Can We Call It a Revolution? Women, the Labour Market, and European Policy
In the USA the change in women's role in the economy over the last quarter-century has been likened to 'a quiet revolution'. Can we also talk of a quiet 'revolution' in Europe? The present article addresses this question by reviewing key developments in w
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Can We Call It a Revolution? Women, the Labour Market, and European Policy Francesca Bettio 1 Setting the Stage In the USA, the change in women’s role in the economy over the last quarter-century has been likened to ‘a quiet revolution’ by Goldin (2006), and allegedly as a more radical and consequential transformation than the long ‘evolution’ witnessed in the course of the preceding century. Such views were expressed just before the Great Recession struck. They were probably infected by the economic buoyancy of pre-crisis years, and, as Goldin herself admits, they may have looked rosier through the glasses of the main actors in her story, well-educated American women. A few years on, the so-called Shriver Report (Morgan and Skelton 2014) quenched the optimism about the quiet revolution by taking the perspective of women ‘living on the brink, struggling to achieve economic security while also caring for their families’.1 The report was compiled in the midst of the Great Recession. While acknowledging manifest achievements for women, it also highlighted the downsides, including growing inequalities among women of different ethnic and educational backgrounds and the persistence of wide gaps in earnings and poverty status with respect to men.
F. Bettio (*) Dipartimento di Economia Politica e Statistica, Università di Siena, Siena, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2017 D. Auth et al. (eds.), Gender and Family in European Economic Policy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41513-0_2
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Can we also talk of a quiet ‘revolution’ in the European case? Or has ongoing change being stalled by a much longer recession than the USA experienced? Questions like these naturally arise on this side of the Atlantic because of the much touted ‘European social model’. There is no denying that the European social model has been a hotbed of social and institutional innovations, nor that the effort to further integrate women into the paid economy is an integral part of this model. To my knowledge, however, no attempt has yet been made to assess systematically whether and to what extent such innovations have actually ‘delivered’. Several chapters in this book can be viewed as tiles of the complex mosaic that needs to be pieced together in order to arrive at an assessment of the European experience. This chapter engages with a more preliminary task, a stock-taking exercise where key developments in women’s labour market position at EU level are reviewed in the light of European policy choices and innovations. The exercise offers a chance to ask some of the big questions that ought eventually to guide evaluation. The chapter starts by tracing the policy trajectory that the EU has followed in the attempt to mobilize women’s labour supply and foster economic integration. Sections 3 and 4 take stock of change in female employment, pay and earnings. Section 5 relates such change to achievements and shortcomings of reconciliation policy, one of the key approaches that the EU has embraced to assist women’s economic
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