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Women’s Job Quality Across Family Life Stages: An Analysis of Female Employees Across 27 European Countries

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Abstract

There is little empirical evidence on how working conditions affect women’s employment and fertility choices, despite a number of studies on the impact of individual-level and institutional factors. The article addresses this gap by examining how family life stages are related to particular aspects of job quality among employed women in 27 European countries. The central argument of the analysis is that high-quality jobs are conducive to both transitions to motherhood and employment after childbirth as women select into these roles. Accordingly, mothers of young children, if employed, are expected to have relatively better quality jobs. Four dimensions of job quality are considered: job security, career progression, working time and intrinsic job quality. The results indicate that mothers with young children are more likely to hold high-quality jobs than women at other life stages with respect to working time quality and job security, but with some variation across countries for job security. The findings highlight the importance of high-quality jobs for women’s fertility decisions and labour market attachment after childbirth, with implications for European employment policy.

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Notes

  1. A number of countries have implemented parental leave policies which can be taken by either parent and which thus allow for a longer overall leave period than the maternity leave periods indicated in Table 2. Data for paid parental leave periods are available from the OECD but not for all 27 EU countries included in our analysis. We repeated our analysis using the OECD measure of parental leave for the countries for which it was available; using this measure instead of the maternity leave measure employed here did not change our results. The coefficients of both measures were not significant in our regressions and we therefore decided to keep the measures of maternity leave which was available for all countries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Trade Union Institute, Boulevard du Roi Albert II 5, 1210, Brussels, Belgium

    Agnieszka Piasna

  2. City, University of London, Northampton Square, Clerkenwell, London, EC1V 0HB, UK

    Anke Plagnol

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  1. Agnieszka Piasna
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  2. Anke Plagnol
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Correspondence to Agnieszka Piasna.

Appendix

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Table 5 Job quality measurement.
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Piasna, A., Plagnol, A. Women’s Job Quality Across Family Life Stages: An Analysis of Female Employees Across 27 European Countries. Soc Indic Res 139, 1065–1084 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1743-9

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