Women’s Labor Market Participation in Bangladesh: A Logistic Regression Analysis

As women around the world struggle for equality, there is a need for measuring their progress. The problem regarding women’s employment is more acute in Bangladesh. The conservative nature of Bangladesh’s society is a significant obstacle in the achievement of their goals in life. The aim of this study is to explore the factors that affect the empowerment of women and determine the factors significantly associated with women’s labor participation in Bangladesh. The study represents the current condition of women participating in the labor market in Bangladesh. A total of 375 structured questionnaires were distributed and 188 usable questionnaires were returned. SPSS version 20.0 was used and the analysis was carried out using binary logistic regression and bivariate analysis. Logistic regression was used to determine the risk factors for women’s labor participation. The findings revealed that women’s labor market participation is influenced by age, education and their partners’ education, as education is also an important factor that changes human behavior significantly. This study has also proven that women with higher levels of education have more employment opportunities.

Feminization of Resistance: Reclaiming the Affective and the Indefinite as Counter-Strategy in Academic Labor Activism

‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”.

The Informal Sector Facing COVID-19: The Case of Cameroon

This study aims to analyze the effects of COVID-19 on actors in the informal economy in Cameroon. To analyze the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on actors in the informal economy, we use secondary data from the National Institute of Statistics (NIS). These data come from a survey of 1310 households. We performed data analysis using comparative methods and a labor market participation model that considers changes in people’s behavior towards health risks in order to explore and compare empirical results with earlier studies. From this analysis, it was revealed that job losses are more important in the informal sector (and, in particular, among men). We note that the absence of wearing a mask decreases the chances of having an informal job and of being suspended from one’s job during the crisis. Likewise, time restrictions that are not appreciated by workers will push actors more towards the informal sector. These results lead to recommendations that contribute towards providing support or direct support to informal workers in the sector.

Racial/Ethnic Variation in the Relationship between Educational Assortative Mating and Wives’ Income Trajectories

The share of U.S. marriages involving wives with an educational advantage over their husbands has increased in recent years. Prior work has examined the relationship between educational assortative mating and wives’ labor market participation, but they have not assessed how this relationship varies by race/ethnicity. Drawing on 28 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we estimate group-based development trajectories to investigate whether the association between educational assortative mating and wives’ income trajectories varies across racial/ethnic groups. White wives are more likely than black and Hispanic wives to be a secondary earner. Black wives are more likely than white and Hispanic wives to be the primary earner. For white wives, higher relative levels of education are associated with greater contribution to couple’s total income. Black wives in educationally hypergamous unions are less likely than other black wives to be a primary or equal earner. For Hispanic wives, differences in income trajectories by educational assortative mating are small and statistically insignificant. Like family structure, the impact of educational assortative mating differs across racial/ethnic groups. Educational assortative mating is a weaker correlate of black and Hispanic wives’ income trajectory than white wives’ income trajectories.

Women’s Health in/and Work: Menopause as an Intersectional Experience

This paper employs an intersectional lens to explore menopausal experiences of women working in the higher education and healthcare sectors in Australia. Open-text responses from surveys across three universities and three healthcare settings were subject to a multistage qualitative data analysis. The findings explore three aspects of menopause experience that required women to contend with a constellation of aged, gendered and ableist dynamics and normative parameters of labor market participation. Reflecting on the findings, the paper articulates the challenges of menopause as issues of workplace inequality that are rendered visible through an intersectional lens. The paper holds a range of implications for how to best support women going through menopause at work. It emphasizes the need for approaches to tackle embedded and more complex modes of inequality that impact working women’s menopause, and ensure that workforce policy both protects and supports menopausal women experiencing intersectional disadvantage.

The beneficial impact of mother’s work on children’s absolute income mobility, Southern Sweden (1947-2015)

This paper examines the influence of mothers’ employment on children’s economic mobility in a period when women’s labor market participation was still increasing, and it was still was far from common for a mother to be in paid work. It focuses on a period of transition for women’s labor market participation in Sweden, when mothers faced higher barriers to employment.The findings show that intergenerational income associations indicate that the mother’s income did not influence her children directly, in line with the results of most studies on this topic. Nevertheless, I also found that these traditional measures of income mobility failed to capture the important effects of maternal paid labor on children’s income mobility.By using extremely rich longitudinal data from Southern Sweden, I studied the trends in children’s absolute upward mobility (i.e., earning more than their fathers). I found that whether a mother was in paid work, was economically independent, and had an income similar to that of the father – which is a proxy for economic autonomy – during the late childhood and adolescence of her children had substantial effects on her children’s upward economic mobility, and especially on that of her daughters.