimination, harassment, and other forms of social closure. How these barriers can be overcome is not well understood. We argue that individual resilience plays a part in women thriving and developing enduring careers but can only occur in combination with support from gender inclusion strategies and organizational resilience. We have developed the Resilience for Gender Inclusion (RGI) model combining gender inclusion strategies with organizational resilience strategies. The RGI model demonstrates how employee and organizational resilience intersect and may lead to the transformative potential of inclusive cultures of diversity. This will improve employee wellbeing and self‐efficacy and create a much needed sense of belonging and social inclusion for women in male‐dominated occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the presence of refugees alters the intra‐household allocation of tasks across genders in the hosting population. Using panel data (pre‐ and post‐refugee inflow) from Kagera, a rural region of Tanzania, we find that the refugee shock led to women being less likely to engage in employment outside the household and more likely to engage in household chores relative to men. This is probably the result of the environmental degradation that accompanied the arrival of refugees and the additional competition for natural resources such as wood and water. However, the results differ by (pre‐shock) literacy and math skill. For women who could read and perform simple written mathematical operations the refugee shock resulted in a higher likelihood of engaging in outside employment. In contrast, higher exposure to the refugee shock resulted in illiterate women being more likely to engage in farming and household chores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the outline of national guideline for gender‐sensitive post‐disaster needs assessment (PDNA) that was developed based on the experiences of 2019 Iran floods is presented. Accordingly, at first, the baseline information on female‐headed households, elderly, disabled women and the employment situation of females that should be collected before the disaster is introduced. Then, the mechanism for evaluation the effects and impacts of disasters on women and girls is presented. Finally, considering the recovery strategies, their needs in recovery and reconstruction are addressed. The results can be used in other countries to develop the gender‐sensitive PDNA guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing countries, often a major segment of the population is characterized as poor. Thus, social protection programs play a crucial role in facilitating the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda across these nations. Among the several socioeconomic benefits associated with the social safety net programs, the impacts on female labor force participation are vital from the perspectives of enhancing women empowerment and welfare. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to evaluate the impacts of social transfers under the "allowances for the widow, deserted, and destitute women" social protection program on the rural female labor force participation responses in Bangladesh. The overall results from the probit, IV‐probit, and propensity score matching techniques provide statistical evidence regarding the cash transfers acting as a "mini‐push" to nudge greater participation of the beneficiary women in the labor force. Moreover, the cash transfers are also found to positively influence the labor force participation decisions of the other female members within the households of the program beneficiaries. Besides, the female labor force participation decisions are evidenced to be heterogeneous across the age cohorts, marital statuses, and the gender of the household head. In line with the major findings from the analyses, some key policy interventions are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Spring (AS) event characterized the recent history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It brought about various economic, political, and social conditions and transformations that affected women's well‐being and their status and participation in the labour market. Accordingly, this paper examines the short‐run and the long‐run effects of the AS on female labour force participation (FLFP) rates in the MENA region. The empirical analysis is implemented through the generalized method of moments (GMM) system estimator for dynamic panel models, using the basic (one‐step) and the two‐step approaches over different empirical specifications. The benchmark empirical results show that the AS is associated with moderate average increases in FLFP rates in the MENA region. The empirical analysis subsequently emphasizes significant variations and distinct patterns in the AS effects on FLFP rates across MENA countries, and it ties these findings to the AS‐related economic, political and social circumstances in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the available quantitative evidence on the relationship between explicit family policy and women's employment outcomes in 45 high‐income countries between 1980 and 2016. At the methodological level, we gathered 238 papers through a four‐stage systematic qualitative review. We included articles published in English in international journals or by leading research institutes. Despite the accrued importance of the field, comparative works and national case studies do not sufficiently engage one another for methodological and disciplinary reasons. Our contribution is to integrate the findings from both streams of the literature in two ways. First, we chart systematically the debate describing its evolution over four decades, the disciplines involved (demography, economics, politics, social policy, sociology, and interdisciplinary work), and the geographical and policy breadth of the empirical contributions. Second, we provide a rich guide for scholars in the field by exploring how national case studies fit (or not) the broad trends captured in