For the period of the 1960s to the late 1980s, this paper examines variation in job opportunities for men and women in the occupationally segmented and highly gender segregated Swiss labor market. Job opportunities are defined as the volume of job openings potentially accessible to individuals with given skills and other desired characteristics. They are conceptualized within the queuing approach, taking into account the structure and cyclical fluctuations of the Swiss labor market. Theoretical arguments about employers' criteria for ranking workers are abundant. However, the testing of the corresponding hypotheses has often been hampered due to the difficulty of measuring individual job opportunities empirically. This paper attempts to advance this research field by proposing an individual-level and timedependent measurement of job opportunities based on annual occupation-level job advertisement data. It yields an indicator of the volume of job opportunities accessible to workers with given occupationspecific credentials and other job relevant characteristics (i.e., gender, age, work experience). Based on separate regression analyses for men and women, job opportunities for salient groups of labor-market participants and their ranking within the labor queues are assessed. The findings, which differ markedly by gender, show that macro-level processes, such as the economic cycle, play an important role for men's job opportunities in particular. Furthermore, job opportunities strongly depend on occupational credentials whereas educational attainment plays a minor part. Age and cohort effects are found mainly for women. These findings imply that in occupationally segmented and sex-segregated labor markets occupational credentials and sex serve as employers' primary ranking criteria.
This paper addresses the rarely studied relationship between job vacancies and interfirm upward, lateral, and downward status mobility in an occupationally segmented labor market, taking Switzerland as the example. To conceptualize mobility mechanisms in this type of labor market, we introduce the concept of "occupational mobility chains" and test its validity. This concept provides the backdrop for developing time-dependent measures of individual job opportunities based on Swiss Job Monitor data. We link these measures with career data taken from the Swiss Life History Study and employ event history analysis to test different propositions of the ways in which status mobility is contingent on the number and the status of vacant positions. Results support our assumption that in occupationally segmented labor markets vacant positions affect status mobility only to the degree that they are located within workers' occupational mobility chains.
A B S T R AC TWith the rise in women's part-time work in many Western industrialised countries, a better understanding of women's employment decisions necessitates the distinction between different employment levels and varying structural opportunities that facilitate or hinder female employment. This article analyses for Switzerland how structural factors affect women's decisions to work marginal part-time, substantial part-time, full-time or to stay out of the labour force. The analyses are based on the Swiss Labour Force Survey. The logistic regression findings show that labour market and firm-related opportunity structures affect the three types of employment levels differently. They also play a much larger role in the probability of working marginal part-time than in that of working substantial part-time or full-time. K E Y WO R D Sfemale labour force participation / full-time work / labour market segmentation / organisational context / part-time work
In modernen wissensbasierten Gesellschaften ist ein Bildungsabschluss der Sekundarstufe II -in der Folge auch kurz als Sek.
We ask how employers contribute to unemployment scarring in the recruitment process in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. By drawing on recruitment theories, we aim to better understand how recruiters assess different patterns of unemployment in a job candidate’s CV and how this affects the chances of young applicants being considered for a vacancy. We argue that in contexts with tight school-work linkage and highly standardised Vocational Education and Training systems, the detrimental effect of early unemployment depends on how well the applicant’s profile matches the requirements of the advertised position. To test this assumption, we surveyed Swiss recruiters who were seeking to fill positions during the time of data collection. We employed a factorial survey experiment that tested how the (un)employment trajectories in hypothetical young job applicants’ CV affected their chances of being considered for a real vacancy. Our results show that unemployment decreases the perceived suitability of an applicant for a specific job, which implies there is a scarring effect of unemployment that increases with the duration of being unemployed. But we also found that these effects are moderated by how well the applicant’s profile matches the job’s requirements. Overall, the worse the match between applicant’s profile and the job profile, the smaller are the scarring effects of unemployment. In sum, our findings contribute to the literature by revealing considerable heterogeneity in the scarring effects of unemployment. Our findings further suggest that the scarring effects of unemployment need to be studied with regard to country-specific institutional settings, the applicants’ previous education and employment experiences, and the job characteristics.
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