Gender inequalities in employment are also expressed through the horizontal and vertical segregation of the labour market. Horizontal segregation concentrates men and women in certain kinds of employment and jobs based on a cultural and social attribution that considers them ‘male’ or ‘female’ positions. This horizontal segregation is also complemented with a vertical segregation, where authority or decision-making posts are mainly male.
Employment
The current economic structure favours paid work, making it less compatible with other areas of life such as domestic, care and affection-based work; that is, work allocated to household maintenance and care, and which frequently falls to women.
The lack of co-responsibility in domestic work between men and women has been forcing many women to opt for part-time work or reduced working days. On the other hand, gender inequalities have also been occurring in paid work which affect labour conditions: women are subject to more precarious forms of employment, denied participation in decision-taking and rarely given positions of responsibility. This ends up shaping the existence of the gender pay gap, a further indicator of the inequality between men and women in the paid-work market.
The sexual division of work, that is, the division of paid work and domestic and care work between men and women, creates inequalities. In the labour market, such inequality is expressed in several spheres such as higher unemployment rates for women. This contributes towards the feminisation of poverty and also affects the conditions women reach their retirement in.