I will be presenting my paper on “Has the potential for compensating poverty by women’s employment growth been depleted?” on Wednesday, at a seminar on Making Work Pay. This is the same paper as I presented last week. Instead of presenting it to an academic audience, however, this seminar is organised by Social Situation Monitor, which is an initiative on behalf of the European Commission that:

• 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.