Are Gender Roles Decisive? The Impact of Country-Specific Gender Cultures on Women’s Working Time

Abstract

In the last decade in Germany as well as other countries, measures have been taken to increase women’s participation in the labour market (such as well-paid parental leave and an increase in childcare institutions). Although the female employment rate has been substantially increasing in Germany, women’s working hours have been fairly stable. Against this background, the objective of this article is to identify those parameters that affect women’s working time. On the basis of the European Social Survey, we compared the actual working hours of women in the EU 27 and developed a multilevel model that enabled us to observe potential determinants on both the macro and the micro levels at the same time. On the micro level we controlled for education, household situation, and workplace characteristics, and on the macro level for sociostructural and family policy differences. Building on Pfau-Effinger’s theory of gender cultures, we additionally modelled a variable “gender culture” and had it interact with macro structural variables. Our results show that the impact of family-friendly measures, such as the use of childcare institutions and flexible working hours, is indeed influenced by a country’s gender culture. We conclude from this that political and firm-level measures to better integrate women into the labour market and, in particular, to increase the working time of women can be fully effective only if they are supported by the roles and family models prevailing in a society.