Gender, work and family (1)

Family policies in East Asian countries lag compared to their western counterparts; the International Labour Organization recommends no less than 14 weeks of paid maternity leave and European Union members provide much more generous parental leaves. However, typical leave in most East Asian countries falls below 12 weeks. Incidentally, East Asian countries collectively rank the lowest when it comes to fertility rate; Singapore marked .78, Hong Kong 1.09, Taiwan 1.10, South Korea 1.23, and Japan 1.39 in 2012. While there are many factors that affect fertility rate, this paper looks at whether family policies influence fertility trends in five East Asian countries above from 1980 to 2010 using data collected from national statistical institutes and organizations such as the OECD and ILO. Policy measures focused are (1) parental leave arrangements; (2) childcare services; and (3) financial supports. The study uses ordinary least squares regression, including country and year fixed-effect variables, in addition to taking into consideration other important control variables taken from previous research. Since studies on East Asia are significantly scarce, though previous literature overall indicates the positive impact of family policies on fertility rate, similar effects in East Asia are questionable and thus worth investigating.

This paper starts form stylized facts showing that savings rates of households headed by women are smaller than those headed by men which suggest a disadvantageous position for feminine households to confront adverse situations in the future. In order to answer if household savings determinants differ between those headed by men or women, a probability logistic model of savings was estimated with income of household proxied by education level, other incomes from other household integrants, credits, government transferences and remittances from the migrant laborers and, demographic factors like marital status, presence of babies and children in schooling ages as independent variables. This paper shows that there are some substantive differences in the effects of the independent variables upon the probability of household savings in men´s and women headed households. The most important differences being education level with a mayor impact in households with a feminine head, other members of the household incomes. The remittances from the USA work in the same direction which suggests that these may be filling the vacuum left by migrant men. Contrariwise the presence of small children, government transferences, access to credit diminish the probability of saving for women.

Unlike in more developed regions where increased female labor force participation has in part been driven by a reduction in fertility, sub-Saharan Africa displays a positive cross-national correlation between fertility and female labor force participation. This paper tests the relationship between childbearing and work at the individual level among young women in rural Malawi. Using longitudinal data from the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, we investigate whether (i) having a child influences the probability of paid and unpaid work, (ii) the effects of childbearing on work differ by parity, (iii) increasing spacing between births affects the probability of working, and (iv) the effects of limiting and spacing fertility on work vary by marital status. Descriptive results show that although a majority of women performed non-household work in the past year, only a small minority receive remuneration. Higher parity is indeed associated with higher rates of paid work. However, parsing out women’s labor market activity by marital status reveals that young unmarried women with no children had the highest rate of paid work of any other group. This paper contributes to the literature on whether enabling women to postpone transitions into marriage and motherhood facilitates greater participation in remunerative work.

From the 6.3 Million informal entreprepeneurs in Perú, 56.2% are women. Two of three jobs are generated within family businesses or in the independent work. This study aims to find out in how far time use at home may have an impact on the net income of female urban entrepreneurs in the informal sector. The Peruvian Time Use Survey (2010) is analized and in-depth interviews are conducted with young female entrepreuneurs in Lima. Our main results suggest that with higher income, regardless of age, women dedicate less time to three main duties: care of children, cooking and house cleaning. Nevertheless, compared to their partners, they keep on working significantly more hours at home. In depth-interviews corroborate this finding and bring out the importance of family networks within this context.

One key contemporary population flow is the migration of Indian software professionals. In the early 2000s, First World market demands resulted in some governments fast-tracking migration of highly-skilled software engineers, but the global economy has seen the return of these migrants. This paper examines the impact of transnational migration on relationships and marriages, focusing on the engineers of the network age. The work adopts a transnational approach using multi-sited ethnography carried out in India and the United Kingdom, to follow the migratory experiences of transnational couples, as well as their families left behind. A central theme of this paper relates to hierarchical notions of power and how migration challenges traditional local structures (gender, age, caste, ethnic identity and wealth), and how national and global structures such as nation-states and multinational corporations influence marriageability, family structures and relationships. The paper finds that migration differentially affected the ‘marriage market’ of male and female software engineers. Migration has brought about re-negotiation of traditional values and expectations within transnational marriages, and is challenging the nature of intragenerational relations, and kith and kin networks

