( From Grant Agreement Funding and tenders portal)
PATHS2INCLUDE will provide new, gender-sensitive, comparative knowledge-base on effective employment policies targeted at developing inclusive labour markets for persons in vulnerable situations in Europe. The study will examine the importance of intersectionality related to how context creates vulnerability, by focusing on three central labour-market processes: recruitment; career trajectories; and work exit. Through the involvement of national and European stakeholders, PATHS2INCLUDE aims to develop proposals for effective policies and to inform relevant policymakers with a view to maximising the project’s impact from a societal as well as scientific perspective. The project will combine diverse methods, data and disciplines (economics, political science and sociology) in innovative ways: (1) harmonised factorial survey experiment combined with qualitative interview studies with employers in four European countries (DE, NO, PL and RO); (2) causal analyses of comparative microdata; (3) microsimulation analysis exploiting the EUROMOD infrastructure. Linking the analyses of these data and the three central labour-market processes, will give original insights on how institutional and contextual factors shape barriers or mitigate risk of labour-market attachment among persons in vulnerable situations. These insights could include cross-national differences in employment-protection legislations and facilitation of care, regional differences in demand for labour, differences at company level related to the size of the firm, flexibilities in job tasks, and conditions that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, covering unemployment rates and infection-control measures across different segments of the labour market. The project will be implemented by an interdisciplinary consortium of seven research institutions and one European civil society organisation. The consortium has a balanced composition in terms of gender, stage of the career and area of expertise.
The PATHS2INCLUDE project is organized in eight work packages (WPs), each with specific objectives and tasks that collectively address the overall aim of the project. PATHS2INCLUDE has 9 objectives to:
1. Develop an interactive map depicting labour market attachment within the Consortium, with a special focus on groups that are difficult to identify in available data sets (e.g. with respect to ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation), by mapping labour market indicators and analyses of existing data, studies, and public documents (WP2).
2. Deliver an overview of existing databases at European and national level to detect lack of relevant variables or modules that could enrich future studies on persons in vulnerable situations (WP2).
3. Develop new knowledge about the conditions for removing barriers to inclusiveness and long-term labour market entry by identifying how context in relation to vulnerable situations affect inclusion in the processes of recruitment, career trajectories, and exit from the labour market (WP3-7).
4. Identify discriminatory attitudes in recruitment related to the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and care responsibilities, and how the organizational context at the workplace influences these attitudes. The analyses will be based on a factorial survey experiment combined with qualitative interview studies with employers in four European countries (DE, NO, PL and RO) (WP3).
5. Develop a more nuanced understanding of factors behind the gender employment gap by investigating the impact of gender norms and flexible working conditions on women’s attachment to the labour market and their career trajectories across Europe. The analyses will be based on European Social Survey (EES), the European Union – Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), and the European Union – Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) (WP4).
6. Deliver new knowledge on how employment policies, institutional factors, and economic downturns (affected by the COVID-19 pandemic) predict differences in timing of work exit and work exit routes, and involuntary and voluntary work exit among older workers (60 years and above) in relation to gender, health, skills, and care responsibilities. The analyses will be based on the harmonized longitudinal data source Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and a similar data source in Norway, The Norwegian Life Course, Ageing and Generation panel study (NorLAG), in addition to interview studies with employers in four European countries (DE, NO, PL and RO) (WP5).
7. Explore and develop methodological tools to discover the effect of digitization and automation, related to changes in job tasks and occupational polarization, on individuals’ risk factors that may predict the demographics of vulnerable workers in the future of work. The analyses will be based on EU-SILC and the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and interview studies with employers in four European countries (DE, NO, PL and RO) (WP6).
8. Identify profiles of individual and contextual characteristics that predict vulnerable situations and factors that promote successful labour market inclusion. This will be achieved by performing multilevel analysis using EU-SILC and ESS to identify determinants of employment status transitions, and by performing microsimulation analysis exploiting the EUROMOD infrastructure (WP7).
9. Implement a comprehensive impact and dissemination strategy in order to enhance public knowledge and facilitate policy learning about factors at the national and EU level that foster or hamper labour market inclusion of groups in vulnerable situations (WP8).
