An Intersectional Analysis of the Justification of Differential Rights in Women's Access to Paid Work in the World Values Survey and the European Values Study (2021)

In this paper we present the results of an analytical framework of intercategorical intersectional analysis with the aim of investigating the underlying factors (gender, age, educational level and economic status) that influence the justification of differential rights in women's access to paid work. For our analysis, we used the joint dataset EVS/WVS 2017-2022 (EVS/WVS, 2021) and the question "Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree? v81. When jobs are scarce, men have more right to a job than women". The original sample included 153,595 participants (70,696 men -46.03%- and 82,899 women -53.97%) from 88 different countries. After selecting only valid cases for all analysis variables, the sample size was reduced to 139,301 subjects, including 64,595 men (46.4%) and 74,705 women (53.6%).

We conducted an intersectional analysis to examine both the role of the variables as main factors and their interactions in order to explain the influence of socio-demographic factors on the differences in the justification of the right to access to work between men and women. The results indicate that the highest risk of justification was found for the strata of men with low-middle income and low education, followed by the stratum of women aged 30-49 with low-middle income and low education. The differences in the justification of the prevalence of the right to work in relation to the social class to which one belongs vary between the different countries studied. Encouraging men, and especially women, to achieve a high level of education is the best strategy to ensure that women's equal right to access to paid work is not called into question.