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Looking at gender within Polish public discourse during the European Union (EU) pre-accession, and ongoing integration, process highlights the importance of symbolic politics to integration, and illuminates ways in which national identity and sovereignty are being renegotiated in response to European unification. This work explores how gendering the analysis improves our understanding of European integration, and points to the emergence of a logic of resistance that is generalizable to both other issues areas and to other contexts, beyond the Polish case. There is an extensive literature that explores resistance to gender equality policy within the nation-states, yet, the specific tensions provoked by the confrontation between supranationalism and nationalism require additional investigation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between occupational segregation and the gender wage differences using data on three-digit occupational level of classification. The authors examine whether a statistically significant relation between the share of men in employment and the size of the unexplained part of the gender wage gap exists.

Traditional Oaxaca (1973) – Blinder (1973) decomposition is performed to examine the differences in the gender wage gaps among minor occupational groups. Two types of reweighted decomposition – based on the parametric estimate of the propensity score and non-parametric proposition presented by Barsky et al. (2002) – are used as the robustness check. The analysis is based on individual data available from Poland.

The results indicate no strong relation between occupational segregation and the size of unexplained differences in wages. The unexplained wage differences are the smallest in strongly female-dominated and mixed occupations; the highest are observed in male-dominated occupations. However, they are probably to a large extent the result of other, difficult to include in the econometric model, factors rather than the effects of wage discrimination: differences in the psychophysical conditions of men and women, cultural background, tradition or habits. The failure to take them into account may result in over-interpreting the unexplained parts as gender discrimination.

The highest accuracy of the estimated gender wage gap is obtained for the occupational groups with a similar proportion of men and women in employment. In other male- or female-dominated groups, the size of the estimated gender wage gaps depends on the estimation method used.

The results suggest that decreasing the degree of segregation of men and women in different occupations could reduce the wage differences between them, as the wage discrimination in gender balanced occupations is the smallest.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the few conducted at such a disaggregated level of occupations, and one of few studies focused on Central and Eastern European countries and the first one for Poland.

This paper examines the similarities and variations in the professional and work organisation of nursing in Greece and Poland. It evaluates the evidence of “convergence” as opposed to “embeddedness” in the professional and gendered organisation of nursing in these two countries. The feminised character of nursing is discussed, in relation to the family within the configuration of health‐care services. This issue also relates to the clientelistic relations and familialism that pervade health‐care delivery in both countries – although for different historical and cultural reasons – and which reflect and reinforce patriarchical relations within these societies.

Poland’s heady transition to a democracy and free market economy has brought dramatic changes in societal values and attitudes, and some of the deepest transformations have been in women’s identity and gender relations, which this feminist art show explores. The exhibit draws its life force – and its title as well – from our global age of permeable borders, with its import-export of material and intellectual goods. This border became permeable in Poland only very recently, bringing in what some Poles call “good Western imports,” such as monetary profits, and “bad Western imports” such as feminism.

This survey‐based study examines gender‐based perspectives of job orientation, expectations, and motivations in the country of Poland.

Polish professionals were asked to rate 25 job characteristics according to their importance to the rater on a five‐point scale (5 = very important, 1 = not important). Mean scores were calculated and rank ordered for males and females separately. Two‐tailed t‐tests between male and female scores for each item tested for significant differences. A principle components factor analysis with rotation by the varimax method was performed on the correlation matrix of the 25 job characteristics.

Results show that males and females differ on 15 of the 25 job characteristics. Standard deviations of the importance ratings were examined. They were higher for males on 21 of 25 items, with a mean standard deviation of 0.96 for males and 0.87 for females. A paired t‐test ((1−(2 = 0)) resulted in rejecting the null hypothesis (p ≤ 0.001). Thus, for the respondents in this study, females as a group are significantly more homogeneous than are the males. Results of factor analysis with orthogonal rotation by the varimax method produced three factors of eigenvalues greater than 1.5, accounting for 37.3 per cent of the total variance. Factor I accounted for 17.9 per cent of the total variance and includes six job characteristics related to long term career objectives. Factor II deals with characteristics which can be classified as intellectual activity and explained 12.7 per cent of the total variance. Factor III included four characteristics related to structure and accounted for 6.7 per cent of the variance.

It would be worthwhile to extend the survey in the future to address three key issues: 1 – group respondents by years of service, for example, less than 5 years, more than 10 years, and so forth; 2 – control for salary levels; 3 – adjust for changes in the unemployment rate.

