Conclusions

Abstract

Much research on women’s working lives has been founded on the assumption that more paid work for women is the key to women’s liberation and gender equality. A large body of cross-national comparative work, including studies comparing Britain and France, has concluded that policy environments play a key role in the nature and extent of women’s participation in the labour market, and hence are influential in engendering progress in gender relations. In this book, however, we have argued that equating progress in gender relations with women’s position in the labour force alone is to only look at part of the story: it ignores women’s position in unpaid work and the impact of policy environments, or their absence, on this area of women’s working lives.