ABSTRACT
Part II examines the four main dimensions to gender inequality in waged work. Chapter 4 begins by comparing women’s and men’s employment rates. This indicator measures the proportion of the working-age population who have a job, and is also desegregated into the full-time and part-time employment rate. The employment rate has two main advantages over the more widely used economic activity rate, which records the proportion of people in paid work or looking for employment. First, in societies where women’s ascribed work is primarily as wives and mothers and the female activity rate is relatively low, the boundary between ‘unemployment’ and ‘inactivity’ is rather blurred. The result is that a large amount of women’s unemployment is hidden. This was vividly demonstrated in the European Union throughout the 1980s, when the majority of net job growth was filled by women entering the labour market from ‘inactivity’, rather than by those from recorded unemployment. Second, given the persistently high unemployment rates in many economies, there is a growing acceptance that it is the employment rate rather than the activity rate which is the better indicator of the health of the economy. Chapter 4 goes on to consider how the different types of labour market organisation mean that the nature of the unemployment problem varies considerably between countries. The chapter also examines the nature of the welfare system and the rate of progress within European labour markets towards institutions that reflect the social economic changes outlined in Part I.
