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Women's Work Histories in Italy

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Women's Work Histories in Italy DemoSoc Working Paper Paper Number 2007--19 Women’s Work Histories in Italy: Education as Investment in Reconciliation and Legitimacy? Cristina Solera E-mail: [email protected] and Francesca Bettio E-mail: [email protected] April, 2007 Department of Political & Social Sciences Universitat Pompeu Fabra Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27 08005 Barcelona http://www.upf.edu/dcpis/ Abstract Within pre-enlargement Europe, Italy records one of the widest employment rate gaps between highly and poorly educated women, as well one of the largest differences in the share, among working women, of public sector employment. Building on these stylized facts and using the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households (ILFI), we investigate the working trajectories of three cohorts of Italian women born between 1935 and 1964 and observed from their first job until they are in their forties. We use mainly, but not exclusively, event history analysis in order to identify the main factors that influence entry into and exit from paid work over the life course. Our results suggest that in the Italian context, where employment protection policies have also been used as surrogate measures to favour reconciliation between family and work, and where traditional gender norms still persist, education is so important for women’s employment decisions because it represents an investment in ‘reconciliation’ and ‘work legitimacy’ over and above investment in human capital. Keywords Female participation, lifetime employment patterns, non-monetary returns to education, public sector employment Acknowledgements This paper was presented at the ESF SCSS Workshop on “Revisiting the concepts of contract and status under changing employment, welfare, and gender relations’, University of Sussex (6-8 October 2005); at Social Science Departmental Seminars, University of Torino (30 January 2006); and at the Research Forum of Political and Social Science, University of Pompeu Fabra (16 March 2007). We would like to thank all those that took part at these seminars for their valuable comments, in particular Nicola Negri, Maria Laura di Tommaso and Gøsta Esping-Andersen. Moreover, we are grateful to Manuela Naldini, Teresa Martin-Garcia and Serena Pattaro for their comments to an earlier version of this paper, and to María José González for her support in publishing it as a DemoSoc Working Paper. 2 1. The issue Two facts about female employment are well known among scholars and resonate with our everyday experience of how developed market economies work. Where overall female employment is low, the reason often lies in low participation of poorly educated women. Where overall female employment is high, public sector employment is likely to be an important contributor. If we take the EU 15 countries in 2004, calculate for each of them the employment rate gap between poorly educated and highly educated women (up to lower secondary versus tertiary education), and verify the correlation between this gap and the overall rate of female employment, the coefficient turns out to be negative and statistically significant.1 Furthermore, if we take the share of women employed in the public sector and correlate it with the overall level of female employment in the country we get a positive and significant coefficient.2 Italy and Sweden drive these correlations in that they stand at the opposite extremes of the female employment spectrum within EU 15. Whereas in 2004, 10% more highly-educated women aged 25- 64 worked in Sweden than in Italy, the difference soared to 26.6% among the poorly educated. Moreover, the employment rate gap between highly and poorly educated women in Italy was the second highest in pre-enlargement Europe. One striking asymmetry between these two groups of Italian women is their respective distributions in the private and public sectors. three fourths of college educated female employees work in the public sector, whereas eighty percent of low- educated female employees are in private employment. All (pre-enlargement) European countries register a similar asymmetry, but to rather different degrees. If we take the share of women employed in the public sector in the total of the best educated women at work, and if we compute the difference with the equivalent share among the least educated, the third largest difference between the two shares accrues to Italy, with only Austria and Portugal recording an even higher difference.3 This association between education, high participation and the public sector on the one hand, and low education, low participation and the private sector on the other, inspired the idea that we want to explore in this paper. We argue that education may offer women important benefits in the guise of ‘reconciliation returns’ by giving them access to public sector jobs that make reconciliation between work and family easier or less costly, and thus particularly attractive in contexts where proper reconciliation policies are scarce. Education also affords the kind of ‘legitimacy to work’ that women may need in order to overcome pressure to give priority to the family in social contexts where traditional norms are still strong and demand for labour relatively weak. Returns in terms of reconciliation and legitimacy depend on the institutional and cultural context, and they may be additional to strictly monetary returns, or be traded off for the latter. Although we provide a conceptual framework for such returns, we do not formally model them here. Rather, we attempt to trace their influence indirectly by empirical investigation of the extent to which education and private/public employment matter in differentiating women’s work histories over the life course. As the above comparison with other European countries suggests, Italy is an ideal case to examine education-based employment differences among women. Our primary data source is the first wave of the Longitudinal Survey on Italian Families or “Indagine Longitudinale sulle Famiglie Italiane” (ILFI), and the focus is on three of the main transitions that make up a life- time employment pattern: entry into paid work, exit from paid work to housework, and return into paid work. We estimate the determinants of each of these transitions and adopt an indirect, residual approach to identify non-monetary returns, given that the data do not allow for direct identification. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes the work histories of Italian women in the ILFI data set distinguishing between three types: ‘continuous’, ‘ interrupted’, and ‘curtailed’. Section 3 illustrates our notion of monetary and non-monetary returns, substantiating it with analysis of the structure of earnings in the public and private sectors. Section 4 undertakes 3 multivariate and event-history analysis of three employment decisions – first entry into the labour market, first exit and re-entry - with a view to also verifying the significance of such returns. Section 5 concludes. The data and the variables used are discussed in the Appendix. 2. Education, public sector employment and work histories: descriptive evidence The ILFI is a five-wave longitudinal survey which began in 1997 and concluded in 2005. It combines a retrospective with a prospective design and thus allows reconstruction of the entire life histories of individuals up to the time of interview (see the Appendix for details). In this work we use the first wave (1997) and focus on women born between 1935 and 1964 so that we can observe them for a relatively long span of their life course, from the end of full-time education up to age 45.4 Moreover, we consider three cohorts of women that entered the labour market and built their families and careers in different historical decades: the first birth cohort (1935-44) mainly in the 1960s, the second cohort (1945-54) in the 1970s and the latest (1955-64) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike previous research, which has typically looked at labour force transitions around childbirth (Mc Rae 1993; Jacobs 1997; Dex et al 1998; Saurel-Cubizolles et al 1999; Bratti et al. 2005; Vlasblom and Schippers 2006) after marriage (Blossfeld and Drobnic 2001) or confined analyses to single cohorts or specific regions (Joshi et al 1996; Schizzerotto et al 1995; Bison et al 1996; Jenkins 2006), we analyse women’s employment dynamics over long periods of historical and individual time. This has two important advantages. First, with the widening of the individual observational window we can also observe exits and re-entries later in life. Second, as Drobnic (2000) argues, we avoid the risk of sample selection inherent in research that focuses only on specific groups of women. At the same time, comparison across cohorts becomes more problematic since the first and the second cohorts can be followed up to age 45 (with some exceptions for the second) while the youngest members of the third cohort are observed until age 33 and the oldest until age 42. This is a minor problem in regression analysis where we control for age, but can be a problem in the presentation of descriptive figures. In order to ensure comparability without much loss of information, all descriptive statistics refer to women ‘observed’ until age 35, bearing in mind that 35 is the lower limit used by demographers to estimate completed fertility. Our analysis is built around a tripartite classification of work histories, as noted. There are various ways to define and classify work histories. Our classification identifies the following types: “never worked” for those women who have never recorded a job episode; “continuous” when a woman has never experienced a housework episode by age 45 or the highest age observable, although she may have stopped working for different reasons (unemployment, education); “curtailed” when a woman has withdrawn from employment without returning. 2.1 Education The first question we wish to address is how work histories vary across levels of education.
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