revised version published in: Labour, 2005, 19 (s1), 79–121
In this paper we use newly available individual-level data from the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households to investigate the factors affecting female labour force participation after the birth of the first child. We focus on the effects of pre-marital job characteristics and find that working without a contract has a negative effect on new mothers' participation, while working in the public sector or in a large private firm increases the probability of participation after childbearing. We suggest that these effects could be at least partly attributed to differences in the level of job protection and employment stability enjoyed by workers. This implies that in Italy women with highly protected and stable jobs find it easier to combine career and family, while those who are less sheltered by the legislation are more likely to withdraw from the labour force after becoming mothers.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.