comparative research and discussing key and controversial debates in the field. In conclusion, we point out also important gaps in the literature and propose new avenues for future research. An exhaustive set of tables provides information on each comparative and national case study and on the databases and variables employed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern agricultural farms offer huge potential in creating employment opportunities, which, in turn, are expected to reduce fertility. The Ethiopian government has recently leased out millions of hectares of farmland to investors under highly concessionary terms. However, little is known regarding women's farm employment effect on their fertility. Using survey data, this paper analyzed this link in the context of Saudi Star and Merti Agricultural Development farms. Results showed lower odds of fertility intention among employed women compared to non‐employed women where employment is measured more broadly. This result at a glance appears to be consistent with conventional theory which considers children as resulting from parental choice relative to other essential household goods constrained by resource shortages in the household's utility maximization framework. Where employment is measured rather narrowly (standard way) as in most socioeconomic research, however, the odds of fertility intention is higher. The two results were expected to be reversed since fertility was expected to be lower where employment is measured more narrowly than broadly where a range of employments are included. Additionally, effects associated with the recent establishment of Saudi Star farm compared to the more matured farms in Merti are likely to reduce fertility intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the intersections between migration, gender and economic opportunity in later medieval England. Drawing on the returns of the alien subsidy, a direct tax imposed on the country’s alien residents during the second half of the fifteenth century, it argues that immigrant women encountered a medieval equivalent of the so-called ‘double disadvantage’, having fewer opportunities to work in independent occupations than immigrant men and English women. Female aliens were more likely than either their male fellow-immigrants or their native counterparts to be employed in service, and significant numbers of alien women can be linked to the low-status prostitution sector. Providing little evidence of economic betterment, evidence from the alien subsidies thus suggests that the so-called ‘golden age’ thesis, according to which economic opportunities for women improved in post-Black Death England, did not apply to the country’s immigrant women. The paper also questions, however, whether the economic expectations of female aliens either actually were in fact or thought to be the same as those of alien men and English women. In an unusually early example of transnational life-cycle service, female immigrant servants may never have had any intention of settling permanently and building a successful life in England, but rather may have come to work for only a limited period, returning home and capitalising on their foreign experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In periods of crisis, companies face a financial reality that forces them to decide whether to maintain their commitment to sustainability or prioritize their financial returns. The study of what happened during the COVID‐19 pandemic is vital, given the hard blow it has implied for business and, consequently, for employment. Thus, this paper seeks to determine whether the business commitment to sustainability policies focused on employment and gender diversity translates into concrete results. In a sample of 1761 multinationals (8963 observations) during the 2015–2020 period, we found that the pandemic has harmed employment at the microeconomic level. However, this impact is moderated by the level of responsibility that companies have with their workers. Therefore, the most sustainable companies have been more reluctant to reduce their workforce and even more so when they are women. These results help to position sustainability performance as a way to achieve gender equality at the business level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the shrinking of the gender wage gap, women with children continue to experience earnings and career disadvantages that women without children do not experience. This review first summarizes how the severity of the "motherhood penalty" is influenced by a woman's marital status and class in ways that perpetuate existing inequalities. Next, it outlines how the same factors also play salient roles in determining women's workforce behaviors upon transitioning to motherhood, largely dictating the extent to which women's earnings and careers are negatively impacted by the arrival of children. After establishing the stratified lines upon which mothers' decisions are made, and the disparate financial ramifications of their decisions, the paper concludes with a call for future research into the mechanisms that propel mothers' labor market decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub‐Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub‐Saharan African countries, this paper analyzes female labor force participation from a demographic perspective. We show that enrollment in education is substantially higher among the most recent female cohorts than among the earlier‐born ones. The higher enrollment mechanically depresses female labor force participation, weakening the relationship between female labor force participation and education. After taking this cohort trend into account, we find a strong and positive association between female labor force participation and female education. We further find a cohort trend toward higher female employment in the nonprimary sector and a positive association between female employment in the nonprimary sector and female education. The higher investments in education by younger female cohorts, together with the demographics of sub‐Saharan African countries, have implications for a potentially arising "demographic dividend". