Impact of Gender Politics on Female Labour Force Participation and Sex Segregation in Switzerland

• In Event: 512 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Women in the Labor Force

Abstract

This paper investigates the longitudinal effects of gender public policies, and in particular of childcare policies, on female labour force participation in Switzerland from 1991 to 2012. A descriptive time-series analysis of sex segregation, monitored trough the Association Index, is also proposed distinguishing between vertical and horizontal effects. The distinctive feature of this research is the peculiar case of gendered trajectories studied in periods of important institutional mutations and recurrent economic crises. The empirical study is run with the use of two large databases, the Swiss Labour Force Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. The first results depict a situation where the public sector as an employer corrects vertical segregation, but does have a strong impact on horizontal segregation. This evidence suggests that horizontal segregation is more resilient to changes and highly rooted in the Swiss society. The probability of women to work is found dependent in the last decade on the number of childcare workers and on the quality of childcare institutions in the whole period analysed. Moreover, the 1990s show more fluctuations in terms of sex segregation than the years 2000s and Swiss women seem to drastically increase their propensity to work with respects to migrant women. Further major improvements of this analysis will include an additional level of disaggregation by cantons, other indices of segregation and the distinction between full-time and part-time female labour force participation.

Authors

• Laura Ravazzini, University of Neuchatel

• Christian Suter, University of Neuchatel