The Gendered Impacts of Labour Market Liberalization: A Critical Examination

Abstract Labour markets are responsible for large part of the levels of gender inequality present in the world: wage differentials could indeed reflect into gender inequalities in education, health and time use. Many countries, including the EU members, enacted liberal reforms of their labour markets since the 1980s, often without paying attention to their consequences in terms of gender (in)equality. The empirical analysis presented in this paper shows that liberal aspects of labour market regulations may increase or decrease gender inequality, depending on several factors. In general, it seems that labour market reforms were not accompanied by interventions in other fields (such as the provision of childcare and eldercare facilities), thus resulting in ambiguous effects in terms of gender equality, as measured by the European Gender Equality Index. JEL Codes: J08, J16, K31, P16