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GENDER AND CRISIS IN

Author(s): Antigone Lyberaki and Platon Tinios Country Briefing Paper No: 06.17.9

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GENDER AND CRISIS IN GREECE

Antigone Lyberaki and Platon Tinios

Prepared for the Project Dynamics of Gender Inequality in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund) London Conference, 9-10 June 2017

Background: As in other southern European economies, women’s employment rates in Greece started from a very low point but did a lot of catching up until the of the financial crisis after 2008. Indeed, there has been explicit and vocal policy activism since the end of the dictatorship in the mid-1970s to redress some of the most salient aspects of gender discrimination in the legal framework and gender gaps in economic outcomes, with a focus on employment. It is useful to situate the gender trends in the context of three distinct periods.

In the first phase, from WW2 to 1980, Greece was a more-or-less successful developing economy, trying to qualify for what was then the European Community. This was the time of the explicit “male-breadwinner model”. Very few women were in employment – just three out of ten – and of those who were working, one out of three had the status of “unpaid family member”. The context was one of fast growth, a large primary sector, big and closely knit families, urbanization and fluid borders between the family firm/farm and the family.

In the second phase, starting in 1981 and ending with the outbreak of the crisis in 2010, Greece was a member of the European Union (EU) and an established democracy. Aspiring to modernize quickly, Greece introduced “institutional leap- frogging” in gender, alongside other spheres of social regulation. This was the time of political activism and abundant resources to promote . Women’s employment rate increased substantially, fertility declined, and the public sector absorbed many women, with one out of four women employed there. Legislation countering gender inequalities in work was instituted, though it applied mainly in the public sector and the segment of the economy consisting of large firms; gender equality legislation was harder to apply in smaller firms, which constituted the bulk of the Greek economy. What essentially remained was a “covert male breadwinner” model. So, despite loud vocal proclamations, generous funding and considerable policy/institutional activism, Greece remained squarely within the male breadwinner model, with a twist: what we just described as a covert (or tacit) breadwinner model. Lack of part-time opportunities and flexibility options discouraged large numbers of women from entering the labour market. For those who worked, combining work and life was a struggle: On the one hand, social infrastructure remained poor. On the other, legislation aimed, not so much to empower working women to pursue a career, but, rather, to compensate the sacrifice of their careers, by offering early retirement (and hence further undermining their career prospects). Part of the solution for urban

1 women was offered by immigrant female workers who filled the care gap at affordable cost. The third period covers the crisis and beyond. The rate of progress in employment participation was arrested and unemployment caused job losses among women, but not as much as among men. Hence the gender gaps in both employment and unemployment diminished, while the financial contribution of women in family budgets increased in importance and visibility. The flip side, however, is that this closing of gender gaps is attributed more to the losses of men than the progress of women. The big question is to imagine the period beyond the crisis. Against a background of deteriorating demographics – that is, of rapid ageing – and the twin pressures emanating from the high debt and the pensions system, the only conceivable way forward should rest on tapping on the reservoirs of inactive women. This road would entail abandoning the male breadwinner model in order to move decisively in the direction of dual adult families. This would require significant adjustment in values, priorities and policy tools, moving beyond protection to empowerment. It would also require to interpret the crisis as a crisis of the male breadwinner model.

Figure 1: Women’s employment (in thousands) 1983-2015 000ς Greece: Women aged 20-64 (in 000s) in employment, by professional status 2000 Contributing family workers 1800 1600 Employed persons except contributing family workers 1400 1200 1000 1,404 1,622 800 824 1,122 678 937 1,321 600 400

200 362 376 299 283 210 165 0 107 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 Source: LFS series, 1983-2015 Evaluating the long-term trends: Progress is visible if we compare the situation of women who entered adulthood in the post-WW2 period and the generation of their daughters who experienced their youth in the late 1970s and 1980s. Twice as many of the latter joined the labour market, mainly in office work or services, while their worked mainly in the rural sector. It is worth noting that fully 64% of the mothers’ generation had never worked, compared with just 36% of the new generation. This new generation of working women had more education, including higher education attainment, and lived in a world of more choices and freedoms. The trend favouring gender equality in employment accelerated during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century (see Figure 1). Nevertheless, if compared with the men of their generation, gender gaps were still stark: women worked for fewer hours, for fewer years and for lower wages, leading to highly unequal pensions in older age (Figure 2).

2 How can we characterise this trend? Is it a success story? The only way to answer this question is to compare Greece’s gender outcomes with those of other “gender laggard” EU members in the period before the crisis. This exercise tempers somehow the success story verdict. Greece’s performance was better only compared to Italy (Spain, Portugal and Ireland performed better in gender employment terms). In Figure 3, data are shown for the four countries (known by the acronym PIGS).

