Gender Gap Dimensions On The Labour Market In The European Union

While the importance of investments in economic assets for ensuring economic and social progress was acknowledged for a long time, sustainable development draws attention on the environmental and human dimension which constitute to equal extent key-dimensions for ensuring economic growth and social development. Up to date, the human capital part represented by women was under-used and their work less valorised, their potential contribution to economic and social progress being practically marginalised. Women’s constraints in prioritising family life have influenced their career development inducing a certain lack of professional mobility, the resort to “part-time†work and even career disruptions. Career disruption limits access to on the job qualification and leads to human capital depreciation generating precarious results in wage, and career-advancement terms and in facilitating the return to job. Resorting to “part-time†work, in general, plays a positive role in the life of individuals from the perspective of rendering compatible professional commitments assumed with family life, the great shortcoming being that such jobs providing also for a high standard are less frequent. As a consequence, employees will suffer an adverse impact in terms of remuneration, occupational segregation (due to the concentration of these jobs in certain fields of employment such as services, trade, and office work), career advancement and even job insecurity. This reality frequently fed the stereotypes regarding gender which generated the “gender gap†currently existing between genders on the labour market with multiple dimensions: differences between genders regarding quantitative employment and unemployment indicators; occupational segregation with impact on the quality of employment, and as cumulative dimension of the effects of several factors the “gender pay gap†or the “wage differential†. All these have constituted a topic arising much interest in the European area generating thus a statistical, analytical and policy approach. The motivation of this approach is that failing in making full use of the women’s human potential most countries fail in ensuring the required level of investment in the human capital as driver of development sustainability.