ABSTRACT
Employment Profiles ! Is it true that women's attachment to work is increasing in leaps and bounds? This is certainly the impression given by contemporary research reports on women's employment, and by the European Commission (2002). Work attachment refers to continuity of employment over a period of years, or across the life cycle, and is measured at the individual level and longitudinally. It is thus quite different, and separate, from economic activity rates which are measured in aggregate data, usually at the national level and at a single point in time, using cross-sectional data (see Chapters 2 and 3). Studies of individual work histories routinely conclude that women's continuity of employment, or attachment to work, has been increasing in recent decades (Martin and Roberts, 1984:187; Main, 1988a). Unfortunately, this is a one-sided and misleading reading of the evidence (Hakim, 1996c). The pattern of women's employment across the life cycle has certainly been changing, but not as yet in the direction of greater work attachment in Britain, although this is certainly a trend in the USA, and among the minority of childless women in modern societies. Within Europe, the British pattern of change is more common than the USA model.
