Knowledge Society and Gender Mainstreaming
The aim of this project is to analyse recent trends in the service sector with a special focus on the challenges of the Information technology and to evaluate how these have and will shape the gender mainstreaming of the European employment strategy in selected European countries and Iceland.
Description
The research question driving this project, financed by the EU in the framework of the TSER, is whether the European social models are moving away from an emphasis on welfare/workfare towards know(ledge)fare as a response to growing global competition, technological development (IT) and changing employment, familly relations as well as pressures from social actors. Knowfare refers to the strategy of Lifelong learning involvind educational and vocational programmes designed to help people acquire and update the skills needed to cope with economic and social changes (skill-improvement) while workfare is used to describe policies aiming at the maximum integration of the labour force into the labour market-
An interdisciplinary and a comparative set of methods will be used to develop socio-economic models that address this research question. Case studies in selected countries will be carried out in order to gahter information on how recent trends in the service sector are affecting men?s and women?s employment opportunities on the one hand, and people?s opportunities to reconcile work and familly life on the other hand. The focus of these case studies will be on job opportunities and life long learning strategies as well as on leave arrangements, working hours and flexible working arrangements. Moreover, evidence (discourse, policies and statistics) will be collected at the macro level in order to evaluate the extent to which EEA is moving towards the Knowledge-based society and whether this trend challenges or enforcing certain development trajectories as concern employment and familly relations, e.g. a move away from the male breadwinner model to the dual breadwinner model. The study will also highlight divergence across countries and its implication for the EU.