Abstract
Female labour force participation is known to depend on the economic status of a partner. Since the current crisis hit more men, it might push more women to enter the labour market (added worker effect). On the opposite, the crisis might produce a discouraged worker effect. In this case, despite male-partner loosing a job, women would not get out of inactivity. The aim of this paper is to investigate which of the two effects dominates in Italy. Our empirical analysis utilized a bivariate probit model. The results suggest that discouraged worker effect prevailed at the start of the crisis. Afterwards some regional differences emerge with an added worker effect showing out for low-educated women in the South of Italy.
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Notes
- 1.
Female workers in Italy generally tend to have long career breaks after the birth of a child and then often drop out altogether (see e.g. Reyneri 2009).
- 2.
The participation rate of married women with children increased considerably in the Member States, by 2.7 % points over the first 2 years of the crisis. The increase was less significant for other categories of women, plus 0.9 pp.
- 3.
Since the mid-1990s and until 2008 there was a constant increase in female employment in Italy. This was mainly achieved via higher integration of women in the Center-North (+1.5 mln), with marginal contribution by women in the South (+200 thsd.) (ISTAT 2012). Despite the lower proportion of the population living in the South, the large gap is evident.
- 4.
In addition to that, ISTAT (2012) points to a reduction in the number of housewives (aged between 15 and 64 years) from 4,890,000 in the second quarter of 2011 to 4,562,000 in the second quarter of 2012 (−6.7 %), with a very sharp decrease among the under 35. By comparing the second quarter of 2012 with the second quarter of 2007, the reduction in the number of Italian housewives amounts to 478,000 units (about −9.5 %). Despite this significant drop, the number of Italian housewives remains very high (over 7,600,000 units) in comparison with other European countries and constitutes a large pool of potential workforce. Indeed, in the second quarter of 2012, housewives between 15 and 64 years old represented about 50 % of the female inactive population in the same age group in Italy and about 32 % of the total inactive Italian population 15–64.
- 5.
The way the relationship variable is codified in SHIW does not allow reconstructing couples for sons/daughters of a household head living under the same roof. These are not numerous anyway since it is becoming less common to live with parents once the couple is formed.
- 6.
For an application of this type of model to studying the (A)DWE in Turkey see Baslevent and Onaran (2003).
- 7.
The estimates have also been made for the Central regions of Italy, but no consistent results were obtained. For this reason we provide only tables for the North and the South of Italy.
- 8.
One of the explanations to these findings could be the reduction in household savings during the course of the crisis which pushed women from poorer families to enter the labour market. The incidence of poorer families is higher in the South, thus more women are constrained to enter, as a result the AWE manifests more in the South. Moreover, the employment losses were higher in the North, this means that the demand shrunk more, thus less possibilities remain for the AWE to appear in the North.
- 9.
For both men and women in the equation for husbands, and the male unemployment rate in the equation for wives.
- 10.
Note that in the North the sign of the coefficient for male regional unemployment flips between the years, and it works in the direction of the AWE during the crisis. If it were only for this variable then the AWE would be apparent during the crisis also in the North of Italy, especially for higher educated women. But, what is of interest to us is the joint effect of all the variables (which can offset each other). For the final conclusion on the prevalence of the (A)DWE we thus refer to a sign and significance of the correlation between the error terms of the two equations. This is an overwhelming measure which takes into account the effects of both observed and unobserved variables.
- 11.
Measured by the coverage rates at the regional level (NUTS2) as in Table 12.1.
- 12.
This goes in line with Del Boca and Vuri (2007), who maintain that the increase in public childcare provisions has a potential to considerably increase the participation of women, but only in those regions where public childcare facilities are already better developed.
- 13.
The mean coverage rate in 2010 was 18.6 % in the North and 5.7 % in the South (Table 12.2).
- 14.
In 2008 and 2010, while the data is missing for 2006.
- 15.
Health conditions are expected to be less restrictive for participation compared to effective employment, since the former includes also searching for a job.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank F. Bettio and M. Capparucci for their useful discussions which gave rise to this work. We are also grateful to the participants of the 33rd IWPLMS and the 5th ESPAnet conferences held at Sapienza University of Rome, as well as the participants of the workshop on disadvantaged workers held at the University of Chieti-Pescara and the two anonymous referees for their useful comments which led to improvements on the previous version of the chapter.
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Ghignoni, E., Verashchagina, A. (2014). Can the Crisis be an Opportunity for Women?. In: Malo, M., Sciulli, D. (eds) Disadvantaged Workers. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04376-0_12
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