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of maternal education on child mortality in Bangladesh by exploiting quasi‐experimental variations in the duration of exposure to a school stipend project for identification. Results from the instrumental variable estimation indicate that an additional year of maternal schooling reduces both under‐five and infant mortality by about 20 percent. The findings are statistically significant and robust to a number of model specifications, including survival models controlling for right censoring of child mortality. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that maternal education reduces child mortality through greater wealth and literacy, positive assortative mating, lower fertility, delayed marriage and childbearing, greater health‐related knowledge, better health‐seeking behaviors, and female empowerment, but not through female employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While gender equality at work and the gendered parameters of workplace conditions are of interest to feminist researchers, this paper brings together sociological and public health perspectives to interrogate factors impacting women who return to work (RTW) while maintaining breastfeeding. Our inquiry is focused on female‐dominated professions, teaching, nursing, and midwifery, and our findings suggest that breastfeeding obstacles exist even when gender‐inclusive policies appear to support women. Workplaces generate both overt and subtle barriers to breastfeeding, which force many women to stop earlier than they intended or create ongoing worry about maintaining breastmilk supply. Interviews with participants who maintained breastfeeding after RTW generated three overarching themes: women's determination to get back into the workforce, not wanting to "rock the boat", and the difficulty in keeping their "head above water". Despite workplace policies that appeared to support breastfeeding, the workplace catered to a supposedly gender‐neutral worker and policies did not translate into practice. Given the many sacrifices that women make to maintain breastfeeding, the level of workplace apathy was surprising, especially in female dominated professions. Our research foregrounds breastfeeding corporeality, not as excess but as an inevitable and essential feature of workplaces, which needs to be acknowledged and accommodated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of rural‐to‐urban migrant women find employment in urban areas of mainland Southeast Asia as beer sellers, beer promoters, and karaoke girls whose duties include selling alcoholic drinks, often on commission, and entertaining clients. Using the label of beer sellers to refer to all of these workers, this paper draws from a sequential mixed‐methods participatory study conducted with migrant beer sellers in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand to examine beer selling as intimate labor. Deploying emotional, affective, and embodied labor as interactive components of intimate labor, migrant beer sellers as members of the urban precariat are subject to myriad forms of surveillance that operate in concert to inform the parameters of beer selling as an intimate industry, the somato‐social presentation of workers' bodies, and their intercorporeal interactions with clients. Together, they work to reinforce gendered and racialized social hierarchies and the normative social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 crisis has translated into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis for the poor and marginalized groups in society. The countrywide lockdowns, quarantine measures, and mobility restrictions across 200 countries of the world have resulted in a host of negative manifestations for women. There have been unprecedented losses in the informal economy, which is dominated by women. Some scholars also contend that the pandemic will translate into heightened burden of unpaid domestic work, loss of economic autonomy and disruption to maternal health services. Despite these factors a gendered perspective is absent in the policy response to this crisis. It is against this background that the present paper employed a feminist intersectionality lens to conduct participatory field based research on the lived experiences of women in informal employment in Indian Punjab during the COVID‐19 crisis. The research unearthed the specific pathways through which existing socio‐economic inequities rooted in caste, class and occupational entities magnify the vulnerabilities experienced by women during such a health crisis. The research offers a contextualized framework for understanding the gendered impacts of the crisis. It also highlights the urgency of taking account of gender specific constraints during the health crisis so as to institute robust, effective and equitable policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs and estimates a dynamic discrete choice structural model of female employment and fertility decisions that incorporates job protection and cash benefits of parental leave legislation. The structural model is used for ex ante evaluation of policies that change the duration of job protection and/or the arrangement for cash benefits. Counterfactual simulations indicate that introducing an initial 1‐year job protection policy increases maternal employment significantly, but extending the existing job protection period from 1 to 3 years has little effect. In addition, the employment effects of cash benefits seem modest. Overall, parental leave policies have little effect on fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of this question by exploiting rich variation across firms in the timing of federal contracting to identify affirmative action effects over the course of three decades spanning 1973 to 2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long-term and dynamic effects of affirmative action in federal