Women at risk: the impact of labour-market participation, education and household structure on the economic vulnerability of women through Europe

Abstract

While increasing female employment has contributed to reducing gender\ud inequality, it has also exposed women to higher economic insecurity. The\ud contribution of this paper is to understand the social conditions that might\ud expose women to economic insecurity in different European cities. Specific\ud aspects have been considered: (a) reduced (part time) work, (b) hampered\ud labour-market participation (unemployment, involuntary inactivity due to care\ud tasks), (c) different household structures (single/couple; with/without young\ud children) or (d) educational level of both partners in the household. Data are\ud based on a survey carried out in 2012 in seven European cities, representative\ud of the different welfare/gender regimes in Europe. The results show that the\ud most important divide is between women cohabiting/not cohabiting with a\ud partner. Splitting the analysis on these two groups of women, differentiated\ud configurations of conditions exposing women to economic insecurity have\ud emerged in different welfare/care regimes. While Nordic, Central-eastern and\ud Anglo-Saxon cities substantiate an individualised model of exposure to\ud economic insecurity mostly driven by women’s participation in the labour\ud market, in Continental and Mediterranean cities insecurity mainly depends on\ud the educational levels (mainly of the partner in the case of coupled women)\ud and the organisation of the household (presence of children)

A Job of One’s Own. Does Women’s Labor Market Participation Influence the Economic Insecurity of Households?

“…Confirming the results from previous investigations [16,32], economic insecurity is a phenomenon that is widespread across Europe, and that affects more women than men, as shown in Table 3. As already discussed, provided the measure of economic vulnerability occurs at the household level it is not possible to clearly identify a gender effect among individuals who live in a couple.…”

“…First, the Mediterranean cluster was very ambiguous: Spain and Italy showed more differences than similarities, and Italy was actually more similar to the United Kingdom in the case of women in a couple, confirming previous empirical results [16]. The results of the present study also revealed that two countries showed strong segmentation by education level, and the role of labour market participation in these instances was clear.…”

“…Table 2 also shows the main characteristics of the sample by country. Following an approach previously employed in the literature [16,53], the present study measured economic insecurity via an additive index of three variables. The three variables were dichotomised, where 1 indicates the presence of an insecurity factor, and 0 indicates absence of the same.…”

“…Although the study is based on a cross-sectional perspective, the index allows for measuring the dynamic situation of economic stress and risk, not a static situation as determined by a fixed threshold. The index has been tested in previous studies focusing on insecurity and material deprivation [1,16,21,53]. The economic insecurity index was then regressed based on the labour market participation of women, measured as a variable defining a class, divided into the following categories: full-time; part-time (less than 30 h/week); careerist (over 40 h/week); short-hours contracts (less than 8 h/week); unemployed; inactive.…”

Sociodemographic analysis of an accelerated transition: the rise of solo living in Spain

“…in Spain (Durán 1999;Tobío 2001;Del Campo and Rodríguez-Brioso 2002;Gumà et al 2015;Kasearu et al 2017). In line with these reflections, a recent research that coped with working-age population across 12 European countries (Spain was not included; Sandström and Karlsson 2019) showed tenuous or non-existent association between education and solo living in more gender-egalitarian countries whereas the opposite tend to occur in less gender egalitarian countries.…”