Introduction

Labour market inequalities present themselves in various forms, and stratification in the labour market happens by gender, race, class and sexual orientation, inter alia. Despite these divergences, men and women generally still tend to find themselves in different positions within the labour market. Women tend to be employed in lower-quality jobs, they earn less than men and they are under-represented in positions of power. How they decide to engage with the labour market has been widely studied, although the debates related to these differences have often been discussed within the narrowly defined notions of work used in the traditional economics literature and textbooks that first introduce these concepts (Feiner & Roberts 1990).

Feminist political economists take a broader view of work, including the unwaged or unpaid care work that is predominantly performed by women, and view the labour market as a gendered institution that is characterized by unequal power relations and structures of constraint. They additionally highlight the important role unpaid care work plays in the reproduction of the productive economy, which is underpinned by a continuous labour supply, and uses it as a tool for understanding women’s, marginalized and racial minority groups’ subordinate positioning in the labour market. Discussing the labour market from a feminist perspective, this chapter is structured as follows: section 7.2 discusses work on a continuum, challenging the dualistic tendencies used to describe work in the economy. Section 7.3 discusses topics widely studied within mainstream texts, human capital development and the gender wage gap. However, this section approaches these topics from a feminist political economy approach and highlights the shortcomings in how these topics have been thought and written about in traditional texts. Section 7.4 discusses segmentation in the labour market, juxtaposing feminist approaches with established ways of thinking about segmentation. Section 7.5 introduces time use inequality as a key source of disparity in paid labour, while section 7.6 takes a feminist approach to interventions that are typically employed to address inequalities in the paid labour market. Section 7.7 looks at changes that are inevitable in the labour market and the implications these changes are having and are likely to have for women and other minorities in the future, while section 7.8 discusses gender inequalities in the labour market in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.