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This chapter assesses the changing position of women in the labour market. Section 7.2 reviews the changing position of women in the labour force. Section 7.3 outlines the legal context of women's work, involving equal pay, equal opportunities, and maternity rights. Section 7.4 looks at the jobs that women do, tracing the trends in activity rates, occupational structure, and gender segregation. Section 7.5 confronts the issue of the gender pay gap, analysing the changing characteristics which women bring to work, such as educational attainment and work experience, and the rewards which these earn in the labour market. Section 7.6, on work and the family, looks at the ways in which women combine employment with domestic responsibilities. Section 7.7 concludes by considering present problems and future prospects for women in the labour market.

The topic of this chapter is women's access to paid work and its impact on their economic resources compared to men in general and within the family. It presents a cross‐national portrait of gender inequality in the labour market in the early 1990s in 15 countries. Initially, the author focuses on labour market attachment (full‐time or part‐time work) and the earnings of working‐age women as a whole; subsequently, the analysis turns to married women and the mothers of young children. The chapter explores the extent to which welfare state regimes are associated with specific labour market outcomes.

This chapter shifts the focus on a recently emerged, but already well established, activity performed by PES, that is to say the delivery of making work pay (MWP) policies. A key argument of the chapter is that these policies — whether in the form of working tax credits, subsidised personal work contracts, statutory minimum wages, or tax and social security rebates for employers hiring long term unemployed workers — have the dual function of rendering wages and labour costs more attractive for, respectively, unemployed workers and businesses. It is highlighted how the emergence of these policies is strictly intertwined with the development of more workfare oriented ALMPs, working as the carrot accompanying the stick provided by active labour market policies.

This chapter explores the unsolved conflict between paid work and unpaid care. The meaning of the term ‘care relationship’ is considered and existing literature is used to explore the diversity of such relationships revealing the complex, finely-tuned and often delicate nature of associated work/care arrangements. It is asserted that society has a moral duty to recognise and reduce the heavy social burden imposed on those engaged in such relationships through shared responsibility. A consideration of women's labour market position relative to that of men reveals the relationship between gendered segregation and the division of labour within families and established labour market classifications. It is argued that the transformation currently taking place in working arrangements provides new opportunities to review the existing regulatory approach to the reconciliation of paid work and unpaid care.

This chapter examines what Amartya Sen has written and argued about gender injustice in three seemingly distinct, but related contexts in South Asia: famine, widowhood, and paid work. The chapter is divided into four parts: one part for each issue and a conclusion linking all three. In parts 1-3, the chapter summarizes what Sen has written about each issue and then, based on research, highlighting certain factors that serve to illuminate or complicate the issue. In the conclusion, the chapter reflects on Sen's entitlement and capability theories and the normative concepts that they offer to those who seek gender justice in South Asia.

This chapter aims to determine if there are major differences in work experience, attitude, and opportunity between mothers who work and mothers who stay at home. It compares the experiences of lone mothers with mothers who are living as part of a couple. It then explores whether mothers wanted to be in paid work or not, and why it was important for many of the mothers to be at home full-time to take care of their children.

This chapter provides the terms of reference and background for the text. It specifies the main aims which are to consider how paid work and unpaid care can be reconciled by exploring the potential for the development of a right to care in European employment law. The specific aim is to explore EU law's response to changes that have taken place in the employment context since the Community's inception and to assess its overall contribution to the reconciliation of the unpaid care/paid work conflict. A central claim is that the constitutional provisions of EU law already endorse a responsive approach to this conflict which, although merely implicit in the existing provisions at present, has the potential to be effectively utilised to provide individuals with a clear right to reconcile paid work and unpaid care.

This chapter explains workplace flexibility as a unifying concept for bringing all mothers together. Exploring across groups and the work-for-pay/stay-at-home dichotomy, it addresses the question of whether or not mothers tend to support various workplace flexibility initiatives. It also examines the levels of support that exist for governmental policies promoting workplace flexibility—ranging from educating firms about the benefits of such options, to tax breaks for companies that offer such plans, to mandatory requirements that organizations offer employees processes through which they can receive such arrangements. In doing so, the chapter offers possible parameters for policy makers as they develop reforms to generate the widest levels of public support.