Figure 2: Progress towards gender equality in the labour market Greece vs EU Gap (w-m) in % unemployment 35 30 25 20 Gap (m-w) in 15 duration of 10 Gap (m-w) in % working life 10 labour force (years) 31 participation 13 5 7 17 25 7 0

15 18 22 Gender 26 28 Gap (%) Gap (m-w) in % in pay 34 employment

GR 1999 GR 2007 GR 2015 EU 2015

Source: Eurostat, LFS series, various years

Figure 3: Comparative picture of women’s employment in PIGS Women's aged 20-64 employment rate (%) IE GR ES IT PT 70 65 66 65 PT, 66 59 60 56 IE, 60 55 55 ES, 56 50 50 PT, 49 GR, 52 46 IT, 50 45 41 42 40 GR, 39 35 IT, 36 35 IE, 33 30 33 ES, 27 25 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 Source: Eurostat, LFS series.

3 The unemployment gender gap was and remained large throughout good and bad years. The gender gap in unemployment doubled in good times between 1985 and 2005 (from 5.0% to 9.1%) and in 2015 remained very high at 7% (women’s unemployment stood at 29%, while men’s unemployment stood at 22%).

Conflicting and pressing demands on women’s time: Untapped labour resources among women, due both to unemployment and inactivity, is a constant characteristic of the Greek situation throughout. Among the inactive women, one third claimed that they could not afford to seek employment because of care obligations. This reveals a mismatch between conflicting roles, which is further exacerbated by labour market rigidities and the paucity of part-time work opportunities. Greece had always the smallest segment of part-time in the EU, and this lies at the heart of the «jobless growth» experience in the pre-crisis years. Interestingly, the lack of part-time jobs was always considered a point of pride among trade-unionists and politicians alike.

Infrastructure for childcare made some progress, albeit for short hours, not covering the working day. The unmet childcare needs were partly covered by grandmothers and immigrant women. The unmet care burden is reflected in the «motherhood penalty»: if we compare mothers’ income from work to non-mothers, mothers in the private sector had at the age of 45 years almost half of the accumulated wage income compared to men in the same sector. The cumulative wage income (up to the age of 45 years) of mothers in the public sector lagged by 14.7% compared to a man working in the private sector, but mothers in the private sector by three times more (42%). Even childless women in the private sector faced a 24% gap by the age of 45.

The influx of large numbers of immigrant women emigrating from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus from the mid-1990s gave a boost to women’s employment (Lyberaki 2011)1. Three reasons need to be mentioned: • First, the supply of cheap labour encouraged women to move out of unpaid- family-labour status in the family business (firm or farm) and seek paid employment elsewhere. • Second, working mothers with young children could afford to remain in employment (with fewer career breaks). • Third, immigrant labour delayed somehow the trend of early retirement among women for the purpose of supplying care to a frail relative.

Given the ad hoc solutions in care provision, together with the lack of part-time and flexible working time options, it comes as no surprise that the public sector became the most attractive employer for women. Women’s employment increased at a faster pace in the public sector to reach 25% of total women’s employment since 2005. As the total includes self-employed and unpaid family members all of which belong to the private sector, the importance of public sector employment for women’s waged employment is even larger.

1 Immigrants were initially undocumented but were offered legal status by 1999. A significant number were ethnic from the ex-Soviet Union and the Caucases, who were offered Greek nationality from the start.

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Figure 4: Change (%) in employment by sector of the economy and gender, Greece Change (%) in employment by sector and gender, Greece 1985-2015 1985-95 1995-2005 2005-10 2010-15 35 28 29 25 20

15 12 9 11 7 4 4 5 3

-5 -2 -12 -5 -22 -21 -21 -15

-25 Men Public Women Public Men Private Women Private Source: ILO database of labour statistics, employment by institutional sector.

If women’s employment outcomes can qualify as moderate success, the picture in wages is more dismal. Increasing gender gaps in wages were a recurring theme in working women’s career experience (Cholezas and Tsakloglou, 2006, Figure 5). As women worked for fewer hours and for fewer years, as well as participated less in on- the-job training courses, they saw their hourly pay lag increasingly behind their male colleagues, both in the private and the public sector.

Figure 5: Experience-earnings profiles (1999)

Source: Tsakloglou & Cholezas, 2006.

5 Taken together with the motherhood penalty evidence, there is hardly any room to celebrate progress on the wage front.

Having said that, the area of pensions is even more unequal in gender terms. The problem of economic independence becomes accentuated in older ages. Mention should be made of the access problem: 17% of Greek women have no recourse to a pension, a figure three times higher than the EU average. For those who do secure an individual pension, the gender gap was 38% in the beginning of the crisis and declined to 23% because men’s pensions were cut by more (Betti et al 2015).

