Documents Yerkes, Mara 5 results

"Employment patterns are gender-driven, yet analyses of women's employment often fail to recognize the heterogeneous patterns evident within women's labour market participation itself. This article examines the variation in women's labour market participation in light of Hakim's heterogeneity argument. It focuses on the effects of individual differences in educational level, marital status, motherhood and cohorts in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK for the period 1992-2002, disregarding Hakim's focus on individual attitudes and preferences as the cause of this heterogeneity. Results from a quantitative study using panel data show that women's labour market participation patterns vary greatly, and that educational level and motherhood are the strongest determinants of this variation. At the same time, cross-country variation is evident. Not only do the results of this study confirm the variation in women's employment patterns, they raise questions about the theoretical understanding of women's labour market participation. Therefore, this article also considers the consequences for future theoretical discussions of gendered labour markets given these significant individual differences among women both in and out of paid work."

"To what extent can collective bargaining compensate for a decline in or absence of welfare state protection against social risks? In this article, we use a comprehensive collective agreement database to analyse social risk coverage in the Netherlands from 1995 to 2009. We compare two forms of social risk, disability and work—life arrangements, analysing the share of collective agreements that offer these arrangements across time. Our results show that collective bargaining differs across the public and private sector but is similar at different levels of bargaining. In general, our findings demonstrate that collective agreements often compensate for declining welfare state coverage or a lack of state provision. As a result, the findings presented here suggest occupational welfare, in the form of collective bargaining, is an important component of welfare provision that is oftentimes overlooked in the current welfare state literature. "

"This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument's potential to facilitate parents' capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen's capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The conceptualization of the multifaceted nature of childcare provides compelling insights into the complexity of comparing childcare services across countries. The ensuing analysis and comprehensive overview of national policies challenges the idea of a defamilialization policy cluster, which masks key distinctions between public and market service provision. The more nuanced conceptualization and operationalization of childcare policy design through the capability approach reveals parents' real opportunities for arranging childcare and the varying effects of policy design across gender and class. In addition, it goes beyond implicit commodification assumptions and opens up space for parents' potential desire for multiple care arrangement possibilities."

"In this Voices article, we use emerging evidence to reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for various aspects of workers' wellbeing. This brief review emphasises how COVID-19 exacerbates existing, well-understood inequalities, along the intersections of community, work, and family. Workers on the periphery of the labour market, including non-standard workers and the self-employed, but also women and low-paid workers, are experiencing significant losses in relation to work, working hours and/or wages. Even once the pandemic is contained, its impact will continue to be felt by many communities, workers, and families for months and years to come."

"One year after the European work–life balance directive, which recognises the need for work–family policy support, measures to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic began shaping parents' work–life balance in significant ways. Academically, we are challenged to explore whether existing theoretical frameworks hold in this new environment with combined old and new policy frameworks. We are also challenged to understand the nuanced ways in which the first lockdown affects the combination of paid work and care. We address both of these issues, providing a cross-sectional comparative analysis of highly educated mothers' perceptions of work–life balance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland and the Netherlands. Our findings show that highly educated Finnish mothers have more difficulty combining work and care during the first lockdown than Dutch mothers. The absence of state-provided care during the lockdown creates greater difficulty for full-time working Finnish mothers in a dual-earner/state-carer system than an absence of such care in the Dutch one-and-a-half earner system, where most mothers work part time. Further analyses suggest variation in part-time and (nearly) full-time hours mitigates the work–life balance experiences of highly educated Dutch mothers. Additional factors explaining cross-country variation or similarities include the presence of young children and the presence of a partner. We discuss these findings in light of current theoretical frameworks and highlight avenues for future research."