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Antecedents The development of labour supply over the next fifteen years has its roots firmly implanted in the past. This dynamic characteristic of labour supply changes extends to labour force participation rates as well as to changes in labour supply attributable to purely demographic changes, so we shall initially examine both of these components of labour force change over the post‐war period. Changes in the size of the labour force which would occur as a result of changes in the age/sex structure of the population and the propensity of women to many if age/sex/marital status‐specific labour force participation rates were constant is denoted as demographic, and Table I shows its contribution to labour force growth in the post‐war period. The primary force behind the demographically‐induced change in the male labour supply is earlier movements in fertility, but both past fertility and contemporary marriage behaviour affect the magnitude of the demographically‐induced change in the female labour supply. In particular, up to the early 1970s the increase in the proportion of women under the age of 70 who are married restrained labour force growth because of the generally higher labour force participation rates of unmarried women; the size of this negative impact did, however, decline over time.

The purpose of this paper is to examine female labour force participation (FLFP) and their employment choice between the formal and informal sectors after several institutional and social reforms such as Millennium Development Goal 3 aimed at promoting gender equality and empowerment of women by 2015, using data from Ghana’s 2010 Population and Housing Census.

In this paper, logit regression and multinomial logit techniques were employed.

The results show that FLFP has declined marginally from the 2005 figures; education remains the important factor in determining women’s participation in the formal sector. Strikingly 91 per cent of the FLFP is engaged in the informal sector of the Ghanaian economy, a sector with a very low contribution per head.

Interventions such as encouraging female education and retraining of self-employed females to improve upon their efficiency ought to be pursued vigorously; whiles developing rural areas for females to get equal labour opportunities and many others aimed at enhancing the efficiency and by inference earning per head of the informal sector is highly recommended.

The literature on the FLFP is thin in Ghana. The current study uses a census data unlike the previous studies and as such employed a huge sample size that reflects the reality in Ghana. The study contributed immensely to policy having established that 91 per cent of the female labour force is engaged in the informal sectors of the economy, and therefore any intervention targeting at reducing poverty and meeting the MDG 3 should be targeted at the informal sector of the Ghanaian economy.

The purpose of this paper is to study the allocation of time to paid work, unpaid work and non-work by women in Britain in 1998-1999. To infer the labor supply from the other time-use expressions.

The paper uses weekly diary data to estimate the unpaid work and non-work functions. It infers the (residual) paid work expression. As the latter is recovered from uncensored regressions, it makes direct use of the complete set of observations. Hence, it contains more information than the conventional labor supply functions that are estimated from the data obtained from paid work participants via the Tobit and Heckit or selection-bias correction (SBC) techniques.

The women surveyed generally allocated 69 percent of their time toward non-work, 18 percent to unpaid work, and 13 percent to paid work. The non-work function is dominated by the autonomous component, and all three functions depend on subjects’ age, wage, non-labor income, household composition, the unpaid work contributions of adult relatives and region of residence. The unpaid work and non-work functions are more consistent with the SBC rather than the Tobit version of the labor supply. Moreover, the Tobit predicts unrealistic paid work allocations for women engaging in very little non-work.

The unpaid work and non-work functions are regressed separately, as often the case in the literature. Their consideration within a seemingly unrelated regression framework necessitates a reduction in the number of observations to match those considered in the Tobit and SBC versions of the labor supply. Nuances may arise when the time reported in the diaries does not add up to 24 daily hours for all respondents. Knowledge of the recovered regional, age, household member and other effects on women time allocation might had come handy to economic development authorities who sought to attract women out of the household into market production, and from part-time to full-time employment in the context of the 2000-2010 Lisbon Strategy. Similar lessons may be valid today.

The data set derives from a survey that has not been used before. It relies on week-long diaries in order to avoid the occurrence of many zeros in a good number of activities (which is the norm in short diaries), and to ensure the study of a censored time-use function through its uncensored complements. The findings are compared to those of a weekly diary survey conducted in 1987 that solicited similar information. Hence, the study fills a gap in time-use analysis. Identifying the factors which influence the number of hours that women engage in work (both paid and unpaid) and non-work is useful for economic policy purposes. The study exposes a limitation in the conventional estimation of the labor supply which, in turn, casts doubt on the reliability of empirical results for policy making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in the effects of gender equality legislation on employment outcomes among female and male workers in industries with different intensity of foreign investment (namely, foreign direct investment (FDI)-intensive industries and non–FDI–intensive industries). The specific employment outcomes that were studied to compare the effects of the legislation are the working hours, employment opportunities, and wages of female and male workers in Taiwan.

Using data from the annual Manpower Utilization Survey, the authors applied a differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation method to test the effect of gender equality legislation on employment outcomes. By using multinomial logit, the authors measured the effect of the legislation on employment opportunities. To correct for simultaneity and selectivity problems/biases, the authors adopted Heckman two-stage selection procedures. Likewise, the authors used weighted least squares to solve heteroskedasticity in the wage and working hour equations. Further, the instrumental variable (IV) method was used to correct for simultaneity bias in the equation on working hour. The authors applied three stages estimation method following Killingsworth’s (1983) approach to measure the effect of the legislation on wages and working hours.

The authors found the restrictions enforced by the gender equality legislation (namely the Gender Equal Employment Act (GEEA), enacted in 2002) in Taiwan to have made certain impact on the workers’ working conditions in FDI-intensive industries. The major finding indicated that in a country like Taiwan, where the legislature tried tilling the perpetual gender gap in its labour market, by passing a law to counter inequality, could finally narrow the gender gap in wages among workers in the FDI-intensive industries. Although initially after the enactment of the GEEA (between 2002 and 2004), the gender gap in part-timers’ wages has widened, yet over a period of time the gap in their wages too has narrowed down, particularly during 2005-2006. The legislation, however, could not improve the job opportunities for full-time female workers’ in FDI-intensive industries. Besides, post 2002, the female workers were found to have worked for shorter hours than male workers, which according to us, could be largely attributed to the enforcement of the GEEA.

