Despite women’s significant increase in educational attainment and employment participation over the past few decades, gender inequality persists in affluent countries. Gender economic inequality is an important societal problem, because it increases the risk of poverty and other vulnerabilities for women as well as children. Indeed, the European Union’s social investment strategy aims to tackle these intra- and inter-generational inequalities because they inhibit economic growth as well as individual quality of life.
Social science research to date, however, has not fully accounted for the inequality between women and men, or exactly why it varies across countries. In addition, researchers as well as policy makers often ignore that both the reasons for family-related inequalities and their relative economic outcomes can differ substantially among women and among men. Gender equality will remain elusive until we fully understand how both between- and within-gender inequalities are configured in modern societies.
The overall objective of the NEWFAMSTRAT project is to fill this void in our understanding through four subprojects, which unpack how both between- and within-gender inequality is configured at multiple levels: individual, couple, organizational, and socio-political. The socio-political context is taken into account by comparing gender dynamics in Britain, Finland, and Germany in four subprojects. The first subproject analyzes British, Finnish, and German panel data to assess how family-related wage effects vary among women and among men. The second subproject explores British and German within-household gender wage gaps, and whether equality in paid and unpaid work is equally “good” for all couples. The third and fourth subprojects explore the role of employers and organizations in structuring gender economic inequality predicted by parenthood. Subproject 3 gathers primary data on the Finnish and UK labor markets to examine gender and skill differences in the impact of parenthood on getting a job. In the fourth subproject, we use Finnish and German linked employee-employer data to assess the role of establishments in configuring gender differences in employment outcomes predicted by parenthood. The organizational research highlights the complex interplay between individual agency and social structure configuring wage inequalities not just between women and men, but among women and among men.
Together these analyses locate the pockets of progress where equality gains continue to be made, as well as where barriers remain and how they differ among women and men in different contexts. The insights are informing not only new theory development, but also better equal opportunity and family policies.
