Women’s work-family trajectories and earnings by ethno-religious groups in Israel: More equality in the public sector?

The public sector is often seen as a “sheltered” labor market that is more accessible, more family-friendly, and provides more equal pay for men and women, and across ethnoreligious groups compared to the private sector. The public sector is especially crucial for women and ethno-religious minorities in a country like Israel, which is a highly unequal, residentially and occupationally strongly segregated society that has been described as an “ethnocracy”. Adopting a life course perspective, we examine ethnoreligious differences in the interplay between work and family life trajectories, with a focus on how employment sectors shape these experiences. Specifically, we investigate how public and private sector careers interact with family formation patterns and potentially enhance or mitigate ethno-religious disparities in career stability and accumulated earnings. The analyses use sequence and cluster analyses, regression methods, and newly available administrative data from the Israeli census and tax registers to show three key findings: 1) Ultraorthodox, Christian, Druze and Muslim women are substantially less likely to enter stable private sector careers compared to third generation Jewish Israeli women, irrespective of their family lives; 2) access to public sector careers combined with marriage and motherhood is far more equal compared to private sector careers across ethno-religious groups; 3) ethno-religious gaps in accumulated earnings are small in public sector careers and large in private sector careers.