The impact of the family context on female working paths

Romina Fraboni, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Valentina Gualtieri, ISFOL

For a long time, difficulties to reconcile job and family have characterize Italian women. In Italy, female participation in the labour market is among the lowest ones in Europe and it shows large differences: female employment rate is indeed lower among the young ones, the less educated and the ones residing in the South of Italy and on the Islands. Clearly, the observed differences are driven by specific national institutional settings. Among others, one of the most crucial features is the availability of day-care infrastructure concerning children, which either fosters or restricts a sustainable relationship between family and work. This work aims at studying the importance of the socio-economic determinants, like the life cycle or human capital, on women’s permanence on the labor market, and it also addresses gender related differences in the paths of labor market transitions. Therefore, the purpose of the analysis focuses on all people at reproductive ages and follows two steps. First, the analysis aims at highlighting the main gender differences according to occupational status, structural features, intentions and opinions about work and family context. Secondly, we select just women and conduct a dynamic analysis aiming at evaluating which factors mainly influence their permanence on the labour market. Data used come from the Multipurpose household survey on 'Family and social subjects' (2003), a Papi survey on a sample of 24,000 households for a total amount of about 50,000 individuals. After a descriptive phase, we apply multivariate data analyses such as multiple correspondence and cluster analyses, logistic regression and duration models. In particular, we apply continuous time proportional hazard models. We included time-independent variables referred to the woman and to her family of origin (birth cohort, geographical area, mother’s occupational status, parents’ highest educational level). In addition, we included time-dependent variables too, to take into account the family changes that take place in a woman’s life-course.