Gender references in job advertisements – relations to job status and gender equality

Research has shown that gender references in job advertisements play an important role for gender (in)equality in personnel selection. The use of pair forms (masculine and feminine form) in German-language job advertisements, for example, was found to reduce the lack of fit between women and leadership roles (Horvath & Sczesny, 2013). Therefore the present study addresses the question which forms of gender reference are used in job advertisements, how these forms are distributed in different countries and how language use is related to gender typicality and status of the job. We collected job advertisements published online in four countries with different rankings of gender equality (i.e., Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and Czech Republic; World Economic Forum, 2011). We randomly selected 100 advertisements per country from four branches that are characterized by different proportions of female and male employees: steels/metals, science, restaurants/food services, and health care. The advertisements were analyzed with regard to gender references as well as different indicators of job status. The results show that, in general, men and women are addressed more equally in Swiss and Austrian job advertisements compared to Polish and Czech job advertisements. The results also show that women and men are addressed more equally in branches where the proportion of women is high than where the proportion of women is low. We thus can conclude that the use of gender references is associated with the degree of gender equality achieved in a country and with the gender typicality of a profession.

Economic Reforms and Income Inequality in Urban China

This paper reports the results of an analysis of changes in income inequality, and in its determinants, in urban China since the economic reforms that began in 1978. The intention is to identify new characteristics of economic inequality. It first shows that income differentials acrossand in provinces widened and that their economic rankings were becoming fixed during the period from 1988 to 1995. Second, age was the major factor in inequality in 1988, while education became the important factor in 1995. Third, education significantly contributed to increasing inequality during the period. Fourth, the higher education-level groups had less within-group inequality. These changes reflect the penetration of the market mechanism into China after the reforms. However, this will be problematic without equality of opportunity.

Economic crisis, immigrant women and changing availability of intimate partner violence services: a qualitative study of professionals' perceptions in Spain

Introduction: Since 2008, Spain has been in the throes of an economic crisis. This recession particularly affects the living conditions of vulnerable populations, and has also led to a reversal in social policies and a reduction in resources. In this context, the aim of this study was to explore intimate partner violence (IPV) service providers’ perceptions of the impact of the current economic crisis on these resources in Spain and on their capacity to respond to immigrant women’s needs experiencing IPV. Methods: A qualitative study was performed based on 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews to social workers, psychologists, intercultural mediators, judges, lawyers, police officers and health professionals from different services dealing with IPV (both, public and NGO’s) and cities in Spain (Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Alicante) in 2011. Transcripts were imported into qualitative analysis software (Atlas.ti), and analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: We identified four categories related to the perceived impact of the current economic crisis: a) “Immigrant women have it harder now”, b) “IPV and immigration resources are the first in line for cuts”, c) “ Fewer staff means a less effective service” and d) “Equality and IPV policies are no longer a government priority”. A cross-cutting theme emerged from these categories: immigrant women are triply affected; by IPV, by the crisis, and by structural violence. Conclusion: The professionals interviewed felt that present resources in Spain are insufficient to meet the needs of immigrant women, and that the situation might worsen in the future.

Family income growth and income equality : progress or punishment?/

"This study was prepared by JEC/GOP staff : Christopher Frenze (author)...--p.13 nt.

Report of the first session of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean: full integration of population dynamics into rights-based sustainable development with equality: key to the Cairo programme of action beyond 2014

Includes as annex the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development

Encouraging majority support for immigrant access to health services:multiple categorization and social identity complexity as antecedents of health equality

Health disparities between groups remain even after accounting for established causes such as structural and economic factors. The present research tested, for the first time, whether multiple social categorization processes can explain enhanced support for immigrant health (measured by respondents’ behavioral intention to support immigrants’ vaccination against A H1N1 disease by cutting regional public funds). Moreover, the mediating role of individualization and the moderating role of social identity complexity were tested. Findings showed that multiple versus single categorization of immigrants lead to support their right to health and confirmed the moderated mediation hypothesis. The potential in developing this sort of social cognitive intervention to address health disparities is discussed.

The unhappy marriage of religion and politics:problems and pitfalls for gender equality

This article explores how religion as a political force shapes and deflects the struggle for gender equality in contexts marked by different histories of nation building and challenges of ethnic diversity, different state–society relations (from the more authoritarian to the more democratic), and different relations between state power and religion (especially in the domain of marriage, family and personal laws). It shows how ‘private’ issues, related to the family, sexuality and reproduction, have become sites of intense public contestation between conservative religious actors wishing to regulate them based on some transcendent moral principle, and feminist and other human rights advocates basing their claims on pluralist and time- and context-specific solutions. Not only are claims of ‘divine truth’ justifying discriminatory practices against women hard to challenge, but the struggle for gender equality is further complicated by the manner in which it is closely tied up with, and inseparable from, struggles for social and economic justice, ethnic/racial recognition, and national self-determination vis-à-vis imperial/global domination.

The elderly care and domestic services sector during the recent economic crisis. The case of Italy, Spain and France.

Over the past ten years in Italy, Spain and France, the demographic pressure and the increasing women’s participation in labour market have fuelled the expansion of the private provision of domestic and care services. In order to ensure the difficult balance between affordability, quality and job creation, each countries’ response has been different. France has developed policies to sustain the demand side introducing instruments such as vouchers and fiscal schemes, since the mid of the 2000s. Massive public funding has contributed to foster a regular market of domestic and care services and France is often presented as a “best practices” of those policies aimed at encouraging a regular private sector. Conversely in Italy and Spain, the development of a private domestic and care market has been mostly uncontrolled and without a coherent institutional design: the osmosis between a large informal market and the regular private care sector has been ensured on the supply side by migrant workers’ regularizations or the introduction of new employment regulations . The analysis presented in this paper aims to describe the response of these different policies to the challenges imposed by the current economic crisis. In dealing with the retrenchment of public expenditure and the reduced households’ purchasing power, Italy, Spain and France are experiencing greater difficulties in ensuring a regular private sector of domestic and care services. In light of that, the paper analyses the recent economic conjuncture presenting some assumptions about the future risk of deeper inequalities rising along with the increase of the process of marketization of domestic and care services in all the countries under analysis.    

Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe

This article addresses some implications for gender equality and gender policy at European and national levels of transformations in family, economy and polity, which challenge gender regimes across Europe. Women’s labour market participation in the west and the collapse of communism in the east have undermined the systems and assumptions of western male breadwinner and dual worker models of central and eastern Europe. Political reworking of the work/welfare relationship into active welfare has individualised responsibility. Individualisation is a key trend west − and in some respects east − and challenges the structures that supported care in state and family. The links that joined men to women, cash to care, incomes to carers have all been fractured. The article will argue that care work and unpaid care workers are both casualties of these developments. Social, political and economic changes have not been matched by the development of new gender models at the national level. And while EU gender policy has been admired as the most innovative aspect of its social policy, gender equality is far from achieved: women’s incomes across Europe are well below men’s; policies for supporting unpaid care work have developed modestly compared with labour market activation policies.Enlargement brings new challenges as it draws together gender regimes with contrasting histories and trajectories. The article will map social policies for gender equality across the key elements of gender regimes – paid work, care work, income, time and voice – and discuss the nature of a model of gender equality that would bring gender equality across these. It analyses ideas about a dual earner–dual carer model, in the Dutch combination scenario and ‘universal caregiver’ models, at household and civil society levels. These offer a starting point for a model in which paid and unpaid work are equally valued and equally shared between men and women, but we argue that a citizenship model, in which paid and unpaid work obligations are underpinned by social rights, is more likely to achieve gender equality.