ABSTRACT
The intersection of structural and biographical change is a crucial feature of the differentiation of women’s lives. The analysis of women’s position in society is often considered to be particularly affected by their stage in the life cycle. This chapter will examine that hypothesis in relation to one aspect of women’s position in the labour market. On the one hand it can be argued that women are particularly affected by their stage in the life cycle because of the importance of child birth and child care in their lives. On the other, it can be argued that this overstates the significance of biological events at the expense of the significance of other factors structuring women’s lives. In particular, that there is a problematic tendency to use a’job model’ to explain men’s work patterns and a different one, ‘a gender model’, to explain women’s work patterns (Feldberg and Glenn, 1979). That is, labour market and industrial structures tend to be used to explain patterns in men’s work while domestic events are used to explain patterns in women’s work. The greater tendency to use the life history method in the analysis of women’s as opposed to men’s labour force experience thus may push our understanding of women’s employment in a different direction from that of men to a greater extent than is warranted.
