Shirley Dex

Women`s labor force transitions in connection with childbirth: A panel data comparison between Germany, Sweden and Great Britain

In this paper we make use of the panel aspects of the German GSOEP, the Swedish HUS and the British BHPS data. In these data sets we known month and year of childbirth and the month to month labor force status of the mother also before giving birth. This permits analysis of labor force transitions triggered by child births of different birth orders. From macro data Swedish women are known to have the highest labor force participation. The difference in total labor force participation of women is totally a result of fewer mothers entering the labor force and entering later in Germany and Great Britain than in Sweden. This paper shows that before birth of first child there is no such difference. We find that German and British women have even higher full-time labor force participation than Swedish women 12 months before the birth of the first child. The difference is more pronounced for second and third births than for first births. We suggest that these differences are caused by different family policy regimes where Germany can be characterized as a breadwinner regime and Sweden a regime oriented towards equal role sharing of father and mother. Our results on determinants of being in the labor force both after and before the birth of a child as well as determinants of the tempo of entering the labor force after birth shows that womens own human capital is important both in Germany and Great Britain, whereas in Sweden also less educated women have entered the labor force by the time the child is 2 years old.

Flexible and Family‐Friendly Working Arrangements in UK‐Based SMEs: Business Cases

Interest in researching flexible working arrangements has been growing as such practices have been heralded as the way to reconcile or balance the increased pressures of work and family life. Relatively little attention has been paid to the experiences of flexible working arrangements in small and medium sized enterprises. We report the findings of empirical work on ten small and medium-sized enterprises and four larger organizations. The reasons for introducing particular flexible working arrangements in SMEs were explored. Our findings show that business case reasons were used when introducing flexible working arrangements in both SMEs and larger organizations, although in different ways. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2001.

Women's Employment Transitions Around Childbearing

The dynamics of women’s labour supply are examined at a crucial stage of the life-cycle. This paper uses the longitudinal employment history records for 3,893 33-year-old mothers in the 5th sweep of the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort. Models of binary recurrent events are estimated which correct for unobserved heterogeneity, using SABRE software. These models focus (a) on women’s first transition from first childbirth until the interview and (b) on all the monthly transitions. Evidence of a polarization was found between highly-educated, high-wage mothers and lower-educated, low-wage mothers.

Freelance Workers and Contract Uncertainty: The Effects of Contractual Changes in the Television Industry

Changes in the competitive and regulative conditions of British television over the 1980s and 1990s make for an environment of increased uncertainty for those who work in television. Broadcasting legislation, increased competition and technological advances have changed the working practices of the UKs 28,000 production workforce. The introduction of a 25 per cent quota of independent productions on all terrestrial channels, the implementation of Producer Choice in the BBC and the creation of a Network Centre in ITV, leading to a new commissioning process along with merger rationalisation and increasing competition have all contributed to constructing a workforce in which over 50 per cent are freelance and face much uncertainty. This paper focuses on some of the ways workers have experienced and responded to these changes by analysing the postal questionnaire and diary-data collected in an eight-wave panel study of 436 creative production workers in British television 1994-97, collected by the British Film Institute. This paper considers whether uncertainty is a problem and finds that it is for the majority of these workers. The question of what makes uncertainty a problem is also considered. Individuals were found to cope with uncertainty by diversifying the income sources, by collecting information, building informal networks and by thinking of leaving work in television.

