Gendered Employment Patterns Across Industrialised Countries, 2015-2019

An influential body of work has identified a ‘welfare-state paradox’: work–family policies that bring women into the workforce also undermine women’s access to the top jobs. Missing from this literature is a consideration of how welfare-state interventions impact on women’s representation at the board-level specifically, rather than managerial and lucrative positions more generally. This database includes data that contribute to addressing this ‘gap’. It compiles existing secondary data from various sources into a single dataset. Both the raw and 'fuzzy' data used in a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 22 industrialised countries are available. Based on these data, analyses reveal how welfare-state interventions combine with gender boardroom quotas and targets in (not) bringing a ‘critical mass’ of women onto private-sector corporate boards. Overall, there is limited evidence in support of a welfare-state paradox; in fact, countries are unlikely to achieve a critical mass of women on boards in the absence of adequate childcare services. Furthermore, ‘hard’, mandatory gender boardroom quotas do not appear necessary for achieving more women on boards; ‘soft’, voluntary recommendations can also work under certain family policy constellations. The deposit additionally includes other data from the project that provide more context on work-family policy constellations, as they show how countries performance across multiple gendered employment outcomes spanning segregation and inequalities in employment participation, intensity and pay, with further differences by class.