A Job on One’s Own. Economic Insecurity and Women’s Labour Market Participation in Six European Countries.

The need for a wider comprehension of economic insecurity dynamics has been widely assessed in academic and political debate in recent years. However, to keep gender as the main analytical frame is still up to now underdeveloped in this debate, as the analysis’ focus mainly remains at household level despite the well-known phenomenon of feminisation of poverty. The main contribution of the proposed paper is to empirically address this theoretical gap and to propose an analysis of how the institutional context as well as individual characteristics in intersectional perspective affects women’s risk of living in economic insecure households. By taking in account six European countries (United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, Czech Republic and Denmark) as representatives of the main welfare regimes in Europe, the article aims at better understanding causes and mechanisms behind economic insecurity. The main hypothesis behind the paper is that households’ risk of economic insecurity is directly influenced by women’s frailer labour market participation.

The paper will use the EU-SILC database and its additional module 2013 to analyse the risk of women’s exposure to economic insecurity, using a set of logistic regressions by countries and comparing differences in national determinants of the risk, with a specific focus on women’s contribution to paid work. The article will contribute to advance the contemporary feminist debate in two ways. First, it focuses on the grey area between well‐being and full‐blown social exclusion. A new understanding of economic insecurity might put in evidence what are causes and mechanisms that determine the descent from a condition of risks to poverty and social exclusion, giving new input to innovative social policies. Secondly, it offers new advancements to comparative analysis by putting in question the traditional clusterisation of welfare regimes stemming from new empirical results.