This issue, my first as Editor-in-Chief, focuses on the very public themes of work and money – on women’s participation in the labour force, on pensions, mobile money services, bill payment, social exclusion, perceptions of gender and leadership in work contexts, gender inequality within organizations and the impact of disasters on women’s work.
In our first paper, Fernando Antonio Ignacio González and Juan Marcelo Virdis take a broad overview of the relationship between female labour force participation and economic development. Their analysis shows that both the most and least developed countries have the highest levels of female labour force participation, while those with intermediate levels of development have the lowest. It also shows that, while most research focuses on income, female labour force participation depends on a range of factors, including environment, economic structures, access to basic services, inequality, poverty, education, and health. In addition, female labour force participation is affected by social, cultural and legal norms, depending on, for example, whether women are free to travel and work and whether there are laws against workplace harassment. Policy makers need to take notice of the many dimensions of female labour force participation and to recognize the importance of the non-economic factors that influence it.
The following two papers consider issues of finance in more detail. Kyungha Kim assesses how mobile money services have affected the financial inclusion of women in Nairobi. Here, women have limited property rights, depend on men’s approval to conduct financial activities, and tend to work in the informal economy – all of this making it difficult to access financial services, which in turn increases women’s dependency on male family members. However, the growth of mobile money services has made a real difference by allowing women to access financial services and conduct financial transactions. Focusing on the experiences of women in urban areas, the paper shows that mobile money has made it easier for women to access financial services – even for women who are younger, with lower levels of education attainment and lower income, that it increases men’s support for women’s financial activity, and that women believe it to be essential for their independence and economic empowerment.
Inmaculada Dominguez Fabian and colleagues focus on the issue of women’s pensions, noting that in most countries in the EU, the gender gap in pensions is greater than the gender gap in wages and that more women live on a minimum pension than do men. Their study, like Kim’s, considers an aspect of women’s work that has been neglected in academic research – that is, the regulation of the minimum pension in Spain after pension reform in 2011 and its effect on women’s pensions. They show that this reform has decreased the amount of minimum pension received and that the impact of this falls particularly heavily on women. The reform represents indirect discrimination and requires action to remedy the effects it is having on women’s lives.
Two further papers focus on Spain. María del Carmen Navarro García-Suelto and Sonia Santoveña-Casal consider the large numbers of women who are vulnerable or at risk of social exclusion. Focusing on women in a small town on the outskirts of Madrid, their article presents women’s accounts of their experiences. Women report discrimination across the spheres of family, society and economics. Most women do the family housework and caregiving, find that their family and personal lives are scrutinized when they apply for work, and report that the work they do is more precarious, more likely to be part time, without social security benefits and poorly paid. Finding better work is hindered by women’s lack of experience, career interruptions, and the responsibilities they have for family care, which means that they work a ‘double day’.
Sonia Agut, Carlos Hernández Blasi and Daniel Pinazo examine one very particular aspect of women’s work, that women are assumed to be less suitable for leadership roles than men, because of their presumed ‘communal’ qualities compared to the ‘agentic’ traits associated with masculinity and achievement. Their study investigated how Spanish students associate these qualities with types of work and with gender. It found that agentic traits in candidates were preferred for profit-oriented companies and communal traits in candidates for civic-minded companies, but that a candidate’s sex did not play a significant role. This suggests that there is no single model of good leadership, but that candidates are assessed on the congruity between traits and organizational settings. However, communal attributes were only welcomed for the civic-minded company when they were of high value (for example, demonstrating ‘understanding’), whereas agentic traits, both good and bad (for example, being ’dominant’ and ‘egotistical’) were still considered preferable for profit-oriented companies.
Frida Linehagen also examines the politics of the workplace, considering the actions of the Swedish Armed Forces in 2016 as it resolved to implement its first centralized wage survey in 8 years and to establish pay levels that addressed gender inequality using a collective agreement. Focusing on policy documents from this process, Linehagen shows how the Forces appeared to engage with the issue of gender equality, but ultimately failed to address it, protesting that organizational culture is difficult to change whilst failing to do anything substantial about this, such as equalizing salaries in their organization.
Inequalities around gender and money are explored in a quite different context by Eric Swank and Breanne Fahs in an article that examines bill placement practices in the US – showing how servers and customers interact around who is to pay restaurant checks, comparing data from the 1970s and 2010s. While the study found little change in that the majority of servers placed the bill in the centre of the table, the percentage of men receiving the bill actually increased over time (by 15% from the 1970s to the 2010s), while the percentage of women getting the bill decreased (by 11%). The type of restaurant and server characteristics, check price and type of food served made no difference to this. Depressingly, the study challenges the view that sexist behaviour is less likely to occur now than in the past, suggesting instead a regression of gender equality in these settings, and the need for more research on the routine and mundane practices of everyday sexism.
While many of the matters that this journal issue considers are longstanding and familiar, our final paper instead examines how unexpected disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic may impact on women’s employment and on their lives. Qudsia Kalsoom’s article illustrates the way that disasters such as war, famine and disease impact on women disproportionately, leading to an increase in their responsibilities and the deterioration of their wellbeing. Kalsoom’s study investigated the experiences of women who were both teachers (in middle-income private schools in cities) and mothers of young children in Pakistan during the pandemic. It showed that they faced a number of issues in managing space and resources for their teaching – often being expected to buy the equipment to make their work possible and without the appropriate space to deliver lessons online. Family members expected them to provide care whilst simultaneously carrying on with their teaching work. Balancing family care, domestic work, teaching, and learning to use new technology without support impacted their mental health, with further impact on women who had non-supportive or abusive partners or children with extra care needs. Kalsoom concludes that the disaster made pre-existing gender inequalities more visible and that measures to support women need to be put in place to remedy these.