It is often noted that employment rates of females have been rising during the last decades. However, in contrast to men, women are often part-time employed and the allocation of working time over the life-cycle is linked to family formation. In addition, employment rates may differ across skill groups and countries due to differences in incentives to work and in labor market attachment. This paper analyzes empirically macroeconomic trends and life-cycle profiles in full-time and part-time employment of different skill groups of women in the UK and West Germany. The analysis is based on large cross{sectional data sets for a time period of 20 years. We find that patterns of part-time and full-time employment are surprisingly different across skill groups and countries. In particular, the life-cycle patterns are such that full-time employment declines and part-time employment increases with age in both countries. Time trends do not change in a monotonous way across skill groups and they differ by country. There is almost no evidence for a positive time trend in part-time employment thus the strong increase in part-time rates in both countries can mainly be attributed to composition effects. Our findings are based on an empirical model taking the effects of time, age, and birth cohort membership simultaneously into account.

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

In this paper we compare gender differences in the allocation of time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisure over the life cycle. Time use profiles for these activity categories are constructed on survey data for three countries: Australia, the UK and Germany. We discuss the extent to which gender differences and life cycle variation in time use can be explained by public policy, focusing on the tax treatment of the female partner and on access to high quality, affordable child care. Profiles of time use, earnings and taxes are compared over the life cycle defined on age as well as on phases that represent the key transitions in the life cycle of a typical household. Our contention is that, given the decision to have children, life cycle time use and consumption decisions of households are determined by them and by public policy. Before children arrive, the adult members of the household have high labour supplies and plenty of leisure. The presence of pre-school children, in combination with the tax treatment of the second earner's income and the cost of bought-in child care, dramatically change the pattern of time use, leading to large falls in female labour supply. We also highlight the fact that, in the three countries we study, female labour supply exhibits a very high degree of heterogeneity after the arrival of children, and we show that this has important implications for public policy.

Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies

Women's employment is one of the most widely-discussed and often-misunderstood issues of modern society. Are women today oppressed, or do they have the best of both worlds? Do women have to go out to work to gain equality with men, or do they already do more than their share of domestic work, caring work and voluntary work as well as work in the informal economy? Do women seek careers on the same terms as men, or are they content to be dependent wives or secondary earners taking jobs on a short-term basis? How important is job segregation in explaining the 20% pay gap between men and women? Have equal opportunities laws had any real impact? Are women in Europe lagging behind, or are they at the forefront of developments in modern societies? This new updated edition of Catherine Hakim's classic text addresses all the key issues currently debated in relation to women's work - in the domestic sphere, as well as paid employment. Dr Hakim tests the power of patriarchy theory and preference theory against economic theories. Sex discrimination, work-life balance, part-time work, flexible hours, homeworking, career patterns across the life cycle, labour mobility, labour turnover, the returns to education, occupational segregation, the pay gap, the glass ceiling, and the impact of European Union policies are all considered. Analysis of historical developments over the twentieth century, based on censuses, is complemented by case studies of people working in occupations undergoing dramatic change. Throughout the book, comparisons are drawn between the USA, Britain, other European countries, Canada, Australia, and also China, Japan and other Far Eastern societies. The analysis draws on sociology, economics, psychology, labour law, history and social anthropology to conclude that the diversity of women's life goals and lifestyle preferences is increasing. This explains the growing polarisation of women's employment and many contradictory recent research results.