Sally Bould (University of Delaware, USA)
E-mail: salbould@aol.com
Funding Child Care in Developing Countries
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This paper uses an example of a child care and preschool education program in Sri Lanka. The poor families of this community are put at risk by the "marketization" of development aid, both by donor nations and by international charitable organizations. Both child care and preschool education are essential in order for the mothers to participate in the work force and to prepare the young children for successful participation in the educational system. But this program can not depend on the state or the parents for funding.
The case study is the Child In Need Development Association, a child care and preschool program serving poor families in Sri Lanka. This program began 20 years ago with funding from Terre des Hommes, an international charitable organization. But this funding was terminated under the philosophy of self-help. Canada then became the donor country, but the shift in philosophy lead to "competition" for funding specific projects with specific goals. There was no longer an interest in continuous funding of child care and preschool education.
The "marketization" of funding including the unwillingness of international donors to provide continuous support for an essential on-going service puts poor families and children at risk.
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Jose Andras Fernandez Cornejo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
E-mail: jafercor@ccee.ucm.es
Gender Discrimination in Promotion: The Case of Spanish Labor Market
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A potential source of gender discrimination is that of promotion or advancement within the firm. In fact, data shows that women's promotions to higher job positions are slower than those of men. An issue of great economic and social importance is to what extent these differences are explained by differences in education, occupation, experience, family circumstances and so on (which, in any case, are often the result of previous situation of gender inequalities), or to what extent they are the result of discrimination. This last is often referred to as a "glass ceiling" effect, because women (or others minorities) can see the top, and may be in line to get there, but they are held back through the promotion practices of their employers.
This paper aims to provide evidence of "glass ceiling" effect in Spanish labor market.
Our data set comes from the 2001 survey "Encuesta de la calidad de Vida en el Trabajo" (ECVT) [Survey of Quality Life at Work]. This survey is made (annually) by the Spanish Labor and Social Affaires Ministry. The ECVT data are based on interviews with individuals (the sample are 6020 occupied workers). It contains a wide range of information concerning many aspects of personal and professional characteristics of people interviewed, such as family circumstances, schooling, work experience and tenure, work conditions, etc.; among work experience it includes several questions concerned promotion within the firm.
The paper starts with a brief review of the literature on this subject. Then, based in our microdata, and by using models of qualitative choice, we determine the probabilities of being promoted of women and men with the same set of attributes. In the following section, and by using the variable "gender gap in number of promotions per year" (promotion gender gap), we are trying to decompose it (in the same way of "Oaxaca method" for decomposing gender wage gap) into differences in characteristics and differences in the returns to this characteristic, being this last an estimation of the glass ceiling effect.
The last section of the paper will contain concluding remarks, with emphasis in antidiscrimination policies implications.
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Bernard Fusulier (University of Louvain, Belgium)
E-mail: fusulier@anso.ucl.ac.be
The Dilemma of Child Care Provider : To be Flexible and to be Family-Friendly
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Family needs and their correlatives make up one of the major obstacles to an all-out extension of the system of flexibility (eg. flexible working hours). In fact, even if the ideal model at the core of this system is the worker with no outside ties, fully committed to his work, it remains the case that social reality is imbued with other values and types of social ties, among them being values and strong ties which are deeply rooted in and around the family.
With the disappearance of the 'breadwinner model', following on the access of women to the labour market, the consequent increase in families where both parents are going out to work and the increase of the number of monoparental families, the setting up of flexible child care services appears as a relevant response to the pressures of flexibility on working parents.
In Wallonia (Belgium), the 'Centre Coordonné de l'Enfance' (CCE) has set out to respond to the needs of male and female employees by offering a flexible and extended service. In order to meet the demand from parents, some of its care services are available from 5.30 until 23.00, seven days a week. The CCE is a large organisation within this sector employing in the region of 250 staff. It is a non-profit making organisation, mainly financed by public authorities, set up in 1996 following on the results of a think-tank led by the board of workers, technicians and executives of the socialist trade union, SETCA. While seeking to respond to the needs of the work/family balance of employees having to work extended or irregular hours (flexibilised workers), the CCE is supporting the spread of flexibility while simultaneously flexibilising its own workers.
This case study of the CCE shows to what extent the tensions arising from flexibility are thrown back both on the organisation providing the service, and on the workers who are primarily responsible for delivering it. It is ironic that in its concern to help working parents, the CCE has been drawn into setting up a structure of work, itself flexible, which affects the family/work balance of its own workers while at the same time favouring the project of finding a balance between working and family life. We have analysed tensions and complaints arise from this paradoxal situation
We can learn a great deal from this flexible organisation in the child care sector, and the ways in which it attempts to lessen the tensions of flexibility. The seeking for cultural cohesion, the recourse to part-time working, the recruitment of staff with a social worker profile which would render them more prepared to work atypical hours, and the advance into a chain of flexibility are examples of the way management has responded to the problems flexibility poses for its workers. Nevertheless, they do not provide a definitive solution to the dilemma of the work/family balance, which remains a burgeoning issue within this organisation.
Our case study rests on a dozen in-depth interviews with staff members holding different viewpoints according to their positions in the organisation: director, human resource manager, team leaders, nursery nurses, social workers and trade unionists. In addition there is a documentary analysis and numerous informal exchanges. We have given oral presentations of the results of our analysis to two of the CCE's authorities: to the Business Committee, which brings together employers' and employees' representatives, and to the Annual Staff Meeting.
