Flexible work arrangements and intentions of unemployed women: Towards a model development

Abstract

This study extends research on women and employment by exploring the perceptions, attitudes, and intentions of unemployed women towards flexible work arrangements (FWAs). We focus on unemployed women in the far south-eastern EU corner, and use the theory of planned behaviour as a basis to develop and validate empirically, through group interviews and mail questionnaires, a conceptual framework for this research. Through this framework we suggest that the interactions of different factors related to perceived behavioural control, subjective norms, and women's attitudes influence the intentions of women to adopt FWAs and their career aspirations. We find that women's intentions to work under FWAs, and aspirations, differ depending on each FWA as well as the factors relevant to them. Moreover, results show that the institutional and normative characteristics of the southern regime have profound influence on women's actual control of the behaviour, i.e. adopting FWAs, and therefore raise issues for employers and policy-makers, who need to become actively involved in fully integrating women in the labour market.