contracting on employment composition within firms in the United States. I use a new panel of over 100,000 large private-sector firms from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including both firms that obtain federal contracts and are therefore mandated to implement affirmative action and firms that are noncontractors, across all industries and regions. The paper's key results indicate that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men. Dynamic event study analysis of workforce composition around the time of contracting reveals that a large part of the effect of affirmative action on increasing protected group shares occurred within the first four years of gaining a contract, and that these increased shares persisted even after a firm was no longer a federal contractor. The paper also uncovers important results on how the impact of affirmative action evolved over 1973 to 2003, in particular that the fastest growth in the employment shares of minorities and women at federal contractors relative to noncontracting firms occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s, decelerating substantially in ensuing years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordan has long been a party to the main international instruments prohibiting discrimination against women, yet it still displays a significant gender pay gap. Using data from the 2002, 2006 and 2008 Household Expenditure and Income Surveys for decomposition analysis, while also accounting for the labour force participation decisions of women and men, the author finds that the pay gap is entirely explained by gender differentials in his estimated coefficients. The gap is initiated upon recruitment into wage employment through 'screening discrimination', though it tends to narrow over time. Women's selectively low participation also contributes to a statistical improvement in their relative earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper documents the change in employment and wages between 2012 and 2020 when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe implemented his economic policy popularly known as Abenomics. Despite population aging that by itself would have decreased the employment rate by 2.8 percentage points, the aggregate employment rate increased from 56.5% in 2012 to 60.7% in 2019, largely because of a substantial increase in the 25–64‐year‐old female employment rate, which was especially profound in the health and welfare industry. The real wage declined by 1.8% from 2012 to 2017, of which 1.4% is explained by changes in worker composition, particularly the increase in female workers. We also assess the impact of COVID‐19 on the labor market in 2020 and discuss its impact on the long term labor market trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper presents an estimation approach that addresses the problems of sample selection and endogeneity of fertility decisions when estimating the effect of young children on women's self‐employment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, 1982–2006, we find that ignoring self‐selection and endogeneity leads to underestimating the effect of young children. Once both sources of biases are accounted for, the estimated effect of young children roughly triples when compared to uncorrected results. This finding is robust to several changes in the specification and to the use of a different dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than two million Mexican women, including over 60,000 in the southeastern state of Oaxaca (population 3.8 million), generate income through paid domestic labour. Within the local political economy, this low-paid, low-status job commodifies the unpaid household chores that local gender role norms ascribe to women. Although the potential economic, social, and physical exploitation of uneducated, poor women domestic workers in a 'dead end job' is well documented across the globe (see Hoerder, 2015), less is known about the goals and experiences of women who work in service as a way to 'get ahead' through and after schooling. Through ethnographic analysis of the lives of Oaxacan domestics who possess high education levels, this paper explores ways that local socioeconomic and geographic conditions and patterns coincide and contrast with broader debates regarding the gendering of urbanization and employment in underdeveloped regions. This issue is especially compelling in an impoverished state that is notorious for low schooling levels, high rates of international migration, and the nation's highest percentage (80 percent) of workers in the informal sector (CONEVAL 2013). This study contributes to our understanding of the importance of informal sector employment for urban women-both with and without advanced schooling-whose agency has led them to work in domestic service while negotiating precarious economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the careers of 27 women employed as part-time managers in a range of UK public, private and not-for-profit sector organizations. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews, the article briefly summarizes the career trajectories of these women, prior to and after a transition to part-time working, before exploring whether and how career progression is linked to the support of role models and mentors. The part-time managers in this sample held varied careers while working full-time, but careers often stalled following a transition to part-time work. Given research has identified role models and mentors as having a positive impact upon career progression, this paper explores the existence of role models and mentors within the sample of female part-time managers. While the majority of interviewees identified role models, just over half identified these as negative role models who did little to champion part-time working. Drawing upon Gibson's 'positive/negative' role model dimensions, we argue the likelihood of identifying positive and negative role models alters when an analysis takes account of gender and working hours. Few