The prolonged career break around childbirth is one of the reasons behind large motherhood penalties in terms of pay and employment opportunities. We aim to understand what is driving the duration of career break in Italy, where it often remains longer than the five-month obligatory maternity...

Unlike in many other transition countries, where the gender pay gap has remained stable while female employment rates have reduced, in the case of Belarus women' activity rate has been practically unchanged despite an increase in the gender pay gap. This paper investigates why this is the case...

This paper suggests an analytical framework to analyse the joint evolution of female participation and wages across countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU), of which Belarus is a particular case. In CEE, female participation has reduced relatively more...