The Equal Pay Bill of 1963, once passed, prohibited employers from paying women lower wages than men, but with several exceptions. The bill was supported by the slogan developed decades earlier, “equal pay for equal work.” This slogan was two-sided: it represented both the feminists striving for true equality in the labor force as well as those men and women who were worried that women’s cheaper labor was displacing men. It was this duality, if not ambiguity, that allowed the bill to pass successfully. The Women’s Bureau, established in 1929, was a major proponent for the bill. The bill’s supporters called for society and businesses to see a woman’s identity as individual, rather than strictly as part of a family. The rhetoric invoked by proponents and opponents of the bill finally introduced a broad discussion on gendered wages.

This chapter explores the place of Poland among the new Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states of the European Union, and how Poland compares, in key dimensions, with countries of Western Europe. In particular, it situates Poland within theoretical debates about welfare regimes and gender, and examines quantitative comparative data about the new CEE member states and the wider European Union. The chapter investigates the gender models on the male breadwinner/dual-earner spectrum into component parts – paid work, care work, income, and time and voice – asking to what extent they can be seen as systems of gender equality or as systems of traditional gender roles in each of these parts. Additionally, the provisions for care of young children – nurseries, kindergartens, and arrangements for maternity and childcare leave – are reviewed in more detail. Working-time arrangements in CEE countries are distinctive.

This chapter provides a historical and comparative examination of employment services in the light of their ‘public service’ nature and vocation as developed through the 20th century. It also provides a reasoned taxonomy of the various activities and functions performed by public employment services in Europe, and in particular of job-intermediation, unemployment benefit management, skills formation, the provision of active labour market policies, and the management of ‘making work pay’ initiatives. This is followed by an analysis of the various modes by which PES have been providing their services, ranging from public monopoly arrangements to public-private coexistence systems, to market and quasi-market systems. It is argued that in recent years, and particularly with the demise of monopolistic regimes, the role of private employment services as providers of employment services has been bolstered just as the relevance of PES has progressively faced a decline and reconfiguration.

In this chapter we argue that to understand the ways that policy, structure and culture all shape how grandmothers help to care for children, we need to re-think our approach to these issues. We need in particular to think about policies in terms of how they impact on mothers and grandmothers simultaneously, providing different and complex incentives and opportunities in each generation. This leads us to conceptualise childcare as something that is organised in the wider family, and to think of family care versus formal care when considering the wider impacts on individuals and society, rather than focussing on maternal versus non-maternal childcare. It also necessitates thinking about how cultures of gender, family and paid work might be influencing family-level discussions and negotiations. We show that conceptualising childcare as a family collaboration framed by policy and culture helps to explain substantial variations in grandmaternal childcare across Europe..

This introductory chapter presents the account of Dianne, a working grandmother who is balancing work and caring for grandchildren. She works full-time as an elected official while also taking care of three of her six grandchildren most of the week. Her story shows that grandmothers are prized daycare providers. A survey found that grandparents provide some amount of child care every week. Another study found that more than 43 percent of grandmothers care for grandchildren regularly; 20 percent of which have working mothers. Grandmothers may be considered the most available source of child care, but most of these women are also employed. As such, the book analyzes how working grandmothers balance paid work and unpaid carework.

This chapter analyzes Latina transnational mothers who are currently employed in Los Angeles in paid domestic work, which is one of the most gendered and racialized occupations. It also studies how their definitions of motherhood change in relation to the structures of late 20th-century global capitalism. The chapter refers to literature on immigration and transnational frameworks, and looks at gendering transnational perspectives. The discussion introduces the concept of the “cult of domesticity.”

The chapter begins with a general section on social citizenship, which covers its theoretical framework and the context of how social citizenship has been understood and debated in the UK, leading to New Labour’s philosophy on social citizenship. As the main area in which this philosophy has been translated into policy has been the social security system, this is the main focus of the policy analysis. The central section discusses the relationship between rights and responsibilities in the social security system. The chapter also assesses the social investment approach, with particular reference to policy in the areas of child poverty, childcare, and social exclusion, and the shift to greater emphasis on means-testing in the name of “progressive universalism.” The conclusion briefly reflects on the factors underlying the shift in social citizenship and looks ahead to the implications of the change of government.