The gender gap in earnings in the Brazilian labor market have been declining steadily for 40 years, but there is a remaining difference which is usually associated with discrimination against women. This paper examines the extent to which familiar characteristics of women and men explain the documented gender gap in earnings in Brazil. The hypothesis is that overcommitment of women with paid work and housework is the fundamental constraint for equity in earnings. I found no maternity or marriage penalty for women. On the other hand, there is a substantial penalty for household work for both men and women, but it is considerably more severe among women, not only because they do four times more hours of housework than men, but also because the negative effect over female earnings is larger. I added the familiar characteristics and the mean number of weekly hours of housework to the conventional model of decomposition of the difference in earnings and it increased the explained component of the difference between women and men.

This paper draws on a sample of in-depth interviews with 42 mother-daughter dyads in Cairo, Egypt to examine how individuals make sense of rapid inter-generational change in gender roles. Women’s labor force participation has declined in Egypt over the past twenty years, yet respondents adamantly and eloquently described a variety of reasons for their nearly unanimous belief that women are more likely to work now than a generation ago. Drawing on the social demographic literature that addresses how conflicting cultural schemas frame individual actions, I argue that these two generations’ perceptions of change in women’s labor force participation reflect broader social tensions surrounding the desire for a "modern" globalized Egypt and nostalgia for a past era seen as simpler and plagued by fewer social ills. Schemas surrounding women's work capture the multiple and often contradictory models of women’s social roles that are implicated in these competing desires, as well as women’s attempts to apply these models to the course their own lives have taken.

Closely related to the demographic dynamics and the changes in reproductive behavior, it has been observed a marked increase of women participation in economic activities. We talk about a gender dividend insofar as this process may turn into a direct contribution of women to the countries' economic growth, complementing and fostering the demographic dividend.
Based on the data from household surveys and projections of economically active population for the Latin American countries, which are available at ECLAC, this study aims at describing and projecting women’s labor force participation in economic activity in a context of gender equality.
This study intends to be a contribution to the theoretical and methodological development of the topic and to contribute to raising awareness and capacity in the countries of the region in assessing the economic impact of demographic changes and incorporating a gender-based approach into sustainable development and poverty reduction policies.

This article aims to analyze the occurrence of adolescent pregnancy aged 15-19 years and its impact on women education and occupation in Rio de Janeiro. According to evidence gathered through national household surveys, this city has one of the lowest fertility rates in the country. However, there are some poor regions where fertility rates are higher and young motherhood is part of life trajectories. In order to achieve the purpose of this research, some social aspects as household income, schooling, occupational status position, household position and number of children have been considered. The methodology consists on multivariate analysis of indicators provided by 2010’s Census (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) and the latest School Census (National Institute for Educational Studies and Research). The results points out that adolescent aged 15-19 years that had given birth have much more probability to stop studying than other girls with no child. As young motherhood incidence is higher through more vulnerable youth, lack of education constrains living conditions and perpetuates poverty.

This study examines several potential mechanisms underlying the recent emergence of positive relationship between educational attainment and married women’s labor force attachment in Japan. I use data from a longitudinal survey collected in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period of substantial change in the context of women’s work, to estimate discrete-time competing risk models for married women’s labor force transitions including labor force exit, transitions between standard and non-standard employment, and reentry to the labor market. Study results indicate that recently emerging educational differentials in married women’s labor force participation in Japan are mainly due to the fact that highly educated women are more likely to stay in the labor market (including standard and non-standard employment), not because they are more likely to return to the labor force. Study findings also show that it is those with the lowest educational attainment who are more likely to reenter the labor force usually in non-standard jobs with few benefits and little room for advancement. In addition, women’s own income, work orientation, and job characteristics such as occupation, firm size, and public sector employment play important roles in mediating relationships between education and labor force transitions.