Gender Is the Key: An Analysis of the Gender Inequalities in the Access to Employment during the Great Recession in Spain

This article analyses gender inequalities in access to employment during The Great Recession
in Spain. Using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey for the period 2006-2016, we
examine the individual, familiar and contextual factors that facilitate access to the labor
market. The main hypothesis of the paper claims that during The Great Recession, while
women have increased their probabilities of finding a job thanks to their investment in
Human Capital, men have decreased their probabilities of finding a job due to the destruction
of masculinized jobs during the crisis. The main analytic technic used in this paper is the
logistic regression. The results confirm the persistence of a gender gap in access to paid
work, although these inequalities have been decreasing since the beginning of the crisis for
women with higher educational level. Finally we did not find evidence of the existence of
motherhood penalty/ fatherhood premia in the job entry level during the crisis.