Institutionalizing Women's Employment: Understanding Cross-National Variation in Women's Work

Becky Pettit, University of Washington
Jennifer L. Hook, University of Washington

One of the most dramatic social transformations of the latter half of the twentieth century involved the massive influx of women into the paid labor force. The large scale movement of women into wage labor after World War II has occurred in every OECD country, although the rate of growth in women's entry into the labor force and rates of female employment vary substantially across nations. In this paper we examine women's employment in 18 OECD countries between 1974 and 1999. We analyze social survey data from a large number of countries using multilevel modeling methods. We examine labor force participation within countries along demographic and economic lines, and we investigate how the relationship between female employment and the structural features of labor markets depend on the institutional context by incorporating specific information about institutional arrangements over-time and across countries. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of both structural and institutional arguments for women's involvement in the paid labor force and helps clarify our understanding of cross-national variation in measures of gender equity at the close of the century.