Search

This paper explores the gender gap in time allocation in European countries, offering a comparison of the 2000s and the 2010s, along with an explanation of the documented gender gaps, based on social norms and institutional factors. The results show that the gender gap in both paid and unpaid work has decreased in most countries, but with a significant level of cross-country heterogeneity in the size of the gender gaps. More traditional social norms are related to greater gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work, while countries with better family-friendly policies and a greater representation of women in politics and in the labour market exhibit smaller gender inequalities. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of gender gaps in Europe, and attempts to monitor the progress towards the elimination of gender inequalities. Despite that some degree of gender convergence in paid and unpaid work has taken place, there remain inequalities in the distribution of labour in European countries, and possible solutions may be related to social norms and family-friendly policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the quality of housing feature prominently in academic and policy discussion on housing, yet there is little agreement about how housing deprivation should be measured or monitored. In empirical studies, measures of housing deprivation are typically examined for one of two purposes—either to compare incidences of housing quality problems for different groups, which typically leads to an examination of performance of different measures of housing deprivation, or as dependent variables to examine competing theories about what explains cross-national variation in such problems, which typically ignores these measurement considerations. Our paper seeks to analyse measurement and theory jointly, focussing in particular on the EU's severe housing deprivation measure, and its subcomponents—overcrowding and housing conditions problems. In descriptive analysis, we show that the two components of the severe housing deprivation measure are weakly related and pattern differently across nations and that the aggregation rule of the main measure has a substantial influence on observed incidences of this problem. We subsequently construct multi-level regression-based models and demonstrate that the two components have quite different determinants. Our paper has implications for the measurement of severe housing deprivation in Europe, for theories that seek to account for differences in housing outcomes, and for policy that seeks to tackle housing deprivation problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire foods in socially acceptable ways. The study presents a comparison of the principal determinants of individual food insecurity in Europe and other Continents, with particular regard to gender, since the literature clearly states the importance of women in the administration of food in the household. The study of gender related differences in food insecurity is particularly important in Europe, since women experience food insecurity at a larger extent than men, but with a variability related to the geographical distribution and with complex relationships with economic and social drivers. Using a large international sample of individual level data, that allows the analysis for developed Countries for the first time, and the first experiential measure of food insecurity comparable at the global level, the paper analyses the principal determinants of gender differences in food insecurity. In order to verify if women's vulnerability in food insecurity is moderated by specific factors, the modelling approach allows gender to vary by education, poverty, place of residence. The results suggest that the driver that could most mitigate women disadvantage is education: people with a university degree present a lower probability of experiencing food insecurity, both for men and for women. On the contrary, familial characteristics, such as the number of children in the household, present a higher impact on women's food insecurity than on men's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is renewed interest in earnings differentials between social classes, the contribution of social class to overall earnings inequality across countries and net of compositional effects remains largely uncharted territory. This paper uses data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions to assess earnings differentials between social classes (as measured by ESeC) and the role of between-class inequality in overall earnings inequality across 30 European countries. We find that there is substantial variation in earnings differences between social classes across countries. Countries with higher levels of between-class inequality tend to display higher levels of overall earnings inequality, but this relationship is far from perfect. Even with highly aggregated class measures, between-class inequality accounts for a non-negligible share of total earnings inequality (between 15 and 25% in most countries). Controlling for observed between-class differences in composition shows that these account for much of the observed between-class earnings inequality, while in most countries between-class differences in returns to observed compositional variables do not play a major role. In all these respects we find considerable variation across countries, implying that both the size of between-class differences in earnings and the primary mechanisms that produce these class differences vary substantially between European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]