Bridging the Gap: Exploring Gender Dimension in European Labor Market Transitions

Extant studies document that women often shoulder the primary responsibility for childcare, household maintenance, and care for dependents. These roles outside of work make women more susceptible to specific or alternative work arrangements, more frequent career breaks and working in specific occupations. Most empirical evidence is based on single-country analyses. This paper aims to expand the existing literature by examining gender differences in labor market transitions (from employment to inactivity and from employment to unemployment) across European economies during the 2000s. The analysis of the micro-EU-LFS dataset captures the individual decision-making process on labor market participation, while a set of country variables incorporates specific market-level conditions. The paper places particular emphasis on variables representing labor market policy changes, thereby addressing the question of which policies exert the most significant impact on labor market transitions. For most policy domains, the intensity of measures is associated with different impact on the transitions of the whole population, or on the transitions of the female population. This suggests that more attention should be put on different population subcategories when designing policy measures.