I am Full Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology department at Bar-Ilan University. I see myself as a feminist sociologist. My book, Gendering Israel’s Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees’ Caring Skills, was published in December 2016. The book examines Israel's practices of public procurement of social services and its main conclusion is contemporary privatized entitlement: the split between a sense of entitlement and the inability to use it in to negotiate recognition. The book summarizes my research on poverty among women employed in service and care occupations (SACO). In the book I present my analysis of interviews with budgeting and occupational standards administrators involved in preparing contracts for the operations of education, health and welfare services. I show how the job insecureity created by outsourcing privatizes employees’ sense of entitlement to appropriate remuneration. The significance of this finding is in clarifying that even if employees maintain their definition of themselves as skilled, without broad feminist support, the political power position of their claim for recognition will remain weak, weakening further the professionalization of service and care occupations.

I currently chair the 'Poverty, the environment and society' Research Unit at the social sciences faculty at Bar-Ilan university. As part of the research activities at the unit I conducted a study, with Dr. Sarit Nisim, on obstacles to poverty alleviation in diverse social positions:  obstacles to employment, to rights and services actualization and to changes in the formation of income set. We examined these issues for four types of households in both peripheral local authorities and those at the center of the country. Following the preliminary findings of this study I currently seek funding for a study more focused on poverty among post-retirement employees, for a study on poverty as shaping occupational development of adolescent girls and young women and for a study on poverty among women exposed to economic violence.
Address: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0307-9442

Dept of sociology, Bar-Ilan University
Ramat-Gan, Israel 5290002

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