Labour market

Background: The introduction of reforms to the Austrian pension system in the early 2000s resulted in a significant increase in the employment rate of older working age women. This increase was highly differentiated along education groups, with increases in employment rates concentrated among those with secondary and tertiary education.

An increasing demand for both formal and informal care is likely to result from the ongoing demographic transition at the same time as there is a further move away from the traditional domestic division of labour. Public policy-making that aims at increasing the supply of informal care necessitates knowledge about the relative importance of various incentives for individual care providers.

Without the contribution of informal carers of disabled, sick & older people, organised social care in England & Wales could not cope. However, carers can often experience financial hardship, poor health & social isolation, & may find it difficult to combine work & care. The government has developed policies to support carers in their caring role, while also introducing measures to assist carers to work, reflecting the emphasis on paid work as a driving force to reduce poverty.

As people continue to age and receive complex health care services at home, concern has arisen about the availability of family caregivers and their ability to combine employment with caregiving.

Throughout the 20th century women were more vulnerable to poverty than men which continues into the 21st century. These gender differences are explored in a chapter on gender, poverty and social exclusion in a volume giving the results of the millennium Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Survey. Social exclusion exists where one or more of the social sub-systems is not functioning adequately - the economic, social and family and community systems.

This study investigates whether men and women in caring occupations experience more negative job-related feelings at the end of the day compared to the rest of the working population. The data are from Wave Nine of the British Household Panel Survey (1999) where respondents were asked whether, at the end of the working day, they tended to keep worrying or have trouble unwinding, and the extent to which work left them feeling exhausted or “used up.” Their responses to these questions were used to develop ordinal dependent variables.