ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an inventory of what is being done, in terms of analyses, research and debates about women’s place on the labour market in Europe. Analyses of women’s place in the labour market are nothing new, of course. The chapter looks at the issue have evolved enormously since the 1960s, however, no doubt because the socio-economic context of the 1990s is so different from that thirty years before. The issue of work-sharing in times of labour shortage is very different from an era when it is jobs that are in short supply. On the highly controversial issue of private services, the combination of sociological, historical and philosophical approaches has succeeded in breaking with technocratic debates on the importance and limits of these allegedly new sources of jobs. Approaching the problem as an issue of democracy reintroduces a historical perspective.
