Work-family and work-life issues

Since the longstanding notion that economic well-being was associated with lower fertility levels started to be called into question, there has been a renovated interest in understanding the relationship between economic hardship and fertility decisions. So far, most studies have approached the idea of uncertainty using snapshot indicators like type of contract or employment situation. However, these types of measures seem to be falling short in capturing what is intrinsically a dynamic process. In this paper I approach the concept of economic uncertainty developing an indicator of employment instability that considers the entire employment trajectory. Using sequence analysis I first classify trajectories based on their degree of instability, by considering the amount of change and the time spent in each employment/unemployment spell. The outcome is later used as an independent variable to estimate its effect on completed cohort fertility. Analyzes are performed for French men and women using the first two waves of the Generations and Gender Surveys. Although France is characterized by strong family policies, we expect employment instability to have a significant effect on fertility decisions, especially in the case of couples that struggle to reconcile family and career aspirations.

Power-resource approach based on Esping-Andersen’s views has been criticized, not considering women’s different experience on family care work. The welfare state should be understood as ‘a gendered power’ which enhances or alleviates gender inequality, supporting different type of family provisions embedded in institutional frameworks. Family policies involve gendered conceptions who are primary care givers, affecting gendered division of care work in family relationship.
Family policies can be divided into the following three types; Time-off, Cash, and Service as care provisions of family policy. Time-off involves a care conception of private duty, releasing economic needs. Cash indicates direct benefit transfer to private households increasing purchasing power. Service conceives care by public institutions to replace private care duty of families or women.
I will examine how different institutional frameworks embedded in family policies conceive care relation and how these affect gender inequality in care work. Especially, I will focus on different care time within couples and relational dynamics held in household contexts. For empirical evidence, I will use multilevel/hierarchical model to analyze both country and individual level. As data sets, I will use MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) and OECD statistics.

One of the significant changes in OECD countries in recent decades has been a substantial increase in maternal employment. While many children attend formal or informal childcare while mothers work, a substantial proportion of children in dual employed families are cared for only by their parents. This paper uses two Australian studies to explore how families manage dual employment without the use of non-parental childcare, with a focus on working arrangements used by mothers and fathers. The 2011 Australian Bureau of Statistics Child Care survey is used to examine job characteristics and childcare in a national sample of children aged up to 11 years. The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children is also used to look at work arrangements used when children are very young. Mothers were asked to report on the main jobs they and their partner had after the birth of their child, and what working arrangements each had used to care for their child. Open-ended responses from this survey are used to illustrate some of the findings on how work is managed without non-parental care. The findings highlight gendered patterns, but with certain job characteristics, especially working from home, related to the avoidance of non-parental care.

Transnational Call Centres in India cater to the customers of developed countries like United Kingdom and United States. Due to time differences between Western countries and India employees have to work at night. The objective of the paper is to bring out how far the women employees are able to negotiate between their career and family life. The study is based on data and evidence available from various surveys carried out on women employees of transnational Call Centres located in India cities. The night shift disrupts normal social and family life routine and becomes challenging, especially for married women. It challenges and changes the position of women by physically taking her away from home, family and society and leading to her social and mental isolation. Women hardly have time to spend with family during daytime or holidays. The cumulative outcome of all these is increasing health hazards and mental stress, which women manage through positive and negative coping mechanism.

Cutting the number of hours people work might contribute to boosting fertility by reducing work-family conflict. However, the causal impact of the number of hours worked on fertility is largely unknown mainly due to the possibility of reverse causality and omitted variable bias. Notably, this study adds valuable evidence to the literature by utilizing a unique natural experiment in Korea, reduction in legal work week from 44 to 40 hours since 2004. The law eliminated work on Saturdays for most workers. I assess whether, and, if so, to what extent the policy had an effect on fertility in Korea, and draws implications for other countries with low fertility rates.
This paper uses a difference-in-difference research design, which compares changes in the numbers of newborns before and after the law between two groups, families whose work hours declined due to the law, and other families. Data come from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study, an annual longitudinal survey which contains information both before and after the policy intervention. To investigate broader impact on the well-being of the family, I examine additional outcome variables including workers’ and their spouses’ health and self-reported satisfaction at home and at work.