interviewees identified mentors: just four women spoke of being mentored currently, though ten others identified being mentored in the past. We argue this lack of mentors and the identification of negative role models, the majority of whom were women, exacerbates the already precarious position of these female part-time managers. The paper concludes by commenting on the lack of support for female part-time managers, and the paucity of influential people working part-time in organizations, despite the rapid growth of part-time work in the UK over the past four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the status and determinants of gender disparities in financial inclusion using a sample of 4,466 individuals from the Finscope survey in Tanzania. The results provide evidence to support gender disparities in financial inclusion, mostly pronounced in formal savings (21.3%), formal accounts (10.6%) and mobile money accounts (9.4%). This is reflected in 17.1% less likelihood of female ownership of a formal savings account but a 2% higher likelihood to access formal credit. Finally, the paper documents evidence that gender disparities in financial inclusion are explained by lower levels of education, income and over‐dependence of women on men. The findings support gender mainstreaming in other sectors to increase employment and education for women to close the gender gap in financial access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the economic landscape of contemporary Nunavut from the perspective of Inuit women's labour force activity. Gender is shown to play a crucial role in explaining wage work dynamics in contemporary Nunavut and, more importantly, within Inuit families. Despite the centrality of Inuit women's employment, family, and domestic responsibilities-as well as their increased participation in northern development-very few studies have examined gender dynamics in this context. Drawing on 29 families' personal stories collected by the author in the community of Kangiqtugaapik, Nunavut between 2011 and 2013, this paper examines how wage work is organized at the community, family, and individual levels. Nouveau régime de travail au Nunavut : perspective sur l'identité de genre Cet article examine le paysage économique du Nunavut à partir de l'activité économique des femmes inuites. Dans le Nunavut contemporain, l'identité de genre joue un rôle déterminant dans les dynamiques de travail salarié, particulièrement au sein des familles. Bien que les femmes inuites occupent une place centrale sur le marché du travail, dans les activités familiales et domestiques, et que leur participation au développement du nord n'ait cessé de croître, jusqu'à ce jour peu d'études se sont intéressées aux dynamiques de genre dans ce contexte. Afin d'examiner l'organisation du travail salarié à trois échelles - la communauté, la famille et l'individu - l'article s'appuie sur les récits individuels de 29 familles recueillis par l'auteur dans la communauté de Kangiqtugaapik, Nunavut entre 2011 et 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the macro-national level factors that influence women's work engagement in Arab countries. First, it offers an overview of the notions of work engagement and gendered work engagement. Next, the macro-national context is investigated where economic, socio-cultural, and legal factors are analyzed that may explain differences in workplace engagement between men and women. Lastly, the discussion, implications for future research and practice, and conclusion are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights some of the archives held at The Women's Library relating to home economics. It concentrates on the archives of the Institute of Home Economics, its successor and predecessor. It considers strengths in the collections, in particular home economics education. Although the profession ultimately failed to secure home economics as a foundation subject in the National Curriculum in 1987, it appears that food education is more important than ever, especially when we are reminded about childhood obesity in the daily news. The paper concludes that formal home economics teaching did fulfil the vitally important function of teaching young people how to feed themselves properly, and that food does provide an important part of children's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female labour force participation rates across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have remained low for over four decades even though, in the same period, women's education rapidly increased and fertility rates substantially decreased. This study provides a better understanding of this surprising phenomenon by testing whether the number of children affects the mother's labour supply (using twins at first birth as an instrumental variable.) Despite a strong first stage, it does not find statistically significant effects in the second stage, even in the combined sample of over 100,000 observations. This non‐result, however, does not rule out that fertility affects women's employment in these countries. But it rejects impacts larger than 0.09. Similar twin‐studies in the United States found effects between 0.12 and 0.31. The paper discusses the implications of this result in understanding the puzzle of female participation in MENA and in designing policies to increase women's employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing the level of labor income taxes? In this paper, we argue that the degree of tax progressivity is a quantitatively important determinant of the answer to this question. To make this point, we develop a large scale overlapping generations model with single and married households facing idiosyncratic income risk, extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, as well as endogenous accumulation of human capital through labor market experience. We calibrate the model to U.S. macro, micro, and tax data and characterize the labor income tax Laffer curve for various degrees of tax progressivity. We find that the peak of the