ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of internationally comparative empirical study, which in detail analyses the causes of country-specific differences with respect to the development of women's labour force participation and their working time models in recent decades. It explains the changes in the country-specific labour force participation rates and part-time rates of women from the 1960s until 2001 represent the dependent variable, whose variation in comparison to other countries. The chapter demonstrates how women's labour force participation has changed in the context of the complex interactions of culture, institutions, social structures, and social behaviour and what the decisive conditions for country-specific differences of this development were. It analyses the results of empirical studies of the respective countries that deals with the question of how the picture of the development of female labour force participation rates changes when all groups of employed women are included in the analysis that is also those who are only insufficiently covered by the statistics.
