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The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in employment status trajectories of young Europeans during their initial labour market experience, and the way in which they are affected by some labour market institutions.

The empirical analysis is based on EU-SILC longitudinal data (waves 2006–2012), and focusses on young people aged 16–34. Monthly information on self-declared employment statuses for 36 months is used to define “employment status trajectories”. Young people are observed in two different phases: the first three years after leaving education (first phase) and a three-year window, starting around four years after the end of education (2nd phase). Multinomial logit models are used to estimate the probability of following different trajectory types as a function of individual characteristics, macroeconomic conditions and institutional indicators.

Results show that, in the first phase, women and men face on average the same difficulties in entering the labour market. When controlling for the presence of children, non-mothers have higher chances than men to enter rapidly and successfully into the labour market, whereas young mothers have the same chances. In contrast, in the second phase women experience more fragmented pathways than men, even if they do not have children. A less stringent regulation on dismissals of employees with regular contracts could enhance women’s employment opportunities in the school-to-work transition, but it would have detrimental effects for both men and women in the subsequent years. On the contrary, a more stringent regulation on the use of temporary contracts would have beneficial effects for women, with no adverse effects for men.

The paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it takes a broader perspective on youth labour market integration by considering two phases of individuals’ initial working life. Second, it combines an explicit attention to the first “significant” employment experience with a focus on individual trajectories, by adopting a new method to group trajectories. Third, it shows how the effects of labour market institutions vary by gender, highlighting the importance of considering gender-specific consequences when discussing or adopting labour market reforms.

The aim of this paper is to describe the use of sequence analysis to model trajectories of life‐course economic activity status, within a broader research agenda aimed at improving understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic position and health.

The analysis used data on 288 participants of the Boyd Orr Stratified Sub‐Sample, comprising a combination of prospective and retrospective information on economic activity status, as well as health in early old age. Economic activity was coded as a time‐based sequence of states for each participant based on six‐month periods throughout their lives. Economic activity was classified as: pre‐labour market; full‐time employment; part‐time employment; housewife; made redundant; stopped work due to illness; retired; other unemployed; or not applicable. Optimal matching analysis was carried out to produce a matrix of distances between each sequence, which was then used as the basis for cluster analysis.

The optimal matching analysis resulted in the classification of individuals into five economic activity status trajectories: full‐time workers (transitional exit), part‐time housewives, career breakers, full‐time workers (late entry, early exit), and full‐time housewives.

The paper presents the case for using sequence analysis as a methodological tool to facilitate a more interdisciplinary approach to the measurement of the life‐course socioeconomic position, in particular attempting to integrate the empirical emphasis of epidemiological research with the more theoretical contributions of sociology. This may in turn help generate a framework within which to examine the relationships between life‐course socioeconomic position and outcomes such as health in later life.

Uber, the virtual service that connects drivers to passenger, presents a novel form of work-organization in which managerial functions are transposed into a virtual platform. This ethnographic study documents how Uber drivers in the city of Monterrey, Mexico navigate and come to make sense of the Uber model of work. Employing the conceptual device of the work-game, this study argues that engagement in the game of “earning coins” coupled the interest of drivers in generating the most-possible income with the interest of management in maintaining a readily available labor pool. Reinforcing this coupling was Uber’s deployment of an entrepreneurial ideology of “being your own boss,” which was especially important given the company’s lack of a physical management structure. However, as Uber takes advantage of the deindustrialization that has gripped Monterey, it attracts drivers exhibiting varied employment trajectories. This in turn creates different modes of playing the work-game and thus generates sharply divergent subjective understandings of the work, whose nature this chapter explores.

This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities associated with young carers' employment in Australia.

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, this study captures the reflections of stakeholders (n = 8) and young carers (n = 10) about opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for young carers.

Despite many organisations internationally increasingly pushing diversity agendas and suggesting a commitment to equal opportunity experiences, this study found that young carers' work opportunities are often disrupted by their caring role. For young carers to be successful in their careers, organisations need to provide further workplace flexibility, and other support is required to attract and retain young carers into organisations and harness their transferrable skills for meaningful careers.

The paper highlights important implications for human resource management practitioners given the need to maximise the participation of young carers as workers, with benefits for young carers themselves, employers and society.

The research adds to the human resource management and work–family conflict literature in examining young carers through drawing on Conservation of Resources theory to highlight resources invested in caring leads to loss of educational and work experience resources. This leads to loss cycles and spirals, which can potentially continue across a lifetime, further contributing to disadvantage and lack of workplace and societal inclusion for this group of young people.

This paper aims to explore the ways in which social supports can promote enduring attachments to work and improve overall well-being of disadvantaged workers, within the context of social purpose enterprises.

With coordinators, managers and directors as informants, this mixed-methods study uses a survey and interviews to establish the availability and importance of different social supports found in social purpose enterprises across Canada, and to explore the reasons for such support mobilization and the influences that determine whether social supports are sought or accepted.

Findings substantiate the prevalence and importance of work-centred social supports. Social supports can promote more sustainable attachment to work by addressing work process challenges, ameliorating workplace conflict, attending to non-vocational work barriers and building workers’ self-confidence and self-belief. The source of a support, as well as the relationship between support providers and recipients, contributes to whether supports will be beneficial to recipients.