U.S. Laffer curve is attained at an average labor income tax rate of 58%. This peak (the maximal tax revenues the government can raise) increases by 7% if the current progressive tax code is replaced with a flat labor income tax. Replacing the current U.S. tax system with one that has Denmark' s progressivity would lower the peak by 8%. We show that modeling the extensive margin of labor supply and endogenous human capital accumulation is crucial for these findings. With joint taxation of married couples (as in the U.S.), higher tax progressivity leads to significantly lower labor force participation of married women and substantially higher labor force participation of single women, an effect that is especially pronounced when future wages of females depend positively on past labor market experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the kinds of representations of the woman leader produced discursively in the Finnish business media. The paper draws on the idea that jobs and organizations are gendered and, to the extent that gendered features are valued differently, with masculinity being favoured particularly in managerial positions, the status of women and men leaders becomes unequal. Based on the assumption that the media form a powerful force which creates and maintains meanings in contemporary society, we focus on articles published in a leading business newspaper and major business magazines in Finland. Three discourses are built based on the texts, namely a patriarchal, a victim and a professional discourse. The results of the study imply that the texts are largely reified in terms of masculinity, and that one underlying problem is the shortage of female role models and lack of the feminine perspective in the dominant discourse. It is suggested that, if we are to develop alternative, “new” ways of constructing the woman leader into being, the writing in the business media texts should opt to test the limits of the current discourses by voicing comments regarded as expressly feminine, instead of taking the masculine as the dominant norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women's employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women's 'feminine? social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of the Chile Solidario programme on labour market outcomes from a gender perspective. Chile Solidario was implemented as the main anti-poverty programme in Chile in 2002. The purpose of this conditional cash transfer is to provide poor families with auxiliary social services, including support for employment. We compare the gender impact of Chile Solidario using difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity design estimations based on data from the Chile Solidario Panel Survey. We find that the programme has a strong impact on labour market outcomes. However, the positive effects are particularly important for women subjects in the beneficiary families only after the achievement of the conditionalities imposed by the programme. This analysis suggests that cash transfers should be targeted more specifically to women's needs to contribute to their empowerment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on empirical research data on the work of flight attendants, this paper will explore Marcel Mauss's theory of 'gift' exchange relations, with particular reference to his concern with the 'exchange of aesthetics' (Mauss 1954), as an analytical model which may contribute to our understanding of 'women's work' in contemporary Western societies, of which, we shall argue, the work of female flight attendants is a notable example. It will begin by locating the authors' analytical and theoretical concerns with 'women's work' within the context of recent empirical research. It will then go on to outline briefly a Maussian model of exchange relations and to identify the potential utility of this analytical model for the study of women's work. This paper then goes on to offer an analytical account of empirical research into the work of flight attendants and to analyse the ways in which airline service provision constitutes a critical case study of women's work, certain elements of which involve a form of 'gift' exchange relations which operate, not as an alternative to, but inside - and in the interests of - commodity exchange relations. Finally, in the light of recent feminist work, this paper will conclude by suggesting the wider implications of this analytical model for the study of gender and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the cyclical behaviour of the employment, hours and wage rates of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labour in British mechanical engineering from 1963 to 1978. Figure 1 shows the variation of the employment share of skilled and non-manual male labour in relation to the cyclical fluctuations during the same period, where the cycle measure employed is the percentage deviation of output from its trend value.
This paper has investigated the empirical validity of the implications of fixed hiring, firing and training costs for the short-run behaviour of the employment, hours and wage rates of labour of different skill. The equations estimated are in reduced form and have a general dynamic specification. They can be derived from simple models of demand and supply. The empirical
evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that skilled labour is a quasi-fixed factor or production. We have found that: (a) the employment of skilled labour varies less than the employment of lower skill grades during the cycle (we have also found that the employment of non-manual employees varies less than the employment of manual workers) (b) the hours per man of skilled labour vary more than the hours per man of lower skill grades during the cycle; (c) the cyclical wage rate variation is larger for lower-skill grades than for skilled labour. The combined evidence is consistent with the existence of higher firing, hiring and training costs for skilled workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]