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Tetsu Harayama (Toyo University, Japan)
E-mail: harayama@toyonet.toyo.ac.jp
A Historical Study of Nursing Profession in France and Japan
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In order to study the evolution of nursing profession, it is significant to consider three elements, that is, gendered division of labour, organization of hospital and acquisition of knowledge. This study will examine three following points, three contrasts between France and Japan.
1. Nursing outside family emerged in the form of Christian charity in France as in other European countries, but the nursing had to be limited to family members, especially women until the Tokugawa period in Japan.
2. In France, the hospital authority structure was characterized as equilibration of physician and administrators until 1958 (Debre Law); on the contrary, in Japan, it has been monocratic since physicians appropriated administrative authority in the Meiji period.
3. French nurses have possibilities of obtaining superior diplomas, associated with their construction of career, but Japanese nurses have accentuated the acquisition of knowledge in QC groups.
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Gayatri Koolwal (Cornell University, USA)
E-mail: gbk5@cornell.edu
The Impact of Girls' Work on Household Preference for Sons: Evidence from Nepal
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Can child labor lower son preference among poor households that send their girls to work for income? Using the Nepal Living Standards Survey (1995-96), this paper shows that households sending their girls to work have a significantly lower degree of son preference, as measured by the household's reported ideal number of girls relative to their ideal number of children.
High male-female sex ratios in many countries are often motivated by a strong cultural preference for sons. This preference often manifests itself in neglect and even abuse of girls in societies where son preference is very high.
Preliminary results indicate that households that send their girls out to work (due to exogenous cultural, sociological, or economic circumstances) are in turn less likely to exhibit son preference than those who do not.
Specifically, taking a sample of children aged 10-15, a rise in expected wages for girls significantly lowers the household's preference for sons, controlling for dowry, household socioeconomic status, caste, and other factors. Interestingly, increases in boys' expected wage has no effect on son preference. Policy implications are discussed, as well as the potential long-term effects of paid child labor on girls in the household.
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Sebastien Lechevalier (CEPREMAP, France)
E-mail: sebastien.lechevalier@cepremap.cnrs.fr
Working Women in Japan during the Lost Decade: A Revisited Regulationist Approach.
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The situation of the Japanese women at work has been studied a lot by heterodox economists. Paradoxically, the Regulationist School, which produced refreshing analysis of the Japanese wage labor nexus, did not focus on the working women. They are mainly considered as a traditional peripheral workforce, which does not require a specific analysis.
However, according to us, this approach fails to explain the following paradox stylized facts of the lost decade. First, contrary to what happened in the 1970s, working women are not the main losers of the crisis, especially in terms of employment security. Second, the behaviour of the female labor supply changed since the beginning of the 1990s: they do not leave anymore the labor market, when it gets tight. Third, one observes increasing wage inequalities among full-time and part-time working women, which induce a polarization of the possible choices.
This article proposes to enrich the concept of wage labor nexus by a gender approach, taking into account both the labor market and the family, both the production and the reproduction of the workforce. In this analytical framework, the above stylized facts appear to be better explained. Moreover, an interpretation of the Japanese crisis is proposed.
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Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay (Telé-Université, Canada)
E-mail: dgtrembl@teluq.uquebec.ca
Virtual Communities of Practice?: Gendered Differences in Participation and Learning
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Over the last decades, there has been much interest in various forms of participation in the workplace and in its impacts for individuals and organizations. Knowledge management has also spurred interest in recent years, partly on the basis of these expected gains from a better management of the knowledge hidden within organizations, i.e. with workers. More recently, the concept of communities of practice has been put forward as a form of knowledge management which paves the way to attainment of the various organizational objectives: productivity, quality, innovation, etc. Such communities are starting to develop in many workplaces and they bring into question various issues related to the workplace and work organization.
Communities of practice have raised more and more interest over recent years. We will first present the definition of the concept, recall a few elements highlighted by other researchers as impacts or benefits expected from these communities of practice (CoP), before we present results from a Canadian experience in 7 different environments, highlighting the benefits as well as individual and organizational advantages and disadvantages of this experiment of community of practice, but insisting mainly on gendered differences observed in the 7 communities.
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Anthonette A. Rodriguez (Howard University, USA)
E-mail: a_rodriguez@howard.edu
Rural Adolescent Migrant Farm Workers and Substance Abuse
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This proposed research attempts to fill the gap in the intervention literature by employing qualitative and quantitative research methods to increase our knowledge of the relationship between rural adolescent migrant workers and substance abuse. Within the United States, the majority of rural adolescent migrant farm workers experience a myriad of substandard environmental conditions and psychosocial variables that places this subgroup at-risk for substance abuse. There is a need to assess the well being of the rural adolescent migrant farm worker and their psychosocial behavior relative to substance abuses. The three aims of this proposed project are: (1) To determine if a relationship exists between substance abuse (i.e., illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco) and the rural adolescent migrant farm workers; (2) To examine the correlates of rural adolescent migrant farm workers and substance abuse; (3) To compare rural adolescent migrant farm worker substance abuse behavior with that of their non-migrant peers. The overall goal of this study is to fill an important gap in intervention literature and to provide empirical evidence for theoretical foundations related to problems of rural young migrant farm workers. Thereby, helping improve the quality life for one of the most exploited subgroups in our society.
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