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Cross-national studies of the impact of welfare states on gender inequality tend to overlook socioeconomic divisions among women. This paper challenges the implicit assumption that welfare states have uniform effects on the labour market attainments of all women, arguing that the impact of state intervention is necessarily conditioned by women's relative advantage or disadvantage in the labour market. Based on micro-datasets from 21 advanced countries, the findings suggest that welfare state policies interact with socioeconomic position in determining women's economic rewards, tending to penalize highly skilled women while benefiting the less-skilled. Highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of social policies in light of the particular groups they benefit, as well as their implications for other groups, the paper concludes that more research is needed to explore differentiated approaches to reconciling work and family, rather than addressing universal work-family tensions.

This paper focuses on cross-national differences in patterns of gender economic inequality, revealing their affinity to both welfare state policies and prevailing conceptions of gender equality. By mapping multiple aspects of inequality and assembling them into distinctive profiles, the paper shows that each pattern of state intervention is accompanied by an uneven record of achievements and failures in promoting gender equality. These tradeoffs can best be understood by placing them in the ideological contexts in which gender-related policies are embedded. Empirical illustrations are provided for four countries - Sweden, the USA, Germany and Italy - in each of which both the welfare state and the pattern of gender stratification are qualitatively distinct. Data are presented on labor force participation, women's placement in the occupational and wage hierarchies, their economic wellbeing, and their autonomy from male partners.

Individuals who espouse an egalitarian gender ideology as well as economically independent women benefit from a more egalitarian division of housework. Although these two individual-level characteristics affect the gender division of housework, each suggests a different mechanism; the former is anchored within an economic logic and the latter within a cultural one. Using data of 25 countries from the 2002 and 2012 "Family and Changing Gender Roles" modules of the International Social Survey Program, we examine whether a country's mean gender ideology and women's labor force participation (WLFP) rate have a distinct contextual effect beyond these individual-level effects. We predict that the division of housework between married or cohabitating partners will be more egalitarian in countries with higher WLFP rates and in countries with more egalitarian attitudes, even after controlling for the two variables at the individual level. Given the cross-country convergence in WLFP, but not in gender ideology, we expect the effect of WLFP to decline over time and the effect of gender ideology to remain salient. Indeed, our multi-level analysis indicates that the net effect of WLFP, which was evident in 2002, had disappeared by 2012. By contrast, the net contextual effect of gender ideology, which was not significant in 2002, had become an important determinant of housework division by 2012. We conclude that further changes will depend on a country's prevalent gender ideology because the equalizing effect of WLFP on the division of housework may have reached its limit.

The present study examines whether and to what extent welfare-family policies are likely to affect earnings inequality between economically active men and women. Using hierarchical linear models, we combine individual-level variables (obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study) with country level data (obtained from secondary sources) to evaluate the net effects of welfare family policies on gender earnings inequality across 20 industrialized countries. The analysis reveals that net of individual-level characteristics, gender-earnings disparities are likely to be less pronounced in states characterized by developed welfare-family policies. However, when differences in the earnings structure across countries are controlled and eliminated, we find that family policies do not exert a significant net effect on earnings disparities between men and women. The apparent insignificant effect is a result of two opposite effects that offset one another. Specifically, the narrowing effect of family policy on gender earnings inequality is offset by the opposite effect of gender based occupational segregation. These findings clearly expose the unintended implications of 'protective' family policies, namely, a more gender segregated labor market, and its detrimental implications for earnings inequality between men and women. The contradictory effects of welfare-state policies on gender earnings inequality are discussed and evaluated in light of sociological theories on the role of welfare policies in contemporary societies.

The present study examines the hypotheses that progressive welfare-state policies are likely to increase women's labor force participation, but at the same time to increase both occupational segregation and earning gaps between economically active men and women. Using data from 20 industrialized countries (obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study), we combine both individual-level and country-level variables into one data file. The country-level variables pertain to a series of family oriented policies enacted by the state, and to the size of the public welfare sector. The data are analyzed to estimate the net effects of welfare state policies on female labor force participation, occupational segregation, and gender earnings inequality across the 20 countries. The analysis lends firm support to the hypothesis that progressive welfare policies are associated with higher rates of female labor force participation and with higher rates of gender-based occupational segregation but only limited support to the hypothesis that welfare-policies are likely to decrease gender inequality in earnings. The direct and indirect effects of welfare-state policies on earnings inequality obtained from multilevel regression models are discussed and re-evaluated in light of sociological theory.

AbstractThe topic of gender blindness is increasingly gaining the attention of researchers. Even in fields that do not commonly engage with gender, gender blindness has been recognized as a factor that has potential to limit the validity of research findings. This article explores the prevalence and implications of gender blindness in quantitative research for political science outcomes. We first reanalyze three articles recently published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) to illustrate the impact of gender blindness on quantitative research. Next, we classify all articles with quantitative methodology published in the AJPS in 2018 and 2019 by the degree of gender blindness in the research design. Our findings demonstrate how gender blindness impacts outcomes and estimate its prevalence in political science. They show that accounting for gender yields more accurate results and facilitates a better understanding of political behavior and phenomena.