So, women in Greece managed to increase their economic role, almost exclusively in full-time jobs. This occurred more vigorously in the public sector, and whenever possible, with the help of elderly mothers and low-cost immigrant care-providers. Greek women’s income from work, however, lagged visibly behind that of men of equal standing. And when they finally retire, gender inequalities get worse, not better. In terms of unpaid work within the household, women of all ages spend almost four times more hours than men (ELSTAT Time Use Survey 2014). This complements the way the Greek labour market is structured and understood: the dominant hypothesis is that “real workers” are only men working full-time, while women’s economic role is seen as of secondary importance, peripheral or transitory, but clearly in the status of “secondary earner”. Overall, women’s employment increased but work patterns remained fraught with obstacles, leading to significant wage and pension gaps.

The crisis chapter in gender performance: a bitter story with a silver lining

The year 2010 was a turning point in economic outcomes. Women’s employment rate fell, unemployment skyrocketed, the catching up process in gender equality with the EU was dramatically reversed. Joblessness however had a different effect on women than men. Men became discouraged and stopped seeking for jobs. Women, by contrast, increasingly became “added workers”, no doubt to get any job capable of supporting the melting family finances. Job losses were more pronounced among men, while women increased their contribution in family finances. (Lyberaki and Tinios 2014).

As a result, the gender gap in employment shrank to 18% in 2015, down from 27% in 2008) for all age groups. Sectors with higher than average women’s representation (such as health and education) were hit less in terms of employment. By contrast, job losses concentrated in construction and manufacturing (male dominated sectors). However, had women’s progress in employment not been arrested by the crisis, their potential employment rate in 2015 would have been 58% in 2015 (against 46% today). So, the real cost of the crisis for women’s employment is not 6% (rate of observed decline) but rather twice as high –i.e. 12% that would have been reached if established trends had persisted.

Part-time and flexible employment of various kinds increased during the crisis, and especially after 2014 when the reforms finally started to kick in, and this was more

6 pronounced among men (Lyberaki et al 2017 -that is, with men starting to work “as women”). This may have more long-term effects on what is considered to be a “proper job” and remove some of the bias against women. Thus, the financial contribution made by working women has acquired greater importance and became more visible. Another feature of the crisis is the reversal of migration trends. As output collapsed, net immigration gave way to net emigration, as some of the 1990s migrants headed home or West, being joined by increasing numbers of young well-qualified Greeks – the ‘Brain Drain’. The refugee crisis following 2015 meant that Greece was a staging post on the way to Western Europe for people from the Middle East and further east. Some 70 thousand asylum seekers became stranded after the EU-Turkey deal of 2016; of those only a third reside independently in urban centres and could potentially match the labour market role of previous migrants.

Policies for gender equality: rhetorical fuss and hidden gender biases. It is paradoxical that the celebrated transformation of Greece into a member of the EU, combined with rhetorical and legal activism in favour of gender equality, has produced such mixed results. We have suggested in the past that “copy-paste” imported reforms in favour of gender equality in Greece are instances of “legalistic formalism” and were blind to the situation and the resistance on the ground (Lyberaki 2010). Policymakers considered a problem had been solved, so long as a law was passed to deal with it. With hindsight (and after the painful experience of the crisis) we feel justified in being more cynical in our reading of policies and policymakers’ intentions. Because gender equality was never a real priority in their system of values, they opted for a variant that used “protection”, with the aim to segregate women in parallel yet inferior employment trajectories, while preserving patriarchal expectations in their “primary destination”, i.e., family formation and care provision. So long as policymakers and political party narratives fail to see the crisis as an instance of the exhaustion of the male breadwinner model, there is little hope that the post-crisis settlement will prove to be less gender biased.

References and Suggested Bibliography

Betti G., F. Bettio, Th. Georgiadis and P.Tinios, 2015, Unequal Ageing in Europe: Women’s Independence and Pensions, Palgrave Macmillan, NY Cholezas, I. and P.Tsakloglou, 2006, Gender Earnings differentials in the Greek Labour Market’, University of Economics and Business, mimeo, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237105195_Gender_Earnings_Differenti als_in_the_Greek_Labour_Market1

ELSTAT 2014 Time Use Survey www.statistics.gr/documents/20181/a1a9c287-9be8- 40b8-8320-2df4a33e1423

7 Lyberaki A. and P.Tinios, 2014 “The Informal welfare State and the family: Invisible actors in the Greek ”, Political Studies Review, VOL 12, 193–208. Lyberaki Α., “Migrant women, care work and women’s employment in Greece”, Feminist Economics, 17(3): 103-131. Lyberaki, A., 2010, “The Record of Gender Policies in Greece 1980-2010: legal form and economic substance”, GreeSE Paper No 36, Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe, The London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.lse.ac.uk/Hellenic-Observatory/Assets/Documents/Publications/GreeSE- Papers/GreeSE-No36.pdf Lyberaki, A. , C.Meghir and D.Nicolitsas, 2017, Labour Market Regulation and Reform in Greece, in C.Meghir, C.A. Pissarides, D.Vayanos, and N. Vettas (eds) Beyond Austerity: Reforming the Greek Economy, pp.211-250. Boston, Mass: MIT Press.

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