Sociologies (Feb 2017)
Les femmes et le chômage
Abstract
While observing the implantation of women in the labor force, we notice the weak visibility of women's unemployment. Therefore we propose a gendered analysis of the experiences of unemployment, based on a qualitative fieldwork lead by in-depth interviews. We begin by highlighting a close proximity in the ways in which men and women face unemployment. In this sense there is no "gendered unemployment". Then, we focus on unemployed women. We explore the heterogeneity of meanings invested in this condition, and we identify two sources of variation for these experiences. The first one refers to inequalities in the opportunities for getting a job, and it is orthogonal to gender attributes. The second one reflects the gendered distribution of domestic roles, but its effects are limited when unemployed women have specific resources such as training, family support for career aspirations or for childcare.
