An Intersectional Approach towards Parental Employment in Families with a Child with a Disability: The Case of Belgium

Julie Vinck and Wim Van Lancker
Additional contact information
Julie Vinck: University of Antwerp, Belgium

Work, Employment & Society, 2020, vol. 34, issue 2, 228-261

Abstract: For parents with disabled children labour market participation is difficult since these children require care that exceeds typical parental care. At the same time, disabled children often live in families who belong to social categories that are associated with lower employment probabilities. However, the intersection between disability and social categories is hitherto overlooked in the literature. Drawing on a case study of Belgium, this article empirically examines to what extent parental employment is explained by the child’s disability and/or the family’s social disadvantages. For this, unique and large-scale register data are used. The results show that (1) childhood disability overlapped with social disadvantages; (2) childhood disability inhibited parental employment; but (3) the relationship differed by social category: for single parents, parents with low educational qualifications, and parents having multiple disabled children, disability and social disadvantage reinforced each other.

Keywords: activation; childhood disability; intersectionality; parental employment; social category; social disadvantage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017019872648 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:34:y:2020:i:2:p:228-261

DOI: 10.1177/0950017019872648

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().