We are grateful to Tim Smeeding and Lee Rainwater for their generous guidance and support in the development of the new policy database. We would also like to thank Sheila Kamerman for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In addition, we would like to express our appreciation to the country representatives who so generously gave us their time and expertise; their names are listed in Appendix 6. SUMMARYDespite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns of mothers' employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy "packages", these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions.The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined.The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women's labor market attachment. Prior findings on women's labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers' employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family polic...

Parental leave laws can support new parents in two complementary ways: by offering jobprotected leave and by offering financial support during that leave. This study assesses the design of parental leave policies operating in 21 high-income countries. Specifically, the study analyzes how these countries vary with respect to the generosity of their parental leave policies; the extent to which their policy designs are gender egalitarian; and the ways in which these two crucial dimensions are inter-related. The study finds that public policies in all 21 study countries protect at least one parent's job for a period of weeks, months, or years following the birth or adoption of a child. The availability and generosity of wage replacement varies widely, as does the gendered nature of policy designs. Four countries stand out as having policies that are both generous and gender egalitarian: Finland, Norway, Sweden and -unexpectedly -Greece.

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I Abstract New state and market arrangements were twice imposed on the residents of the eastern part of Germany, once when Germany was divided in 1949 and again when it was reunified in 1990; these changes produced a unique natural experiment concerning the effect of policies and institutions on the gendered nature of work. This review synthesizes research on gender equality in paid and unpaid work in East versus West Germany during the decades immediately preceding and following reunification. We consider empirical evidence on gender equality in five major dimensions of work: the prevalence of labor market attachment, time spent in paid work, wages, employment sector and occupation, and time spent in unpaid work in the home. Taken together, developments across these dimensions suggest that, following reunification, the two parts of the country converged toward the gendered arrangement in which men are employed full-time and their female partners hold part-time jobs-with some evidence of continuing differences between East and West. * Rachel A. Rosenfeld died on November 24, 2002. This article is dedicated to her memory.

This paper investigates wage gaps between part- and full-time women workers in six OECD countries in the mid-1990s. Using comparable micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), for Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US, the paper first assesses cross-national variation in the direction, magnitude, and composition of the part-time/full-time wage differential. Then it analyzes variations across these countries in occupational segregation between part- and full-time workers. The paper finds a part-time wage penalty among women workers in all countries, except Sweden. Other than in Sweden, occupational differences between part- and full-time workers dominate the portion of the wage gap that is explained by observed differences between the two groups of workers. Across countries, the degree of occupational segregation between female part- and full-time workers is negatively correlated with the position of part-time workers' wages in the full-time wage distribution.Female labor supply, part-time employment, wage differentials, JEL codes: J21, J24, J31,

In this article, we describe the social and economic changes that have contributed to contemporary problems of work-family conflict, gender inequality, and risks to children's healthy development. We draw on feminist welfare state scholarship to outline an institutional arrangement that would support an earner-carer society-a social arrangement in which women and men engage symmetrically in paid work and unpaid caregiving and where young children have ample time with their parents. We present a blueprint for work-family reconciliation policies in three areas-paid family-leave provisions, working-time regulations, and early childhood education and care-and we identify key policy design principles. We describe and assess these work-family reconciliation policies as they operate in six European countries widely considered to be policy exemplars: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and France. We close with an analysis of potential objections to these policies.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in A Comparative Study of Seven Industrialized Countries AbstractThis paper explores the influence of government employment on the gender gap in earnings in seven countries, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). We raise and answer four questions about the effects of public sector employment on the gender gap in earnings. (1) Do governments offer jobs that are comparatively high paying? (2) Does public employment benefit some workers, such as low-paid workers, more than others? (3) Are public sector employment advantages explained by differences in worker characteristics and the occupational mix? (4) Finally, what is the effect of public employment --its extent and its pay structure --on gender gaps in earnings? The results indicate marked variation across liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare states, but reveal a number of uniformities as well. We find that public-sector workers earn more, on average, than those working in the private sector in most countries in our sample, and most earnings advantages are concentrated on the lower end of the earnings distribution. Generally, a large share of the public/private earnings differential --especially in the social democratic and conservative countries --is explained by sectoral differences in worker characteristics and occupation. The effect of public employment on the overall gender gap in earnings is limited in most countries. We discuss the implications of these results for theory and research on gender and the welfare state.

Parental time investments in children are essential inputs in children's present and future well-being. The ability of parents to make choices about child care time that are free from money and time constraints varies considerably, however, by employment status and country. We use nationally representative time diary data from nine countries with different gendered working time regimes to investigate how employment hours influence child care time, and whether parents in countries with high maternal employment rates, long work hours among mothers and fathers, and limited family policies have a deficit in child care time. We instead find that child care hours are lowest among French and Swedish mothers, and among French fathers, countries with relatively high parental employment rates but also short work hour cultures. We document a range of employment penalties on child care time among employed mothers and fathers in English-speaking countries and Slovenia, and smaller or no penalties among parents in the Netherlands and Nordic countries. Findings suggest employment associations with child care are not only mediated by gendered work hour cultures, but also culturally distinct parenting ideologies.