Future studies require corroboration directly from the employees and training participants of social purpose enterprises. The limitations on the sampling and the survey response rate may limit generalizability of findings.

Findings contribute to knowledge on more effective social support provision for improved work outcomes and overall well-being of employees and training participants.

Applying theory from social support research brings greater clarity to the potential of work-centred supports for addressing both vocational and non-vocational barriers to employment and job training for disadvantaged workers.

Few have studied the relationship between employment and health in the Medicaid population. The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of job loss on the mental health of working Medicaid beneficiaries.

This study conducted a post hoc analysis of 1,538 adult Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in a prospective cohort study. The authors matched participants who lost their job to participants who remained employed based on demographics, illness severity and social determinants of health. The authors estimated the effect of job loss on the odds of a diagnosis of depression and/or anxiety and self-reported mental health during a one-year follow-up period, stratified by prior history of depression and/or anxiety as documented in the Medicaid claims.

Among participants with no preexisting depression or anxiety, the incidence of depression or anxiety was 17% versus 7% (aOR = 2.85; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.88 to 4.34) between those who lost versus kept their job, respectively, and the mean difference in self-reported mental health was −4.3 (95% CI: −6.02 to −2.58). Self-reported mental health was also poorer between those who lost versus kept their job among participants with preexisting depression and/or anxiety (x = −4.78 (95% CI: −8.90 to −0.66).

Limitations of this study are as follows: we may not have matched on all factors that influence retaining a job; we do not distinguish between involuntary and voluntary job loss; generalizability is limited; and employment information is based on self-report.

Our society should invest more resources into supporting low-wage workers such as Medicaid beneficiaries.

Active labor policies that connect people to jobs, help them retain their job and support skills training to secure a better quality job, could reduce health disparities in the Medicaid population.

Use of both claims and self-reported mental health information to evaluate the impact of job loss on working Medicaid beneficiaries.

Research on job precarity and job instability have largely neglected the labor market trajectories in which these employment and non-employment situations are experienced. This study addresses the mechanisms of volatility and precarity in observed work histories of labor market entrants using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997. Several ideal-typical post-education pathways are modeled for respondents entering the labor force between 1997 and 2010, with varying indicators and degrees of precarity. A series of predictive models indicate that women, racial-ethnic minorities, and lower social class labor market entrants are significantly more likely to be exposed to the most precarious early careers. Moreover, leaving the educational system with a completed associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-graduate degree is protective of experiencing the most unstable types of career pattern. While adjusting for these individual-level background and education variables, the findings also reveal a form of “scarring” as regional unemployment level is a significant macro-economic predictor of experiencing a more hostile and turbulent early career. These pathways lead to considerable earnings penalties 5 years after labor market entry.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether high responsibility for housework or childcare is related to weak labour market attachment.

Survey data on domestic responsibilities in 1998 and 2003 were linked to register data on respondents’ employment spells for 2004-2011. Effects of the responsibilities on labour market trajectories – identified with latent class growth analyses – were analysed with multinomial logistic regression analyses.

Four trajectories for labour market attachment were identified among both genders. When adjusted for prior labour market attachment and other control variables, a high responsibility for housework predicted weak labour market attachment, compared to the trajectory of strong attachment, only among men. Compared to the trajectory of strengthening attachment, a high responsibility for housework was related to weak attachment among both men and women.

Personal orientations may, to some extent, explain both the division on domestic responsibilities and attachment to the labour market. In the Finnish type of welfare state, domestic responsibilities have long-term effects, especially on men’s careers. More attention should be given to men’s roles in families and their possible consequences.

This is the first study analysing the division of domestic responsibilities on later labour market attachment among both genders. The strength of this study is the long follow-up time and methodology; it combines survey data at two time points and register data on employment spells over eight years, identifying patterns in employment with latent class growth analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of parental leave use and long-term employment trajectories of parents in Luxembourg based on anonymous administrative records. This is the first systematic analysis of parental leave take-up rates and return rates for Luxembourg using a large and reliable data set.

The authors use highly detailed administrative data to calculate take-up and return rates for parental leave for both men and women working in Luxembourg. To gain deeper insights into the employment trajectories of parents, the authors deploy the visualisation tools of the TraMineR package, which allow the authors to trace developments over time.

The authors estimate take-up rates for parental leave at 72 per cent for mothers and 13 per cent for fathers. The return rates for mothers are 88.4, 99.4 and 70.8 per cent depending on whether they took full-time, part-time or no parental leave. In contrast, over 95 per cent of fathers remain employed following parental leave. The trajectory analysis reveals that the event of birth is a clear turning point for the majority of the female trajectories, but not for the male ones.

The paper contributes to the literature in at least several ways. First, this is the first available paper presenting the situation in Luxembourg using a large and reliable data set. Second, by including fathers in the analysis, the authors contribute to the available knowledge of male use of parental leave, which has been the subject of continued policy efforts in the past decades. Finally, the authors show how parental leave can be analysed using sequence analysis tools and how this method offers additional, holistic insights into work-family patterns over time.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.