Women at Work An Economic Perspective

Covering employment and wage gender gaps, participation of women, fertility, and the welfare of children, this insightful volume discusses how the trend towards greater participation of women in labour markets interacts with gender differences in pay. It focusses on the scope for increasing the number of women in the labour force without negatively affecting the development of their children. The need for this volume has become self evident. At the Spring 2000 Lisbon meeting of the European Council the Heads of Governments of the EU agreed to accelerate the greater participation of women in the labour market. However, neither in Lisbon nor in the subsequent Spring European Councils of the EU was it discussed how to achieve this target - and the trade-offs that would be involved in increasing the participation of women in paid employment. Policies for increasing participation must involve some losers, or they would already have been implemented everywhere. If distributional considerations and policy trade-offs are ignored, it is only possible to set virtual targets, neglecting the reforms needed to achieve them. This book sets out a better informed policy debate about these issues, paving the way to more realistic targets and ways to achieve them.

1 - Introduction
2 - Some facts about women's employment patterns
3 - What explains women's employment patterns?
4 - Job segregation
5 - Wage gaps
6 - The consequences of rising female participation for other workers
7 - What should polcy do?
1 - Labour supply and fertility in Europe and the U.S.
2 - Parental work and child welfare
3 - How does women's work affect family income distribution?
4 - Taxes, transfers, labour supply and household welfare
5 - What should policies do?

Tito Boeri is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Milan and Director of the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti. He is research fellow of CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) and of the Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan. Tito Boeri obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from New York University and was senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1987 to 1996. Daniela Del Boca is Professor of Economics at the University of Turin and is Director of the newly established Center for Household Income, Labour and Demographic economics (CHILD). She has previously been President of the European Society of Population Economists, Professor at the Politechnic of Milan, Visiting Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and Visiting Professor at New York University and Johns Hopkins. Christopher Pissarides is Professor of Economics at London School of Economics. He has held visiting positions at Yale University, UCLA, University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. Christopher is currently a specialist adviser to House of Commons Treasury Committee, a member of the Cyprus Monetary Policy Committee and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and IZA.