Gender Equality at the Heart of Decent Work

2009

IZA World of Labor, 2015

Pros Job training and wage subsidies encourage female paid employment in the formal sector. Business training increases female labor force participation and raises the income of low-earning women already in business. In low-income households, access to free or subsidized public childcare increases women's labor force participation. Child health and nutrition may improve with female paid employment if the money spent on children rises. Female paid employment improves child schooling. eleVaTOR PiTCH Engaging in paid work is generally difficult for women in developing countries. Many women work unpaid in family businesses or on farms, are engaged in low-income self-employment activities, or work in low-paid wage employment. In some countries, vocational training or grants for starting a business have been effective policy tools for supporting women's paid work. Mostly lacking, however, are job and business training programs that take into account how mothers' employment affects child welfare. Access to free or subsidized public childcare can increase women's labor force participation and improve children's well-being. auTHOR'S Main MeSSaGe Training programs in developing countries have been effective in boosting female employment and earnings. However, the impact depends on whether the programs target younger or older women, new entrants or women with labor market experience, or women in rural or urban areas, as well as other factors. Policies to enhance women's access to paid work and support their efforts to start a business should also consider any potential negative spillover effects on child well-being, since women still bear most of the burden of childcare. Integrating public provision of childcare with training programs can make it easier for women to engage in paid employment. Cons The positive effects of training and wage subsidies tend to disappear after one or two years. Business training increases profitability only in the short term and is only effective in starting subsistence businesses. The effects of childcare programs on female labor supply are not clear. When women work, children's well-being can decline, since mothers have less time for childcare. Women in poorer households are more likely to work, but their labor income is not enough to increase school attendance of children. Policies to support women's paid work Policies in developing countries to improve women's access to paid work should also consider child welfare

Women's employment and the policies facilitating it, constraining it or ignoring it are central to contemporary social politics across the developed countries. Social policies and other political interventions, such as equal-opportunity legislation, are hardly the only influences on women's employment. We must also point to changes in labour markets and the demand for women's labour (as employers tend to see labour in gender-specific ways); women's rising education and aspirations, and their increased productivity and real wages; the decline of men's wages; the decline of fertility; increasing individualization and the rising instability of marriage. But social policy is also significant, if not so much for increasing women's employment, then for shaping the patterns of women's employment, especially the continuity of their participation over the life course, and the conditions under which they work-as well as for helping to constitute the stakes in gendered social politics. And in this respect, even as women's labour force participation has increased everywhere, there are significant cross-national differences in the policies and politics affecting women's employment.

1990

˜The œEconomic and labour relations review/Economic and labour relations review, 2024

Work usually means gainful employment for pay or profit. This definition of work excludes subsistence production such as collection of basic necessities like water, firewood and fuel, domestic work and care of the family. This means that the so called 'reproductive' sector is left to the women where their activities go unrecognized. Efforts have been going on for acknowledging women's work to raise women to economic, social and political parity with men. Women themselves have come forward to fight for their rights through trade unions and through their own organization by pressing for a revaluation of their paid work and for valuation in cash for their unpaid work. No one can deny the importance of unpaid work-it lowers the cost of reproduction of the labour force. Of course there are difficulties in the statistical system of identifying, enumerating and quantifying the work performed by women. Many of the activities associated with household maintenance, provisioning and reproduction, are not subject to explicit market relations. There is always a tendency to ignore the actual productive contribution of these activities. Similarly, social norms, values and perceptions also operate to make most of women's work invisible. These invisibilities get directly transferred to data inadequacies, making officially generated data in most countries very rough and imprecise indicators of the actual productive contribution of women. We need to do away with all these difficulties and revaluate the concept of 'work' to make women's work accountable.

CEPAL Review

2010