Despite policy initiatives aimed at promoting female access to jobs, the information and communication technology (ICT) professions have traditionally been largely monopolised by men. Segregation, gendered stereotypes and environmental factors have a clear impact on educational and professional choices, as well as on working conditions. The spread of ICT to all economic activities has meant that ICT specialists are now to be found everywhere, not only in the ICT sector where many stereotypes related to technical jobs persist. This work aims to analyse the gender wage gap and discrimination in ICT professions, with the emphasis on how working in an ICT‐intensive industry might affect that situation. The study uses the Spanish Earning Structure Survey data for 2014, and applies wage decomposition techniques to the wage distribution. The results show that female ICT professionals face unfavorable working conditions, especially in highly qualified jobs and in ICT‐intensive industries.

The improvement in women’s labor conditions and the elimination of segregation and other forms of direct or indirect discrimination have become one of the major challenges of the international political agenda, and as so have been included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched by the UN in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the same time, there is an increasing interest in the effects that the Social Economy (SE) might have on the achievement of the SDGs, as a consequence of its distinguishing of people-oriented principles. The goal of this paper is to analyze the specific contribution of SE entities to the reduction of gender inequalities in the labor market. We conduct an impact analysis with quasi-experimental counterfactual techniques, in which we compare one experimental group (the SE) with a control group (profit-seeking firms) using labor data from Spain for the period 2008–2017. The results indicate that social economy entities significantly contribute to the achievement of SDGs 5, 8 and 10, showing higher female participation, more stable jobs, and a lower degree of the glass-ceiling phenomenon.

The strategies for integrating people with disabilities into the labor market have evolved toward a social approach, in which the objective is the integration with stable and decent jobs. This article analyzes how persons with disabilities enter the ordinary labor market by studying the factors that strengthen stability in that process. In particular, it analyzes the incentives to hire workers by means of Social Security contribution deductions, a wage cost-reducing measure, and studies whether or not reduced contributions affects the hiring of people with disabilities in stable positions, thus promoting the possibility of decent and stable jobs. We focus on people with disabilities entering the job market for the first time during the period 2004 to 2011, using the Continuous Sample of Working Histories Database for Spain and using as a control group people without disabilities. The results obtained show that reduced social security contributions constitute an incentive that effectively encourages the entry of workers with a disability into the labor market by means of stable employment.

The role of the Social Economy (SE) in society is increasingly acknowledged by social agents and institutions, especially in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Commitment to SE requires the support of quantitative measurement of its contribution to society from an aggregate perspective. The difficulty in specifying it in quantitative terms is related to the assessment of the contribution of SE's differentiating and intrinsic values. These values contribute to the fight against some structural problems that persist in modern society in terms of unemployment, inequality, territorial imbalance, environmental problems and social exclusion that surpass the economic sphere and involve the contribution to social goals, social utility and social and territorial cohesion. Our objective is an assessment in quantitative terms, including an estimation, in monetary terms, of the specific contribution of Social Market Economy (SMkE) firms to society linked to their distinctive principles, and thus their behaviour, in comparison to traditional profit-oriented firms, used as a control group. We use impact analysis techniques, with a simulation exercise, by which SMkE entities "lose" their identity and behave like profit-oriented firms. The results obtained for Spain confirm the existence of differential behaviour that generates social value in several ways. In monetary terms, in 2017, SMkEs contributed 6,229 million Euros in benefits to Spanish society that would have been lost if SMkE entities had behaved like profit-oriented firms.

La economía social se caracteriza por una serie de principios diferenciales, entre los que cabe destacar la valorización del ser humano y la generación de valor social por encima de los resultados económicos o financieros. En términos de empleo, la literatura apunta a una mayor estabilidad y calidad del empleo, haciendo mención especial a las crisis económicas (Monzon y Chaves, 2012, 2017). Para el caso de España, la literatura empírica sobre cooperativas muestra evidencias que apoyan la idea de mayor estabilidad del empleo generado (Grávalos y Pomares, 2001, Díaz y Marcuello, 2010). El objetivo principal de este trabajo es analizar la contribución de las cooperativas y sociedades laborales en España a la cohesión social en términos de la calidad del empleo generado en la recuperación económica tras la Gran Recesión (periodo 2013-2016) a través de la generación de un indicador sintético de calidad laboral. Los resultados se comparan con un grupo de control formado por sociedades anónimas y limitadas, para estudiar las posibles diferencias en la calidad del nuevo empleo y la significatividad de las mismas. Los resultados apuntan ciertas diferencias entre las cooperativas y sociedades laborales y el grupo de control respecto a las características del empleo ligadas con la calidad del puesto laboral, aunque no todas son más favorables. De forma global, el indicador sintético muestra que los nuevos puestos de trabajo en cooperativas y sociedades laborales tienen mayor calidad que en el grupo de control, resultados influidos por el menor porcentaje de contratos a tiempo parcial observado en estas entidades.