Gender and Precarious Work Anna Paraskevopoulou Contents Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Methodology .................................................................................. 3 Defining “Precarious” ............................................................................ 3 Focusing on Gender: Theoretical Approaches ............................................... 6 The Rise of Precarious Work and Its Main Drivers .......................................... 7 Gender and Precarious Work ..................................................................... 8 Informal/Undeclared Work and Hidden Employment ....................................... 10 Intersectional Approach to Precarity .......................................................... 11 Skills ........................................................................................... 12 Policy Implications ............................................................................... 13 Summary .......................................................................................... 14 Cross-References ................................................................................. 15 References ........................................................................................ 15 Abstract Precarious work and gender is a relatively underexplored topic. Understanding why women are disproportionately affected by precarious work is an integral part of the overall discussion on the position of women in the labor market and in the society as a whole. The main aim of the chapter is to explore some of the issues that particularly affect women in low skilled jobs by focusing on the more disadvantaged groups of migrant and undocumented migrant workers. This discussion is based on secondary data consisting of policy documents, research project reports, and academic books and journal articles. There is brief focus on three thematic areas: informal work; an intersectional approach to women’ s precarity; and last but not least, the question of skills. The three themes have been selected because they interact with one another and they also cover some of A. Paraskevopoulou (*) Faculty of Business and Law, HROB, School of Management, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: anna.paraskevopoulou@anglia.ac.uk © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. F. Zimmermann (ed.), Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_30-1 1