Family Policy, Women's Access to Paid Work and Decommodification

In this dissertation I present a new analytical approach to the study of women's employment. Using data on 18 OECD countries from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), I model cross-national variation in "the gap" between women's orientations toward work and family and their employment trajectories over the life course.;In the first chapter I examine whether the effects of childcare-related provisions, labor market conditions, and other factors on mothers' employment trajectories are moderated by their work-family orientations. I distinguish among women with "domestic" and "careerist" orientations, who appear to prioritize homemaking and a career respectively, and a third group of women with "adaptive" orientations, who believe that mothers should reduce their labor force involvement or withdraw from the labor force entirely when their children are young. Women's work-family orientations are not simply a rationalization of the current structure of opportunities and constraints in the environment, as is apparent from the large orientations-employment gaps in many countries. In the main set of analyses in this chapter, I treat mothers' work-family orientations as fixed.;I find that the effects of childcare-related provisions and characteristics of the labor market in different countries are highly contingent on mothers' work-family orientations and that mothers generally strive to minimize disagreement between their orientations and actual behavior.;Even though mothers exhibit a remarkable degree of agency in formulating strategies for the reconciliation of work and family responsibilities, family policy regimes in different countries still have important implications for women's emancipation. In the second chapter I examine variation in the size of the orientations-employment gap between and within countries as a means to assess the emancipatory potential of family policies, broadly defined, in the extent to which they support mothers' access to paid work (Orloff 1993) and decommodification (Esping-Andersen 1990).;The typology of family policy regimes suggested by the results from my second dissertation chapter differs in several important respects from the broad picture offered by previous research. First, I find evidence of tension between the very active involvement of the state in supporting (careerist) women's choice to work in the Scandinavian countries and women's decommodification, as illustrated by the large numbers of domestic and adaptive women with young children who are employed in these countries. As suggested by the large gaps between domestic and adaptive women's work-family orientations and employment behavior, however, the Scandinavian countries have ensured women's high levels of labor force involvement not only by supporting work-centered women's full-time employment, but by inducing home-centered and adaptive women to work when their children are young. I hypothesize that features of public policy such as individual taxation systems in which the (usually male) breadwinner's earnings are taxed at a higher rate than those of the second earner (Sainsbury 1999) and work-related conditions that are attached to the receipt of unemployment insurance and social assistance (Andersen 2010) serve as incentives for mothers to enter the labor market.;While the Scandinavian countries are characterized by both their strong support for (careerist) women's choice to work and domestic and adaptive mothers' high levels of labor force involvement, only the latter feature distinguishes the Scandinavian countries from the other countries. A second major approach to supporting women's employment can be identified in Britain and the United States, where there is greater emphasis on demand side measures and reliance on the private sector and the family in the provision of child care. Even in many countries whose family policies are designed around a "male breadwinner" family model, including Austria and Germany in Continental Europe, the gap between careerist women's work-family orientations and employment trajectories is relatively small. However, while countries adopt distinct strategies in supporting women's choice to work, each strategy carries unique costs.;In the third chapter I examine the influence of a wide range of "person-level" factors such as work orientations, human capital characteristics, and family background factors on American women's employment trajectories using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. The first critical juncture in women's labor market careers occurs in the period following the completion of (or a pause in) schooling and preceding childbirth, during which time most women embark on a male-type employment pattern of continuous full-time employment ("careerist" and "steady withdrawal" women) or work part-time ("adaptive" and "domestic" women). The caretaking responsibilities and financial demands that accompany the birth of the first child constitutes the second critical juncture in women's lives and cause further branching in women's work histories. An important question that I ask is whether the same factors explain divergences in women's employment in the period following the completion of schooling and after childbirth. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).