The ILO Concept Measuring Parental Leave Across Countries.

The labour market status of women, in particular whether they are economically active and employed, is an important indicator of their life chances. Country-specific women's employment rates tell us about the economic dependence of women on other family members, serving as one of the indicators of gender equality. Clearly, the validity of conclusions drawn from comparing countries depends on the quality and comparability of data. In this paper we focus on the situation of women in parental leave in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and show that, for this group of women, the comparability of the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) labour market status variable is limited. According to the classical approach, the conditions of employment and non-employment can be easily distinguished. A housewife or house husband, i.e. persons who earn no income and devote their time to home and family, is obviously not employed. Persons who spend eight hours each day in a factory or in an office and get their wage are clearly employed. How, however, should we classify a formally employed person who, during a period of considerable length, does not perform any occupation-related tasks and receives money from the social security system? This is, for instance, the situation of women on parental leave. Our article analyses how parental leave beneficiaries are classified in the labour market status variable in the EU-LFS in 2008. Are they considered employed or inactive? In concrete terms, we analyse recommendations and instructions regarding the core EU-LSF labour market variables used to derive the labour market status variable in 2008, and we check how they are implemented in two selected countries (the Czech Republic and Slovakia). We report the differences found that might lead to potential inconsistency in the categorization of parental leave beneficiaries across Europe, which raises questions regarding the cross-country comparability of the labour market status variable.