ABSTRACT
The integration of women into the wage economy over the past decades has represented one of the most profound social and economic changes within European economy and society. This integration has been associated with a restructuring of employment and a reorganisation of work, involving the growth of service employment, more diversified working-time arrangements and new patterns of industrial relations. At the same time women’s integration into wage work has involved a restructuring of household and family life, based on different and more complex patterns of household formation, fertility and social reproduction and with changing patterns of consumption and lifestyles. Too often the study of women’s employment is treated as an area of marginal interest to the core issues of European employment and European social policy, and the linkages between changes in gender relations and changes in economic and social structures are not made. These relationships are twoway: the integration of women into employment shapes the wider economy and society, and changes in women’s employment position is contingent upon the evolving patterns of economic and social conditions.
