Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

This paper revisits stylized facts on female labour force participation, employment and unemployment, using a unified and up-to-date dataset with comparable information for high-income (HI) and middle-low income (MLI) countries. We find that: (i) global trends in labour supply in the last 30...

This paper analyses the main distinctive features of the situations of labour discrimination that women are actually suffering. Men and women play different roles at home, in society and at work. A strong occupational segregation (horizontal and vertical) and serious wage differences between men...

Public policies aimed at promoting gender equality should not be elaborated without making sure that their goals are consistent. Among a number of factors, such policies must crucially take into account labour market conditions and social protection dynamics. This paper deals with the importance...

This study examines employment convergence between immigrants and natives, by gender and region of origin, using data with annual information (1990-2000) on more than 200,000 individuals of which over 19,000 were born abroad. Duration of residence is found to have a significant effect on...

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the reasons why women endure longer unemployment durations than men in post-restructuring urban China using data obtained from a national representative household survey. Rejecting the view that women are less earnest than men in their desire...

Transition countries hoping to join the European Union are in the process of introducing western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. The efficacy of these policies depends on the relative size of the gap's elements they target; therefore, it is important to...

This article deals with everyday work experiences in the two sectors of social and editorial work. It stems from two processes of co-research, in-volving a group of eleven editorial workers and journalists in Milan in 2011, and another group of 19 social workers in Turin in 2012. In both cases,...

Transition countries hoping to join the European Union are in the process of introducing western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. The efficacy of these policies depends on the relative size of those elements of the gap they target; therefore, it is...

We compare the importance of occupational gender segregation for the gender wage gap in East and West Germany in 1995 using a sample of social-security wage records for full-time workers. East Germany, which features a somewhat higher degree of occupational segregation, has a gender wage gap in...