This chapter describes in ethnographic detail the nature and intensity (both physical and emotional) of direct care of the elderly and disabled, exploring the constraints facing aides who provide direct care. Certain conditions of work—such as financial insecurity, on-the-job injury, lack of training, and bureaucratic constraints on care—produce distress and fatigue for home care aides. With respect to emotional labor, the chapter establishes that there are times when aides' emotional ties to clients lead to feelings of burnout, exhaustion, fatigue, and a sense of alienation. Aides also find themselves providing “surplus care,” working additional hours without compensation or offering to do tasks outside their scope of work, simply because there is no one else to do it. In these moments, broader institutional and organizational realities directly impact the way in which aides experience their emotional labor. These factors reinforce the inequality associated with paid care work, with potential consequences for worker satisfaction and burnout.

Fathers' contributions to childcare have increased, but are still far outweighed by mothers' contributions. Increased paid work among mothers has also necessitated increased childcare outside the immediate family. This chapter focuses on paid work and childcare while mothers are employed, as elements of family life, at the dawn of the 21st century. The chapter describes first the employment status of parents at the point where their baby was aged 9–10 months, and then the childcare they arranged while they were employed. Finally, it examines indicators of mothers' and fathers' work-life balance.

Time use among young people varies greatly during the transition to adulthood and is strongly regulated by social roles, constraints, and obligations. Yet, time use has not been one of the indicators traditionally used by scholars to study adult transitions. This chapter examines broad historical trends in patterns of time use among young adults as they make their transition to adulthood. It poses two main questions: whether patterns of time use among young adults have changed since the 1970s and whether there has been a convergence in the patterns of time use of men and women. To answer these questions, the chapter uses a series of time-use surveys carried out in eleven industrialized countries since the 1970s. For each of these subgroups of young adults, the chapter identifies seven broad categories of time use: education, paid work, housework, child care, leisure, personal activities, and travel to and from school and/or work.

Most young Europeans expect to combine paid work and parenting at the same time in their life course, although they do not have a clear idea on how easy or difficult it will be to manage and support what might be necessary. It is difficult for them to do so, as people's circumstances differ and in some national contexts there are no clear normative models that apply to both fathers and mothers. Many of the research on working parents' needs and experiences focuses either on regulation/workplace policies and national public policy, which are only part of the overall picture. National, economic, social and ideological contexts are significant. Labour market and workplace policies can make a difference to parents' lives, however, the changing economic climates and global trends also have a profound effect in shaping the practices and cultures in specific workplaces in specific contexts and societies. This volume recognises the significance of several interacting and dynamic layers of context on employees who are attempting to reconcile paid work and the tasks of parenting young children. It explores the ways in which managers manage employees' need for work-life balance while fulfilling the organisations' aims and goals of profitability and efficiency. The focus of this volume is on the workplace and the changes that are happening therein, as well as on the other layers of context that influence and are influenced by employing organisations. This volume is comprised of case studies of the changing European workplaces carried out as a part of the eight-country study entitled: ‘Transitions: Gender, Parenthood and the Changing European Workplace’. The study evaluated the experiences of employed parents and their managers, including the ways in which parents are able to negotiate work-family boundaries in varied national contexts and in the rapidly changing organisational contexts. The objective of the study is to develop an understanding of the impact of welfare state, organisational change, and workplace context on young adults who are parents in the countries of Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK. The case studies in these countries provide an understanding of the processes whereby contexts create limitations as well as enable conditions where working parents can manage their everyday lives.

This chapter provides a new explanation of the rise in female-headed families among the poor. It explains that the economic hardship faced by single mothers is generally perceived as changing little over time, stemming simply from the loss of marriage and burdens of single parenthood. This study instead views the “feminization of poverty” as a dynamic process, placing it in the context of women's historic transition from household to paid work. It explains that close examination of women's poverty from such a perspective reveals heretofore unseen changes in the causes and composition of such hardship over time. It demonstrates how marriage as a means of resolving such poverty is a solution better suited to the 1950s than today.