Conference Agenda

Contemporary societies are in transformation, visible in the changes in work contents, knowledge claims and roles of expertise in societies. These transformations are partially related to macro-level societal factors such as the ageing population and mature economies. For example, the ageing population pushes forward technological solutions of care as the primary solution to labour deficiencies. Digitalisation entrenches all activities of society, and there are especially important sectors, which require closer analyses, in order to address the meaning, importance and consequences of the transformations. Platforms that have entered the realm of care globally are transforming the concept of care by commodifying it into piecemeal gigs, instead of permanency and continuity. While offering more possibilities for individual care providers to offer their expertise and labour at the platforms, at the same time the platforms themselves, through their logic of actions, transform the idea of expertise in care. More broadly, new technologies such as algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are all shaping the idea of expertise, and changing work, workplaces, and practices in most jobs. As such, technologies are changing thus not only the logic by which gendered work is organized but also by which most existing work tasks are organized, and finally, changing the ways institutions organize their activities.

This paper addresses specifically the realm of digitized gendered care work, offered through platforms and draws examples from three countries in the analysis of the platformized care provision. The paper asks pertinent questions about the role of the welfare society, gendered care work and coerced transformation in the role and position of the one in need of care into customer shopping at platforms. The paper uses Germany, Finland and the UK as empirical data.

Recent literature about gender gaps in employment and earnings emphasizes the role of unpaid care work -primarily associated with childrearing- in explaining men's and women’s differential trajectories in labor markets. However, care work is not restricted to that provided to children and recent demographic and cultural changes will potentially increase the demand for care associated with the elderly population.

Elderly parents and sick family members require care and, most times, this care is provided by women in informal family settings, especially in developing countries. However, the literature studying the labor market consequences of caring for a parent on adult children remains scarce. One obstacle for research is that unpaid care work is hard to measure as it happens informally within families. Additionally, selection into care work is also related to many characteristics that interact with gender.

To overcome these obstacles, we follow a novel approach. We exploit rich administrative data from Chile to identify what we call "health shocks". A health shock is a health event that is associated with an increase in the amount of care a person requires and that is unpredictable in timing. We use cancer and stroke hospitalizations as health shocks. Using birth records, we link parents and children and thus identify families that experience a health shock. To study the labor market consequences of providing care to a sick parent, we analyze what happens with the employment and wages of adult children after a health shock. We follow a stacked event study framework and thus match families that experience a health shock with similar families that do not.

We find that the hospitalization of a parent due to cancer or a stroke causes a reduction in formal employment of 1-3 percent points only for adult daughters. Adult sons are unaffected by parents’ hospitalizations. Employment recovers within a year for daughters in the case of strokes but the reduction persists for up to 5 years in the case of cancer.

We assess differential effects for different sub-groups. The reduction in daughters' employment is only observed in women with pre-shock earnings below median earnings, which speaks of the ability of higher-income families to possibly pay for care and thus avoid negative employment effects. Additionally, the negative effect of a parental health shock on daughters is driven primarily by maternal health problems.

The paper examines the relationship between types of employment and wages by gender and gender pay gaps among permanent, temporary, and informal workers. There are substantial gender inequalities in bargaining, and these inequalities are argued to be more prevalent for temporary and informal jobs. Hence, we expect to see larger wage penalties for women in such positions. Moreover, we argue that the inverse association between wages and non-permanent contracts is larger for low paid women. To this end, we employ unconditional quantile regression techniques and counterfactual decomposition analysis, and account for selection bias. Our dataset is based on labor force surveys over the period of 2005-2019 in Turkey and focuses on private sector employees. The findings highlight the disproportionate impact of temporary and informal employment on female earnings and suggest that employment type can be a contributing factor to the gender pay gap in Turkey, particularly for low wage groups. Besides, we reveal that women in temporary and informal jobs earn significantly less than men, particularly at the lower end of distribution. A big part of the gender pay gap is attributable to returns to characteristics, or in other words residual. Hence, we conclude that female employees in Turkey are unfavorably treated in the labor market, which is likely to reflect their poorer bargaining power.

This paper develops Japan's first gendered Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for 2016. A gendered SAM covers all the sectors of a market economy given in the Input-Output database and unpaid work and leisure activities provided from the time-use data so that we can see the holistic economic structure of Japan, including gender and care.

Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has been ranked near the bottom in the global gender equality indexes. Women’s low participation in economic (as well as political) activities is the main factor for persistent gender inequality. According to the 2016 Time Use Data, Japanese women, on average, spent 3 hours 28 minutes per day on unpaid care and domestic work, whereas Japanese men spent only 44 minutes; the gap is one of the widest among the OECD countries.

Japan is a super-aged society, leading to a labor shortage, and the demand for women workers is rising in general, particularly among child and elderly care workers. However, the monthly salary of the care workers, on average, is about $1,000 less than all industry-average; therefore, the sector faces a severe labor shortage. Yet, the wage hikes for care workers are slower than in other sectors. Developing a gender- and care-sensitive SAM is the first step to developing a CGE model, which allows a simulation of the gendered effects of changes in fiscal policy, including public investment in care services.

This paper also summarizes the current structure of paid and unpaid care services in the context of a broad Japanese economy; that is, gender ratios of paid workers and average salaries/ wages in medical, elderly, and childcare services and of unpaid care in households.