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The purpose of this study is to analyse the gender wage gap (GWG) in Spain adopting a labour market segmentation approach. Once we obtain the different labour segments (or idiosyncratic labour markets), we are able to decompose the GWG into its observed and unobserved heterogeneity components.

We use the data from the Continuous Sample of Working Lives for the year 2021 (matched employer–employee [EE] data). Contingency tables and clustering techniques are applied to employment data to identify idiosyncratic labour markets where men and/or women of different ages tend to match/associate with different sectors of activity and occupation groups. Once this “heatmap” of labour associations is known, we can analyse its hottest areas (the idiosyncratic labour markets) from the perspective of wage discrimination by gender (Oaxaca-Blinder model).

In Spain, in general, men are paid more than women, and this is not always justified by their respective attributes. Among our results, the fact stands out that women tend to move to those idiosyncratic markets (biclusters) where the GWG (in favour of men) is smaller.

It has not been possible to obtain remuneration data by job-placement, but an annual EE relationship is used. Future research should attempt to analyse the GWG across the wage distribution in the different idiosyncratic markets.

Our combination of methodologies can be adapted to other economies and variables and provides detailed information on the labour-matching process and gender wage discrimination in segmented labour markets.

Our contribution is very important for labour market policies, trying to reduce unfair inequalities.

The study of the GWG from a novel labour segmentation perspective can be interesting for other researchers, institutions and policy makers.

Against the recent reversal of the gender gap in higher education that has been observed in many countries, this paper aims to explore why there are better chances for lower social class women to access higher education than for higher social class women in a relative comparison with the same groups of men. Based on the occupational approach and the Breen–Goldthorpe model, we demonstrate those country conditions under which stratification in individual chances to obtain higher education is more severe.

We use contextual characteristics which capture gender-based and occupational differentiation, including female labour force participation, the share of females in the service sector, and the share of males in upper-secondary vocational education. By using multilevel modelling techniques and data provided by the European Social Survey (2002–2018) for 33 countries, we have made a cross-country analysis of how the relationship between gender and class, as well as the achievement of higher education, is moderated by these features.

Our results show that a higher share of males in upper secondary vocational education in a given country is negatively associated with the likelihood of obtaining higher education, whereas a high share of females employed in services in a given country has a positive association with this likelihood. We have also found cross-level interactions between a higher share of employed females and women in the service sector, on the one hand, and those of working-class origin, on the other, that are positively associated with higher education achievement. In higher education achievement, the growing importance of horizontal differentiation based on occupation and gender has accompanied the declining power of vertical inequality based on social class.

This study combines gender and class in an analysis of patterns of inequalities of educational opportunity in different societies undergoing a post-industrialist shift.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.

Periodic economic instabilities and structural changes in the labour market have given rise to a variety of forms of job insecurity. This article compares the scarring effects of different forms of job insecurity on future employment chances, and how they vary across education groups.

Using a sample of real vacancies and data collected in a vignette experiment with employers in Switzerland, a country with a strongly developed vocational education and training (VET) system, this article investigates how employers evaluate a period of unemployment, job hopping and work experience in deskilling jobs when hiring candidates.

The findings reveal that work in deskilling jobs is by far more scarring than unemployment or job hopping. The study also demonstrates that applicants with upper secondary vocational education are impacted the greatest by all three forms of job insecurity.

The study makes use of real vacancies. While experiments have the strength of high internal validity, most experimental studies in recruitment research rely on students as respondents. As this study works with real employers hiring for positions it benefits from high external validity.

This work analyzes female immigrants’ integration in the dimensions of education, labor market participation and fertility in 15 European countries, considering individual characteristics, including cultural background, host countries’ attitudes towards immigrants, the role of women in the family and country-specific integration policy. All these aspects taken together are crucial to understand the main patterns of integration focusing on gender differences.

We focus on second- and first-generation male and female immigrants between the age of 25 and 41, with a length of stay of at least ten years. Enrollment ratios for tertiary education in parents’ countries, the total fertility rate and the female labor force in the mother’s country represent ethnic background. Diversity in the destination regions is captured by local attitudes towards immigrants, the perceived role of women and national policies to integrate migrants [Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX)]. The data are drawn from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 2010–2018. Our results are based on ordinary least squares (OLS) and logit estimates; multilevel analysis was conducted.

We find significant evidence of gender role transmission from mother to daughter; age at immigration seems to be crucial to examine the importance of the culture of origin among immigrants. However, females are responsive to attitudes toward immigrants and gender equality in receiving societies, while integration policies, by defining the set of opportunities, may contribute to both genders’ tertiary education and women’s probability of being in the labor force.

This work underlines that integration policies favoring equal rights as nationals may contribute to both women’s tertiary education and their probability of being in the labor force.