This research indicates that even though money is an important motivator (number 1 for males and number 5 for females), there are certainly other methods of motivation beyond financial ones. This is particularly significant for foreign corporations investing in Poland. Such knowledge should provide organizations that use it as a competitive advantage not tied exclusively to monetary outlays.

Poland is a developing economy which many observers believe is the most attractive emerging market in the expanding European Union. As such, the findings here should help organizations, both endogenous and exogenous, attract and retain employees.

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of self-employment exit in Poland and its determinants.

The author examines the outflow from self-employment into different labour market status: employment, unemployment, inactivity using multinomial logistic regression. The analysis is conducted separately for men and women using Polish Labour Force Surveys (LFS) (2001-2007).

Results indicate that personal and family characteristics have different impact on self-employment exit for men and women. However, unfavourable macroeconomic conditions have similar impact regardless gender. The author’s results show that higher local unemployment rate reduces the likelihood of self-employment exit into employment, while conducting business in a sector affected by economic downturn increase outflow from self-employment for both men and women.

Certain limitations of the study arise from the design of the Polish LFS. It is a rotating panel with relatively few time periods, so it can only allow the author to analyse the outcomes in short-term perspectives.

Those results provide some background for potential policy interventions. In the context of persistent, high unemployment rates in Poland, there is need for some policy incentives which reinforce self-employment – an important alternative form of the labour market participation.

Majority of previous studies focusses on self-employment creation, as policy incentives do. However, very little is known about the reasons for leaving self-employment. The author fills this gap analysing the outflow and transition from self-employment to different labour market status.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on earnings inequality within dual-earner couples in four Central-East European (CEE) countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. It aims to analyse the factors that influence earnings distribution within couples.

The analysis uses OLS regression applied on the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions 2011 survey to reveal the various influence of relevant factors, especially relative education and the presence of children, on relative earnings.

Women, on average, contribute less to a couple’s income than men. While considerably higher in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, such disparity is relatively low in Hungary and Poland. These countries have the highest share of dual-earner couples where the woman outearns her partner. The factor that substantially reduces the within-couple earnings inequality in all the analysed countries is a higher relative education of women. On the contrary, the presence of children, especially those of younger age, increases this disparity in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The research on within-couple earning inequality in CEE countries lags behind the relatively rich evidence from western Europe. This is the first study which systematically describes the situation in CEE countries from a comparative perspective.

The gender pay gap is a well-documented phenomenon in labor economics. Based on the 2018 Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), the authors estimate the impact of observable characteristics on the gender pay gap in Visegrad Group countries and provide policy recommendations on reducing the gender pay gap.

The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is applied to estimate the values of explained and unexplained parts of the gender pay gap. Gender pay gap in unadjusted as well as adjusted form is estimated using data on the individual level.

The results show that unadjusted gender pay gap proved to be stable at more than 20%. The authors found evidence that education widens gender pay gap implying that men have higher returns on education than women. Tertiary education proved to be the highest contributor to widening of gender pay gap. Results also show that there is strong sectoral and occupational segregation. Decomposition proved that only 21% of gender pay gap could be explained by observed characteristics. The unexplained part showed negative values, meaning women would have higher wages, if they had characteristics like men.

Structure of Earnings Survey data are published every four years; therefore the authors’ dataset from year 2018 might not completely reflect today's reality. Unfortunately, newer data are note available yet. Second, Structure of Earning Survey data do not contain variables representing social factors of respondents like marital status, number of children or labour market absence due to birth or childcare. Third, data used for this study do not contain firms that have less than 10 employees; therefore, considerable portion of the labour market is omitted.

Results of this study will help policymakers understand the roots and causes of the gender pay gap in Visegrad Group countries but addressing this issue requires further research.

This study examines educational inequalities under socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia to assess the extent to which egalitarianism was achieved and whether there was restratification after the common retreat from egalitarian ideology and practices since the 1970s. Exploring the extent of parental influences in three key educational outcomes and their changes in four birth cohorts, the study finds remarkable stability across cohorts and across transitions. Contrary to expectation, the net effect of parental social capital (communist party membership status) is prominent only in the former Soviet Russia and Bulgaria, moderate in Czechoslovakia, and negligible in Hungary and Poland. On the other hand, the effect of parental cultural capital is consistently strong but its influence is somewhat weaker at higher transitions. Its inclusion also dramatically reduces the effect of parental education and father’s occupation, suggesting that a significant extent of intergenerational transmission of educational inequality is mediated through parental cultural capital rather than human capital per se.

The second half of the twentieth century brought an enormous rise in the education level in almost all Eastern European countries. Education became a mass phenomenon. Many new universities emerged, and the number of their employees engaged in research and teaching increased.