The document discusses gender equality within the context of social investment strategies in the EU. It makes three key points: 1) Social investment strategies that focus on increasing individual human capital do not necessarily promote gender equality, as they do not address how organizations sort women and men into different jobs and reward structures. 2) EU gender equality objectives for 2016-2019 emphasize increasing women's participation but do not adequately address organizational factors like occupational sorting that contribute to economic inequalities. 3) Future strategies would benefit from greater focus on positive discrimination policies and analyses of how organizational factors magnify or minimize gender inequalities using new linked employee-employer data.

1. Gender Equality Levers
at the State-Market Nexus:
Bringing Organizations Back In
Prof Lynn Prince Cooke
15 September 2016

2. EU Social Investment Strategy
Inspired by the Nordic model
…‘Social investment involves strengthening
people’s current and future capacities. …. notably in
terms of employment prospects or labour incomes…. to
'prepare' people to confront life's risks, rather than
simply 'repairing' the consequences’ (European
Commission, 2013)
 Employment-focused (growth, knowledge economy)
 Child-focused (human capital, reduced poverty)

3. Gendered issues
Figure 1 (Gendered) investment distribution over the life
course and generations (Kvist 2014)

4. EU objectives 2016-2019
Activation goal = 75% women and men

5. Is it realistic?
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
Countries that started with low flfp
Spain
Italy
Ireland
Greece

6. Countries with 1990 flp 40-49%
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Hungary

7. Countries starting 50-59%
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
France
Poland
Germany
Slovak Republic
Latvia
Portugal
Slovenia
Austria

8. 60-69%...
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
Czech Republic
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Norway

9. 70% + in 1990…
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
Sweden

10. The Nordic gender wage gap x time
0
5
10
15
20
25
2000 2005 2010 2014
%genderwagegap
Denmark
Finland
Sweden
Norway
Linear (Denmark)
Er go, social investment approach does
not result in gender economic equality

11. The Missing Link
• Stratification researchers have long-acknowledged that
individual socio-economic attainment is embedded in
structures:
• Family
• Organizations
• Nation-states
• Initial growth in individual-level microdata privileged
analyses of human capital
• Subsequent growth in comparative data highlighted how
individual-level effects vary across nation-states
• These differences were used to defend social investment
approach (i.e., Esping-Andersen et al. 2002)

12. The Missing Link: Organizations
• Structuralists reject the economic supposition that labor
markets efficiently allocate wages according to skill and
market demand as assumed by the human capital
model
• Instead, organizations are the site of employment
relations, wage-setting, as well as compliance with any
national equality directives
• wage inequalities result from local social relations
that allocate rewards within establishments (Avent-
Holt and Tomaskovic-Devey 2014; Baron and Pfeffer
1994; Tilly 1998)

13. Gender Inequality Regimes
• Organizations’ gender inequality regimes reflect the
surrounding society’s politics and culture (Acker 2006)
• Yet Lazear and Shaw’s (2008) comparative study analysing linked
employee-employer data revealed significant and similar variation in
wage inequalities across firms within divergent socio-political
contexts
• Gender economic inequalities do not derive from women in
the same job being paid less, but the sorting of women and
men into different occupations (glass ceilings) and
establishments (glass doors) (Javdani 2015; Petersen et al.
2011, 2014; Petersen & Morgan 1995)
• May reflect individual ‘choice’ given family constraints, but
evidence that employers discriminate (Correll et al. 2007)

14. EU 2016-2019 strategy v.
organizational sorting
Two (of five) Priorities
 equal pay for work of equal value
 equal economic independence for women and
men

15. EU 2016-2019 strategy v.
organizational sorting
Two (of five) Priorities
 equal pay for work of equal value
• Strategy for reducing pay gaps includes the only nod to
sorting with an objective of reducing gender
inequalities in sectors and occupations
• The specific action plans, however, focus on increasing
today’s and future women’s human capital to compete
in male-dominated sectors (European Commission
2016: 25)
• Doing so will only frustrate women if they cannot obtain
the jobs/rewards using these

16. EU 2016-2019 strategy v.
organizational sorting
Two (of five) Priorities
 equal economic independence for women and
men
• Action plans relating to employment focus on more
policy supports for parental employment
• Mandel and Semyonov (2006) found that such policies
increased high-skilled women’s exclusion from lucrative
private sector occupations as compared with women in
countries with less or no policy support

17. De-gendering unpaid work?
• A further action plan is to encourage men to assume
more unpaid work to reduce the gendered dimension of
assumed family responsibilities
• Organizational ‘ideal worker’ models reward employees
with no familial responsibilities (Acker 1990)
• Research on the “flexibility stigma” finds that employers
penalize men, particularly professional men, who take
advantage of such policies (Williams, Blair-Loy, and
Berdahl 2013)
• Might account for the ‘stall’ in men’s domestic work
across countries…

18. Men’s unpaid work x time (Kan et al. 2011)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Minutesperday
1970s

19. Men’s unpaid work x time (Kan et al. 2011)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Minutesperday
1970s
1980s

20. Men’s unpaid work x time (Kan et al. 2011)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Minutesperday
1970s
1980s
1990s

21. Men’s unpaid work x time (Kan et al. 2011)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Minutesperday
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s

22. Conclusions & Next Steps
 Social investment strategies do not promote gender
equality because they focus too much on individual human
capital and not enough on the organizational context that
determines its rewards
 Positive discrimination/quota policies directly address
sorting, and are acceptable under 2006/54/EC
 Yet many countries reject positive discrimination as a
violation of men’s right to equal treatment (Cooke 2011)
 Growing availability of linked employee-employer panel
data offers an opportunity to understand the organizational
factors that magnify or minimize gender and other group
inequalities