ABSTRACT
Analyses of women's place in the labour market are nothing new, of course. The ways we look 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. Women's growing labour force participation has not been stopped by the employment crisis and its massive, lasting, structural nature. Thus, the labour market has been inexorably feminising since the 1960s, yet the processes by which gender inequalities are produced remain in place. 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. Systematic use of international comparisons serves as a method for situating gender inequalities within their different societal contexts.
