The Family Friendliness That Wasn’t: Access, but Not Progress, for Women in the Czech Judiciary

Despite the fact that three-fifths of Czech judges are women, it would be a mistake to consider the Czech judiciary “feminized”: it is characterized by vertical gender segregation and a slow “defeminization” in positions of power and influence. The key to understanding both women’s presence overall and absence at the top is the gendered division of labor, especially in the home. The same reason why many women enter the judiciary—better reconciliation of private and professional lives than in other legal professions—is the reason why women do not progress—their “second shift” at home prevents them from ascending the career ladder.

What’s in an Occupation? Investigating Within-Occupation Variation and Gender Segregation Using Job Titles and Task Descriptions

Occupations have long been central to the study of inequality and mobility. However, the occupational categories typical in most U.S. survey data conceal potentially important patterns within occupations. This project uses a novel data source that has not previously been released for analysis: the verbatim text responses provided by respondents to the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2018 when asked about their occupation. These text data allow for an investigation of variation within occupations, in terms of job titles and task descriptions, and the occupation-level factors associated with this variation. I construct an index of occupational similarity based on the average pairwise cosine similarity between job titles and between task descriptions within occupations. Findings indicate substantial variation in the level of similarity across occupations. Occupational prestige, education, and income are associated with less heterogeneity in terms of job titles but slightly more heterogeneity in terms of task descriptions. Gender diversity is associated with more internal heterogeneity in terms of both job titles and task descriptions. In addition, I use the case of gender segregation to demonstrate how occupational categories can conceal the depth and form of stratification.

Gender differences and similarities in work preferences: Results from a factorial survey experiment

Despite increased gender equality in many arenas in most of the Western world, women and men continue to choose different educational paths; this is one reason for the persistent gender segregation in the labour market. Cultural and economic explanations for occupational gender segregation both contend that gendered career choices reflect gendered preferences. By analysing data from a multifactorial survey experiment conducted in Norway, designed to isolate the preferences for occupations from preferences for job attributes with which occupation is often correlated: pay; type of position; and amount of work, this article examines whether and to what extent boys and girls who have not yet entered the labour market have different preferences for different work dimensions. The study shows some gender differences in occupational preferences, while also demonstrating similarities in boys’ and girls’ preferences for work dimensions, such as pay and working hours. This indicates that attributes tested by the experiment, which are typically associated with gendered occupations, cannot independently explain why boys and girls tend to have divergent occupational preferences. Importantly, however, the results suggest that boys’ reluctance to undertake some female-typed occupations might be reduced if they did not pay less than male-typed occupations requiring the same level of education.

Measuring the effect of gender segregation on the gender gap in time-related underemployment

This paper focuses on the impact that gender segregation in the labour market exerts on the underemployment gender gap for young adult workers in Spain. In order to analyse the relative importance of segregation in this gap, we develop a methodology based on two counterfactual simulations that provides a detailed decomposition of the gap into endowments and coefficients effects as well as the interaction of these effects. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to perform a decomposition using bivariate probit models with sample selection. Using annual samples of the Spanish Labour Force Survey 2006–2016, the results show that working in female-dominated occupations or industries hinders working as many hours as desired, especially for women. Furthermore, we conclude that the gender gap in underemployment is mainly due to the different distribution of male and female workers across occupations and industries. Additionally, the different impact by gender that working in the same gender-typing jobs exerts on the risk of underemployment contributes to widening the gap.

Gendered Labor Market (dis)advantages in Nordic Welfare States. Introduction to the Theme of the Special Issue

Gender equality has been named as one of the normative foundations of Nordic wel- fare states. This is reflected in how, year after year, Nordic states rank among the most gender egalitarian countries in the world (see, e.g., World Economic Forum 2020). In Nordic countries, the state has been, and continues to be, a central actor in shaping women’s citizenship, labor market opportunities, and caring roles. Especially publicly funded welfare services and policies that facilitate the reconciliation of work and care have played a major part in advancing women’s labor market participation (see, e.g., Bergquist et al. 1999; Borchorst & Siim 2002; Ellingsæter & Leira 2006; Siim & Stoltz 2015). The institutional framework of Nordic welfare state policies has been central to what has been called the ‘social democratic public service route’ (Walby 2004).One of the important building blocks of gender equality has been the aim of making policies in Nordic countries ‘women-friendly’. More than 30 years ago, Helga Hernes (1987) identified the Nordic countries as ‘potentially women-friendly societies’. She characterized women-friendly societies as those that ‘would not force harder choices on women than on men’ (ibid., 15), particularly in relation to work and care. Hernes also envisaged that woman-friendliness should be achieved without increasing other forms of inequality, such as class or ethnicity-based inequalities among different groups of women.However, achieving gender equality in working life and the sort of women- friendliness that Hernes envisaged at the societal level has in many ways also proved to be challenging, as the ties between the state and gender equality goals are more complex than what they might seem at first glance. Gender disparities have proven persistent also within the Nordic context. When we issued a call for this special issue, we were interested in various forms of gendered labor market (dis)advantage in Nordic countries. Furthermore, we asked how gender segregation, welfare state policies, labor marketpolicies, and various labor market actors interact to produce, maintain, challenge, or change gender equality in the labor market in the Nordic countries and beyond. The five articles presented in this special issue address the issue of gendered labor market (dis)advantages in Nordic countries from several vantage points, focusing on both on ‘traditional’ questions, such as corporate power and sustainable employment, and ‘emerging’ questions such as intersectionality, gender culture, and aesthetic work.

Do students need more information to leave the beaten paths? The impact of a counseling intervention on high school students’ choice of major

Despite an almost endless list of possible study programs and occupational opportunities, high school students frequently focus on pursuing a small number of well-known study programs. Students also often follow gender-typical paths and restrict their attention to study programs in which the majority of students consists of same-gendered people. This choice pattern has far-reaching consequences, including persistent gender segregation and an undersupply of graduates in emerging sectors of the industry. Building on rational choice and social psychological theory, we argue that this pattern partly occurs due to information deficits that may be altered by counseling interventions. To assess this claim empirically, we evaluated the impact of a counseling intervention on the intended choice of major among high school students in Germany by means of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We estimate the effect by instrumental variable estimation to account for two-sided non-compliance. Our results show that the intervention has increased the likelihood that participants will consider less well-known or gender-atypical study programs, particularly for high school students with lower starting levels of information. Supplementary analyses confirm that a positive impact on information seems to be one of the relevant causal mechanisms. These results suggest that counseling services have the potential to guide high school students to less gender-typical and well-known majors, possibly reducing gender segregation and smoothing labor market transitions after graduation.