Suchergebnisse

Comparing the situation in Italy and the UK, this is an exploration of the increasing entry of women into the labour market, and their tendency to remain there after having children.

This study compares two countries: Italy and Britain. It examines data from the BHPS and the ILFI up to 2005 and uses event history models to investigate changes across four successive birth cohorts in the effect of family responsibilities on women's transitions between paid market work and unpaid family-care work from the time women leave full-time education until they are in their forties. My findings show that in both countries women's attachment to paid work has increased and that education and/or class have marked and still mark the divide, as predicted by human capital theory. However, in line with culturalist and institutional approaches, it also emerges that the effect of motherhood is, ceteris paribus, stronger in a residualist-liberal welfare regime like the British one. In Italy, where demand for labour is relatively low, gender role norms are quite traditional, reconciliation policies are weak but largely compensated by intergenerational and kinship solidarity, fewer women enter paid work, but when they do, fewer women interrupt when becoming wives or mothers.

Cross-sectional data on the role of education show that low-educated Italian women have one of the lowest rates of participation in Europe, and that their gap vis à vis the highly educated is very wide. Also wide is the gap in the shares, between high and low educated working women, of those employed in the public sector. By adopting a life-course perspective and using retrospective longitudinal data from the last wave of ILFI (2005), this study analyses how in Italy education and public employment differentiate women's entries into and exits from paid work, observing three cohorts of women born between 1945 and 1974 from the time they leave fulltime education to their forties. The findings confirm for Italy what has been shown for many other countries, namely that highly educated women have more continuous careers around motherhood than do low educated women, regardless of their occupational position, their contract, and their employment position in family-friendly sectors such as the public sector. However, we also find that in Italy highly educated women tend to be over-concentrated in the public sector and that, when they work in that sector, they tend to have more children and to bear them earlier compared with equally highly educated women in the private sector. In the Italian context where protection in the public sector has also been used as a surrogate measure for universal work-family reconciliation policies, and where traditional gender norms still persist, these results are consistent with the possibility that education is so important for women's labour market continuity because it represents an investment in 'reconciliation' and 'work legitimacy' over and above investment in human capital.

Literature on sex occupational segregation has typically focused on the micro and macro determinants of it, on mobility patterns over the life course, on implications of segregation and mobility for gender inequalities. Rarely the link between sex-type of occupations and women's risk of labour market interruptions over family formation has been explored. In this article we analyse whether women who are working in female-dominated, male-dominated or integrated occupations have more or less chances to remain attached to the labour market, controlling for qualifications, class, sector and contract positions. By drawing from ECHP, and comparing Italy, Spain, Denmark and the UK, we consider whether the effect of the sex-type of occupations varies across countries with different institutional and cultural configurations. We find that, ceteris paribus , only in the UK the sex-composition of an occupation matters: women in female occupations are more likely to move to inactivity than women in mixed or male occupations. In the other countries considered the main determinants of women's labour market continuity lie elsewhere. In Italy what matters most is the sector of employment (public vs. private). In Spain the sector is relevant too, but also class and the type of contract held (permanent vs. temporary). In Denmark, where policies and culture universally support maternal employment, women's transitions to housework are largely independent of their human capital and their location in the labour market.

Over the last decades, Italian university reforms have put increased pressure on academics and researchers towards greater productivity and accountability. These changes have generated an 'overtime culture', which is one of the main determinants of workaholism, over-commitment, and presenteeism among academics. The consequences of such changes are not gender-neutral: women – more often disadvantaged in academic careers than men – might be more affected by increased work pressure and more likely to work excessively to avoid career penalties. By using an original web-survey of about 1300 academics from four Italian universities, this article investigates gender differences in workaholic behaviours (i.e., working at night, on Sundays, etc.), and their link with the way researchers perceive the recruitment processes and gender disparities. The authors found that women are more workaholic than men, and this is explained by perceptions of gender equality in their working environment.

To what extent and in what ways do welfare state policies and cultural values affect the employment patterns of mid-life women with care responsibilities toward a frail parent? The study draws on Eurobarometer micro-data integrated with country-level information to respond to this question. Performing a multilevel analysis across 21 European countries, it considers macro factors that influence the decisions of mid-life women to give up or reduce paid work in order to care for a frail elderly parent. The results show that, while the overall level of expenditure on long-term care is not influential, settings characterized by limited formal care services, and strong norms with regard to intergenerational obligations, have a negative impact on women's attachment to the labour market. Policies and cultural factors also influence the extent to which women are polarized: in more defamilialized countries, regardless of their level of education, female carers rarely reduce their level of employment.