An in-depth analysis of the labour market effects of gender equality legislation should be useful to policymakers, especially those interested in understanding the impact of legislative measures and policy reforms on labour market and employment outcomes across industry types. If enforcement of a gender equality legislation has succeeded in reducing the gender gap more in one set of industries than the others (e.g. foreign owned instead of domestic industries), as the authors noticed in this study, then the same should have a bearing on revamping of future enactment and enforcement too.

Current study findings would not only provide the broad lessons to the policymakers in Taiwan, but the results that have emerged from a country case study could be referred by other growing economies who are enthusiastic about improving female workers’ working conditions through legislative reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on farm sector wage rate. This identification strategy rests on the assumption that all districts across India would have had similar wage trends in the absence of the program. The author argues that this assumption may not be true due to non-random allocation of districts to the program’s three phases across states and different economic growth paths of the states post the implementation of NREGS.

To control for overall macroeconomic trends, the author allows for state-level time fixed effects to capture the differences in growth trajectories across districts due to changing economic landscape in the parent-state over time. The author also estimates the expected farm sector wage growth due to the increased public work employment provision using a theoretical model.

The results, contrary to the existing studies, do not find support for a significantly positive impact of NREGS treatment on private cultivation wage rate. The theoretical model also shows that an increase in public employment work days explains very little of the total growth in cultivation wage post 2004.

This paper looks specifically at farm sector wage growth and the possible impact of NREGS on it, accounting for state specific factors in shaping farm wages. Theoretical estimates are presented to overcome econometric limitations.

Purpose – In this chapter, I assess women's progress in achieving greater access to management positions in United States workplaces. Although many researchers focus on segregation, women's changing representation in management is a relatively undocumented story about workplace inequality.

Methodology/approach – To increase our understanding of workplace and labor market composition and women's representation in management, I utilize data collected by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from large, private sector workplaces in the United States over time (1966–2000, N=237,934). Using these data and successive regression models, I explore the effects of supply, demand, and organizational processes on women's representation in management.

Findings – The findings indicate that women's representation in management is uneven across industries, with women holding higher shares of management in the service industries. Further, changes in the labor market supply of women and workplace segregation have much smaller effects on women's representation in management than the demand created by the tremendous growth in the service industries.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter shows the gender revolution is far from over in United States workplaces. Women are most likely managers in industries in which women provide services. In other words, women have simply added paid work providing services to strangers to their unpaid work providing services for families. In sum, women's progress is largely the result of demand created from economic restructuring.

This study investigates female labor force participation (FLFP) in Nigeria, over the period 1990–2020. It analyzes the effect of some poverty indices on FLFP, thereby contributing to the ongoing debate on female labor participation, particularly as it relates to household poverty and its alleviation. The study sources data from World Bank Data Bank and employs autoregressive distributive lags after confirming the stationarity of all variables of interest. While there is no long-run relationship among the variables of interest, the results from the short-run estimate show that one year lagged FLFP, fertility (family size), total unemployment and gender ratio in labor participation are poverty indices that positively influence female labor participation. On the other, female unemployment, male unemployment and GDP growth rate are negative determinants. However, female education and household income per capita as poverty indices are insignificant determinants of female labor participation for the period under study. These findings are important for government/policy-makers in Nigeria to develop a policy framework that can improve poverty in the country as well encourage FLFP in the country since their contributions have meaningful impact in alleviating household poverty and on the entire economy.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

This paper uses newly compiled data from two surveys of female home workers undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council in London in 1897 and 1907 to investigate various issues related to their work and wages. The reports detail the occupations, average weekly earnings and hours, marital status, and household size, composition, and total income of approximately 850 female home workers, offering a unique, and as yet unused, opportunity to explore the labor market characteristics of the lowest-paid workers in the early twentieth century. Analysis of the data reveals that the female home workers who were surveyed were drawn overwhelmingly from poor households. Home workers were older than female factory workers, most were married or widowed, and the majority of married workers reported that their husbands were out of work, sick, disabled, or in casual or irregular work. Weekly wages and hours of work varied considerably by industry, but averaged about 7–9s. and 40–45 hours per week, with many workers reporting the desire for more work. The relationship between hours of work (daily and weekly) and hourly wages was negative, and the wives and daughters of men who were out of the labor force due to unemployment or illness tended to work longer hours at lower wages, as did women who lived in households where some health issue was present. These findings lend support to contemporary perceptions that women driven into the labor force by immediate household need were forced to take the lowest-paid work, whether because they lacked skill and experience or bargaining power in the labor market.

The relationship between religiosity and female labour market attainment has been widely investigated for the USA; however, no comparable study has been undertaken for the Canadian context. The purpose of this paper is to redress this critical oversight of the literature by examining the impact of religiosity on Canadian female labour supply, both at extensive and intensive margins.

Using data from the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, the authors consider all the measurable dimensions of religiosity, for the pooled sample, as well as by religious group. A wide array of control variables is included in the regressions to insure the reliability of the estimates.

The authors find that overall religiosity inversely relates to female labour supply in Canada. When the impact of religiosity is assessed on a by religion basis, it is revealed that Protestant females are penalized, by far the most.

The result is comparable with the pattern uncovered in the USA for Conservative Protestant females. Unlike what can be expected, no statistically significant difference is detected between religious-nones and Catholics, suggesting a convergence of gender ideologies.

The investigation reveals interesting patterns that not only contribute to the current state of literature, but also motivate future research. Fairlie and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition techniques are also used to further explore attainment gaps among the religious groups.