ABSTRACT
The increasing labour market participation of women, changing family forms and the demographic pressure from an ageing population have made the reconciliation of work and family one of the major topics of the European social agenda. The male breadwinner model, with the gendered division of paid and unpaid work, no longer describes the behaviour of a significant proportion of families. Rather, the adult worker model, in which it is assumed that each adult participates in the labour market according to his or her abilities, serves as a normative framework, inspiring both the labour market behaviour of individual men and women as well as the policy measures at the national and international levels (Lewis 2001; Lewis and Giullari 2005).