Measuring work-life balance and its covariates

Pressures on work–life balance have grown in modern British society. Concern mounted in the 1990s as more strains arose from job insecurity, work intensification, marital breakdown, a large increase in lone parenting, and demands for parents to be more involved in their children’s education (Burchell et al., 2002; Dex, 1999). Employee absence was costed at £4 billion per year by the Department of Trade and Industry, and employee stress and turnover were also recognized as large business and social costs (DTI, 2000). In 1997 the newly elected Labour government started to formulate family policies to cope with these problems, one being encouragement to employers to adopt more flexible working arrangements. The Work–Life Balance Challenge Fund (DfEE, 2000) offered employers money for consultancy costs to cover plans to introduce flexible arrangements. Britain also adopted the EU Working Hours Directive from 1998, limiting weekly hours to 48, although a large proportion of employees were allowed to opt out. However, it is not clear what measures of success for these interventions should be applied. Work–life balance should provide one criterion, indicating in turn a set of appropriate measures. In the next section we summarize the work–life balance literature at the turn of the 21st century. The report of field research that follows it describes a checklist measure for employees’ work–life balance, analyses data collected using this instrument from a selection of employees in eight organizations, and draws clear conclusions from the analysis.

Employment after childbearing and women's subsequent labour force participation: Evidence from the British 1958 birth cohort

Data on women from the British 1958 Cohort Study is used as evidence on the determinants of their labour force participation at age 33. A conventional cross-sectional model of full or part-time employment makes use of some longitudinal material not normally included in such models. Whether the woman made the hitherto customary break from. employment at the time of the first maternity is included in recognition that this cohort was among the first generation to be offered Statutory Maternity Leave. Results suggest that the presence of children (still) inhibits full-time employment and raises the probability of part-time employment; that income effects on participation have continued to weaken while wage elasticity for full-time employment is high. Continuity of employment straight after childbearing raises the chances of subsequent full-time employment, but by no means guarantees it. Gains from maternity leave and other family friendly employment policies have been far from uniform.

Should We Have More Family-Friendly Policies?

This paper considers the extent of flexible working practices often called family-friendly working practices and evidence from published literature to address the question of whether we need more of these arrangements. A review is carried out to see whether problems exist for the workforce which such policies could help to resolve, whether employers perceive problems in offering such arrangements and whether such problems could be overcome. The conclusions are that more family-friendly arrangements would be welcomed by employees, that employers do perceive problems in designing flexible working arrangements but that there are also ways of overcoming many of these problems to work towards new relationships of trust and commitment between workers and employers.

Low Pay, Labour Market Institutions, Gender and Part-Time Work: Cross-National Comparisons:

The distribution of low pay by sector, size of firm, occupation, type of contract and gender varies cross-nationally. This article examines the extent to which systems of collective bargaining and minimum wage regimes explain such differences. It compares Britain, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and the USA using a newly harmonized data set, PACO, and the European household panel study for Spain. The findings indicate that strong collective bargaining and minimum wage regimes reduce the percentage of low-paid workers. However, the benefits of such regulation do not extend to women and especially part-time women employees as much as to men.

Employment after Childbearing: A Survival Analysis

Longitudinal data from two cohorts of women born in 1946 and 1958 are used to describe the break in employment experienced by women after childbearing. This is reducing in length. The decline in the employment gap, observed for women born in 1958 has largely been confined to those women who delayed their childbearing until their late twenties and early thirties and women who were more highly educated. What seems to be occurring is a polarisation between mothers in the more and the less privileged social groups, in terms of their ability to enter and stay in paid employment once they have responsibility for children. Although mothers at both ends of the social scale have to balance the dual demands of paid and domestic work, older and better educated mothers are more likely to be in higher status occupations, to earn adequate income to pay for childcare and to be better placed to take advantage of any changes in employer provisions for working mothers.

Effects of Minimum Wages on the Gender Pay Gap

This article explores the implications of alternative policy regimes for gender wage inequality. Against the background of a description of recent changes in pay ratios of men and women in Britain, the focus is primarily on calculating the likely effects on gender wage ratios of introducing the statutory minimum wage in the UK. The effects of alternative options are also assessed in part; giving women mens average hourly earnings, leaving occupations unchanged, and redistributing women through occupations in the same proportions as men, leaving their occupational average pay unchanged. The largest effects on pay ratios come from giving women the same pay as men in their existing occupations. However, a statutory minimum wage of £3.60 per hour does improve the gender pay ratio and helps women at the lower end of the pay spectrum. It is also considerably easier to implement than other options.