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This chapter presents a cross-national portrait of gender equality in the labor market in the early 1990s, based on Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data from fifteen countries. Cross-country comparisons are analyzed in the context of variation both across, and within, the three welfare state regime types that have dominated recent theoretical and empirical scholarship on the welfare state. The social democratic welfare states are represented in this analysis by Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden; the conservative (or corporatist) welfare states, by Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain; and the liberal (or residual) welfare states include, here, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The question as to whether these three regime types shape gendered labor market outcomes - in other words, the extent to which variation across the regime types is greater than variation within them - anchors the presentation of empirical findings. In the next section, three central concerns about the meaning of gender equality in the labor market are raised, and resolutions discussed. The following section traces major trends in gendered labor market patterns since 1960. Two subsequent sections present empirical results for the 1990s on gender differences across various labor market outcomes. Policy implications are presented in the final section, followed by conclusions.

Contents -- About the Authors -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction: The Conflicts Between Earning and Caring -- Chapter 2. The Changing American Family and the Problem of Private Solutions -- Chapter 3. The United States in Cross-National Perspective: Are Parents and Children Doing Better Elsewhere? -- Chapter 4. Reconciling the Conflicts: Toward a Dual-Earner-Dual-Carer Society -- Chapter 5. Ensuring Time to Care During the Early Years: Family Leave Policy -- Chapter 6. Strengthening Reduced-Hour Work: Regulation of Working Time

The story of the overworked American parent is by now well-known. Every day, millions of American parents—single and partnered, low-income and affluent—scramble to coordinate the demands of employment with their children's need for care and supervision. In the majority of families in the United States, all the adults are in the workforce, more often than not working full time. It is not surprising that the stressed-out working parent is now a staple in multiple venues, from social science research to newspaper opinion columns to TV-land. As Kathleen Gerson pointed out in these pages last year ("The Morality of Time: Women and the Expanding Work Week," Fall 2004), the common wisdom in the United States generally lays the responsibility for the work—family time bind on individuals and lets American institutional realities off the hook. Conservatives typically focus on mothers, protesting that many (middle-class and well-off) women are choosing paid work over family, indulging themselves while leaving their children and husbands unattended. (Poor single mothers, of course, have long been exempted from this criticism, as they are expected to work for pay.) And many progressives, Gerson argues, have not helped matters, too often attributing Americans' notoriously long work hours to their ever-expanding desire for consumption or their preference for the effects-oriented workplace over the strains and uncertainties of life at home. But, in fact, the American institutional landscape deserves much of the blame. Many workplaces are still designed for workers who have no competing responsibilities, and the paucity of public policies that support working families can hardly be overstated. As Marcia Meyers and I argue in our book—Families That Work—the American state provides much less to working parents than do many other countries, especially the high-income countries of northern and western Europe.

Rather than identify individual causes for American parents' difficulties in managing the work-family time nexus, it is contended that institutional shortcomings are responsible for American adult's feelings of being overworked & not possessing sufficient time to cultivate family relations. A brief comparison of European & US labor initiatives indicate that European workers possess substantially more instruments for negotiating work- & family-related demands. The problems created by forcing American adults to seek private solutions to meeting work & family-oriented duties are then highlighted. It is subsequently demonstrated that the American work ethic has not resolved workplace gender inequality nor provided substantial benefits to children. Even though American families enjoy relative high standards of living, it is shown that high standard of living does not equate familial well-being. In addition, factors that have prevented American adults from mobilizing to support workplace changes are identified, eg, many Americans are unaware of effective work-family time management programs in foreign nations. J. W. Parker

In the past two decades, many researchers have used the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data to analyze women's economic status, or economic gender inequality, across the industrialized countries. Researchers concerned with labor market outcomes have concluded that (1) women's labor market status lags behind men's in nearly every LIS country & time period; (2) motherhood is a consequential factor nearly everywhere; while parenthood typically has little effect (or a positive effect) on men's employment rates & earnings, it weakens women's everywhere; (3) against this backdrop of commonality, gendered outcomes vary dramatically across countries; & (4) variation in policies, or policy packages, explains a substantial share of the observed variation in outcomes. Researchers focused on poverty have found that (1) in several countries, post-tax-&-transfer poverty is more prevalent among women than men, mothers compared with fathers, & female-headed households relative to male-headed households; (2) solo mothers everywhere face a heightened risk of low income &/or poverty, especially in the English-speaking countries; (3) across the LIS countries, single elderly women are also at heightened risk, with the US standing out as an extreme case; & (4) cross-national variation in tax-&-transfer policies explains a large share of variation in post-tax-&-transfer income. 1 Table, 2 Figures, 60 References. Adapted from the source document.