We explore female integration in Europe in the dimensions of education, labor market, fertility and the role of both immigrants’ cultural heritage and specific aspects of destination countries. Previous research, particularly in the USA, has generally focused on some of these features at the expense of a more comprehensive approach. This study builds upon the existing literature and contributes to it by taking a multifaceted approach to female integration in Western Europe, which presents not only an institutional context different from the USA but also some heterogeneity with respect to integration policies and socioeconomic factors.

This paper identifies how the operations of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones. It reveals the change dynamics that LMIs engage in to bring about this transformation and that contribute to the projectification of work.

Drawing on an institutional-work lens and using interview data from both TempX, a German-based staffing service provider, and its client organizations, the analytical framework details the dynamics by which LMIs appropriate various HR tasks and different labour-market-organizing roles and thus create these triadic employment relationships.

TempX assumes a powerful position between its client organizations and workers by increasingly taking over HR tasks from its client organizations, alternating between profiting from market transactions and engaging as a buyer and seller of labour. This powerful position, gradually created through four distinct, sequential, institutional work dynamics, allows it to transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones and to promote project-based work.

By showing how LMIs capitalize on the multiple services they offer, and how they use these services to establish a powerful position in both the labour market and in their relations with client organizations, this paper contributes to research on how LMIs change their institutional environment. Second, by showing that LMIs switch between different labour-market organizing roles and HR tasks, this paper reveals how essential this switching is for LMIs to establish triadic employment relationships and to drive the projectification of work, and thus it also contributes to research on LMIs’ role in the projectification of work.

This paper aims to analyse the short- and long-term effects of entering the Spanish labour market under tough economic conditions on young immigrant–native earnings and employment outcomes.

The authors use cohorts, where the entry cohort into the labour market is the unit of observation. As a database, the authors use the continuous sample of working histories covering the period 2007–2021. Then, the authors estimate the model using weighted least squares.

The results show that the great recession and COVID-19 led to a blockage at the entrance of the labour market, reducing the number of workers. Additionally, the authors observe an adverse impact in terms of employment and earnings on those entering the labour market. Besides, this effect varies in intensity and persistence for natives and immigrants, as well as by country of birth, age of entry, gender and educational level.

A contribution to the literature is the analysis of the earnings and employment trajectories of young people entering the Spanish labour market for the first time during an adverse shock, such as the 2008 economic crisis or the COVID-19 crisis, and the possible differences that exist between native and immigrant workers. So, the authors analyse the labour market trajectories of workers covering the most recent years. Likewise, the authors carry out an extensive heterogeneity analysis in which they distinguish workers by educational level, gender, age of entry into the labour market and immigrants by their country of birth. This represents an additional contribution. The use of a cohort approach also contributes to the existing literature.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

Middle East and North African (MENA) countries notoriously exhibit high prevalence of unemployment and informality among a large fraction of population and, at the same time, gender gaps in labour force participation and job mobility. Why is there such persistent labour market segmentation? What is the impact and potential of various formalisation policies in several MENA countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia)? An overview of the informal economy is provided with respect to taxonomy, coverage and drivers. Transition matrices and multinomial logistic regressions are applied to longitudinal microdata from labour market panel surveys (LMPS) (in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia), focusing on workers’ occupational mobility regarding their pre-existing status, age cohort, gender and other demographics. Persistent segmentation and low occupational mobility in all countries suggest that informal employment is not driven by choice on the labour supply side but by structural constraints on the demand side. Existing formalisation policies encapsulating distinct stick and carrot strategies and targeting business versus workers achieve rather modest impacts. Promoting social and solidarity enterprises and extending microfinance to informal enterprises are promising policies for the creation of decent jobs.

Multiple jobholding (MJH) is assumed to be a growing phenomenon due to working life changes. This study presents new knowledge on the MJH career paths, from the perspectives of both employers and employees.

The qualitative interview study was focused on retail trade and restaurant and food service industries in Finland, where MJH is a quite common work arrangement compared to other European countries. The data were analyzed with the concepts of the chaos theory of careers and with an abductive thematic content analysis.

According to the results, several events and intertwined factors may lead individual careers gradually to MJH. Changing personal and family situations and leisure time needs attracted the careers towards MJH. MJH was not only a financial necessity to employees, but it also served their flexibility interests. The interviewed employers applied flexible non-standard employment arrangements mainly due to rapidly varying labor needs established in the industries. It was important for them to strengthen the non-standard core employees' sense of belonging to the work community. However, employees with work ability challenges were in risk to end up in peripheral positions at the labor market.

Previous research on multiple jobholding has not combined employers’ perspectives of MJH to employees’ experiences of career paths.