In Indonesia, as in many countries around the world, childbearing has a significant impact on women’s labour force participation. This study uses the 2010 Greater Jakarta Transition to Adulthood Survey (N=3,006 representative sample of young adults aged 20-34) to investigate the issues regarding the labour market involvement of young mothers in Jakarta, which have previously not been studied in great detail. In addition to looking at the overall determinants of current labour force participation among mothers, we also examine the timing to entering the labour force after the birth of the first child using detailed monthly data, as well as the reasons for not working. We find that the employment of women is strongly determined by their education level, the number of children they have as well as the age of the children. In addition, women living with their extended families have higher levels of labour force participation. For first time mothers, after the birth of the first child return to work occurs very rapidly, within 3 months, for higher educated women but the transition into the labour force is much slower for women with lower levels of education. A primary reason for not working is lack of childcare options.

The structure of China’s economy and labor market has undergone dramatic changes in the last 30 years, moving from state-centered organization towards marketization. The principles governing employment and gender relations likewise changed. State sector employment remains more secure than the more lucrative market sector, yet market sector jobs do not typically offer wages high enough to support a family on a single income. In order to minimize the risk associated with market sector work while reaping the economic benefits, scholars noted the emergence of a two-system adaptation in which one spouse (typically the wife) retains employment in the state sector with the benefits it entails, while the other ventures into the market. However their findings have been limited to small, non-representative samples. We bring a dataset representative of the Shanghai population to bear on the question of whether or not spouses are specializing in state and market work. We follow changes in couples’ ownership sector of employment and ask if wives are more likely to retain state sector jobs (or be laid off) while their husbands seek market sector work.

The study seeks to advance and contribute to the debate in several ways: investigating the extent and patterns of marital assortative mating, as well as the changes in family structures in Brazil; discussing whether, how and how changes in the patterns of assortative mating marital and family structures affect income inequality in recent decades in Brazil. The analysis exploits the potential of microdata from household surveys in several particular aspects. The rotating panel of the Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from 1982 to 2012 follow transitions (in labor market participation, income and type of occupational structure) which determine patterns of social mobility, according to different family structures and patterns of marital assortative mating. Samples are restricted to individuals 25 to 60 years old, divided into triennial cohorts followed over time. Then, the implications of changes and / or permanence of the identified patterns of living arrangements and marital assortative mating in terms of the distribution of labor income and household income are assessed using a model of quantile regressions. The main question is the extent to which barriers to marriage between educational groups are responsible for differences in income between these groups.

A recent study indicated an expansion of disability in France in the 50-65 age group, which went along with an increase in the sex differentials. Above differences in diseases, gender studies suggest a possible detrimental effect of situations related to gender social roles. Specific combinations of work and family loads might impact health and functioning. This paper describes gender-specific family/work situations and their impact on health using the French Gender and Generation Survey. The analyses are based on two health dimensions (mental wellbeing, activity limitations) and various social and family situations.

In the 2005 survey, 20% of men and 19% of women aged 35 to 79 years older report activity limitations and 12% and 26% report poor well-being. Women face more combinations of work and family loads which are expected to be associated with poor health. Generally these situations affect health in both sexes. Accounting for the gender-specific distribution of these situations tends to lower the OR of female over male health risks, but changes are not significant. This exploratory study show situations of vulnerability with a combination of isolation and family/work burden associated with poor health. Meanwhile, more research is needed to better define these situations and measure their link with health.

The paper seeks to reflect on the conditions of "reconciliation", or better, articulation between work and family among female workers in two different familiar conditions: spouses and heads of households. It analyzes data from a survey of the Project "Vulnerability" held in 2007 in two metropolitan regions of São Paulo, Brazil (Metropolitan Region of Campinas and Baixada Santista Metropolitan Region) involving almost 4000 households.

It starts with the assumption that the dynamics of gender relations in work-family articulation, i.e., the linkage between productive and reproductive work allows to foster reflection on the vulnerability of families. Since the paid work of women - household heads and spouses/partners - becomes increasingly important in the maintenance of families, forms of "reconciliation" between work and family can shape the direction of family unity for the good and for evil.
It is from this perspective that, for both regions, comparative data are analyzed referring to the labor insertion of women, and their concurrent participation in domestic work. Three dimensions are analyzed: the distribution of domestic tasks between household members, caring for children and the making of important decisions for the family life.