The issue: for whom, when and where has women's labour market attachment increased?

In the second half of the twentieth century, rates of women's employment increased markedly in all the advanced countries. As much research shows, this increase was due mostly to the changed behaviour of married women and mothers. Indeed, work and family have everywhere become more compatible. Compared to their ‘mothers’ and ‘grandmothers’, women belonging to the younger generations have not only entered the labour market on a larger scale, but they have also reduced their exits or shortened their family-care breaks.

Several phenomena have contributed to this remarkable transformation. On the supply side, women have increasingly invested in education, closing the gender gap and in some cases even reversing it. This process has been partly the consequence of the general educational improvement that characterised the post-war cohorts – male and female. In the case of women, however, the democratisation of education had an impact not only on inter-generational/inter-cohort differences but also on gender differences. The feminist movements of the 1960 and 1970s – with their contestation of traditional gender roles and redefinition of gender norms and practices – may be read as both an outcome and an accelerator of this process. Higher investments in education have also increased the opportunity cost of not working, or of withdrawing from the labour force during the family formation phase (Bimbi, 1992; Saraceno, 1992, 1993; Blossfeld and Shavit, 1993; Blossfeld, 1995). In parallel, on the demand side, the growth of service sector employment has expanded women's labour market participation. It has indeed created ‘women's jobs’, with sometimes (for example in the public sector), but not always, family-friendly features, although it has produced gender segregation as well (Gornick and Jacobs, 1998; Mandel and Semyonov, 2006). In some countries, tertiarisation has been accompanied by an expansion of, often deregulated, parttime work, which for women with family responsibilities has offered a way of remaining attached to the labour market, albeit in a marginal and under-protected way. Finally, on the institutional side, the improvement of the social security conditions of part-time work and, above all, the extension of maternity and parental leave programmes and of childcare services, have importantly affected the chances of combining employment with family responsibilities (Sainsbury, 1994a; Gustafsson, 1995; Gornick et al, 1997; Esping-Andersen, 1999; Boje and Leira, 2000; Uunk et al, 2005).