It was a great pleasure to discuss Work-life balance in times of recession, austerity and beyond with the book’s editors Suzan Lewis, Deirdre Anderson, Clare Lyonette, Nicola Payne, and Stephen Wood. The book seeks to broaden the dual agenda of promoting WLB to improve both gender equity and workplace productivity, to develop a triple agenda that also promotes social justice toward greater equality, social mobility, and workforce inclusion. The diversity of approaches in the different chapters of this book contributes important insights to the literature, for instance combining insights from action research (that can be criticized for its lack of generalizability) with cross-national compari- sons (that can be criticized for their lack of specificity). As such, the book does what an edited book does at its best: relating diverse perspectives on an important topic to a sum that is greater than its parts.

Ellen Kossek reworked our comments to the form of a book review, which now has been published in the recent issue of Community, Work & Family journal.

Nieuwenhuis, R., & Kossek, E. E. (2018). Work-life balance in times of recession, austerity and beyond (Book Review). Community, Work & Family, 21(1), 106–109. http://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2017.1388002

Manfred te Grotenhuis is currently visiting the Swedish Institute of Social Research (SOFI), where he presented our joint work on Weighted Effect Coding. The recoding of his presentation is available on Manfred’s YouTube channel, and embedded below:

The relevant papers are available here (open access):

• When size matters: advantages of weighted effect coding in observational studies
• A novel method for modelling interaction between categorical variables

More information, as well as software for SPSS and STATA are available from the project website.

ps. Stay updated for an exciting update to the ‘wec’ R package!

• carries out policy-relevant analysis and research on the current socio-economic situation in the EU on the basis of the most recent available data
• examines major issues which are features of the situation or affect it with the aim of providing evidence on which to base policy-making across the EU.

It will be interesting to see what kind of questions and comments the paper attracts at this stage, which is much more policy-oriented compared to last week’s academic seminar. For those who missed it, the abstract of our paper reads:

Although employment growth is propagated as being crucial to reduce poverty across OECD countries, the actual impact of employment growth on poverty rates is still unclear. [Results show that] the increase in women’s employment has had a significant impact on poverty trends. […] However, in the Nordic countries no such poverty reducing effect was found, as in these countries womens employment rates were very high and stable throughout the observation period. In countries that initially showed marked increases in women’s employment, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United States, the initial increases in women’s employment rates were typically followed by a period in which these trends levelled off.

Hence, our findings suggest that the potential of following an employment strategy to reduce poverty in OECD countries has, to a large extent, been depleted.

The paper is available here and isjoint work with Wim van Lancker, Diego Collado and Bea Cantillon. The program of the seminar is available online.

The title of my talk will be “Has the potential for compensating poverty by women’s employment growth been depleted?”, which is based on joint work with Wim van Lancker, Diego Collado, and Bea Cantillon. It answers the question whether trends in women’s employment in recent decades have affected trends in household poverty in OECD countries. We find that women’s employment growth is negatively associated with poverty but perhaps not strongly enough to make further employment growth into an instrument against poverty. Policy implications are discussed.

A list of previous seminars is available online.

References

Nieuwenhuis, R., Van Lancker, W., Collado, D., & Cantillon, B. (2016). Has the potential for compensating poverty by women’s employment growth been depleted? LIS Working Paper Series #644. Available Online

If you happen to be in New York and are interested in attending this talk, please contact me. There might be some ‘tickets’ available.

From the announcement:

Women’s employment rates have risen markedly across OECD countries in recent decades, although evidence is mounting that this trend is stagnating. Rense Nieuwenhuis will discuss how these trends have affected earnings inequality within and among coupled households, as well as poverty rates. His research is based on LIS data to cover OECD countries for about 3 decades. In his talk, he will also relate his findings to current policy developments in Europe.

Rense is a sociologist interested in how the interplay between social policies and demographic trends gives rise to economic inequalities. His publications appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family and the European Sociological Review, among other journals. In 2014 he obtained a Phd (‘Cum Laude’) from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and currently he is an assistant professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Light refreshments will be provided. After the talk, all are welcome to join us for a social gathering at Bryant Park. 

From the call for papers:

The Social Policy Context of Single-Parent Families

This stream will focus on single-parent families and the ways in which these families are affected by social policy across European countries and beyond. We invite invite theory-driven empirical studies on social policies that affect single-parent families. We specifically invite papers that address:

Social Policy Outcomes: descriptions and analyses of how social policies affect single-parent families. What are the various policy arrangements for single-parent families? Do single?parent families benefit more from universal welfare state policies, or from policies targeted on specific needs of such families?

Social Policy Responses: descriptions and analyses of social policy innovations focused on single-parent families. What social policies are adopted for single-parent families, and how are these policies debated? What are the determinants of (EU member) states adopting policies? Is there a trend towards targeting or universalism? How does Social Investment translate to policies for single-parent families?

The complete call for papers is available online.
Abstracts will be submitted to the conference organisers. Instructions and deadline will appear on the conference website shortly:

Please do not hesitate to leave a comment below, or contact me at rense.nieuwenhuis@sofi.su.se, if you have any further questions.

Last week, I was invited to present my dissertation research during the LIS Summer Workshop. My lecture was titled “Family Policies, Women’s Earnings, and Between-Household Inequalities: Using LIS for comparative analyses“. It consisted of three parts.

The first part of my lecture dealt with my argument to combine institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. I differentiate between two types of family policies, and how these affect women’s employment. These two types of family policies are reconciliation policies and financial support policies to families. Reconciliation policies were found to stimulates the employment of specifically mothers, thereby decreasing the employment gap between mothers and women without children. Financial support policies to fmailies with children, on the other hand, were found to increase this motherhood-employment gap.

Secondly, I have answered the question to what extent – and in what direction – women’s increased earnings have affected earnings inequality between households. Put simply: women’s earnings attenuate the earnings inequality between households. Moreover, reconciliation policies were found to stimulate women’s employment in such a way, that her attenuating contribution to household inequality was stronger, while financial support policies suppress this attenuating effect. This means that a family policy-context facilitating women’s employment contributes both to smaller inequalities within households, as well as between households.

The third part of my lecture was technical in nature, and specifically addressed comparative analyses using the LIS database. I presented a ‘netting down’ tool that may assist in comparing net and gross earnings data in the LIS database. Evaluations of the performance of this netting down tool suggest that netting down improves the quality of comparative analyses, but residual bias (between net and gross datasets) remained.

Presenting at the LIS Summer Workshop was an amazing experience, with attendants asking smart and constructive questions. I learned a lot from the experiernce, myself. The slides of my presentation are available upon request (r.nieuwenhuis@utwente.nl).