Women Labour Force In Europe

Introduction

Over the last two decades of accelerated societal modernization in West European countries gender relations have also been modernized. An important part of gender related changes has to do with the gendered division of labour in which females were playing the role of men thus making themselves in cooperated in gender related changes, which in particular is reflected in the general increase in the gainful employment of women in these countries. (n1) However European women cannot be said to have shared common patterns in the life course over dais period. As early as the 1950s, the proportion of women who participated in the labour force differed considerably, and took distinctly different avenues (for example the share of women working part-time), between different countries. How can such differences in the development of women's labour force participation and in working time patterns are explained, and how can this be theorized?

The most common line of argument is that national welfare state policy is decisive in structuring women's participation in the labour market. They are indeed no doubt that institutional conditions are of substantial importance for the employment behaviour of women (Crompton, 1998 and this issue). Nevertheless, the explanatory power of dais approach for understanding differential national gendered divisions of labour remains limited, I would argue, just because of this focus on the welfare state and its policies. This is partly because the assumptions about the impact of state policies on the behaviour of individuals are too deterministic.

There are in principle two variations to this argument. In the first variant, the behaviour of women is seen as an immediate response to the policies of the state. Women are treated as rational individuals who orient their behaviour according to financial incentives (for example Gustafsson, 1997 p 10). However, the employment behaviour of women cannot be explained as a simple reaction to the policies of the welfare state in that the behaviour of individuals also refers to cultural values and norms (see also Hakim, 1996). Thus Duncan and Edwards (1997) argue that women also act according to ' gendered moral rationalities' where priorities differ according to socially derived notions of what is most 'rational' defined in moral terms. According to the second variant, which is more common in feminist discourse, women in general want to gain autonomy through employment, and therefore in general are oriented towards lifelong full-time employment. In this view other choices, for example part-time work, an employment break or unpaid family work, are seen as caused by institutional restrictions, and these choices are therefore only second best (for example Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993 p 78). However, the assumption that there is a homogeneous pattern of actions and orientations for women, with respect to family and waged work, throughout all of Western Europe does not seem very plausible.

Rather, we must examine the idea that the social practice of women is heavily influenced by predominant norms and values concerning the 'correct' division of labour between both gender s. Therefore it is necessary to systematically include culture--the dimension of societal ideas, meanings and values--into any theoretical framework for the explanation of cross-national differences in the employment patterns of women, ,'rod to theorize and to analyse in which ways culture, structure and action are interrelated. This is the task of this paper. The next sections briefly examine some pre-existing theorizations of differential gender division of labour, and then outline the alternative proposed here. This new theoretical approach is then applied to a comparative analysis of the changing employment patterns of women in Finland, Germany and The Netherlands, and finally some brief conclusions are drawn.

Literature Review

A new theoretical framework for cross-national analysis

In the following section I present a theoretical approach to the explanation of cross-national differences in the employment behaviour of women. This conceptualizes the complex interrelations of culture, structure and action, and also dies dynamic of reproduction when change occurs. It also can be used for the classification of societies (cf. Duncan, 1998 p 12). The argument is based on four basic assumptions (see also Archer, 1996 p 65).

1. In societies there exist long lasting cultural traditions--as well as long-lasting social structures--which are the result of former interaction processes and which have an impact on behaviour.

2. Although there is usually a set of dominant cultural values and ideals, it cannot be assumed that there is cultural 'coherence' hi society. Alternative and competing cultural value systems may exist.

3. Cultural change depends on tile way social actors deal with contradictions and alternatives in value systems, whereas social change is based on the way tensions and contradictions between institutions are dealt with by social actors. Power relations between social actors play an important role here.

4. Cultural change is interconnected with structural change by the behaviour of social actors mid the policies of institutions, but is in parts, also autonomous from it. There may be time lags mid discrepancies hi the development between both levels.

In order to conceptualize the main societal processes which work together to influence women's employment decisions, the levels of culture and structure need to be specified more precisely. I use here the concepts of ' gender culture', ' gender order' mid ' gender arrangement' (see Fig. 1).

In every modern society certain uniform assumptions exist about die desirable, 'correct' form of gender relations and of the division of labour between women mid men. These are institutionalized as norms and therefore remain relatively constant (see Kaufmann, 1989a). I define these norms and values as the gender culture. At different social levels it forms a main reference point for the behaviour of actors--both at the level of institutions (like the welfare state and firms) and at the level of everyday life. Cultural change may be caused by contradictions within the gender culture and/or by the development of new cultural ideals within particular social groups. The development of the gender culture is interrelated with, but is also relatively autonomous from, the gender order. This includes the pertinent structures of gender relationships, as well as the relations between different societal institutions with reference to gender structures. Connell (1987) distinguishes three gender structures, which,