Abstract

YERKES, Mara. Choice or constraint?: Women’s weekly working hours in comparative perspective. Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas [online]. 2013, n.72, pp.9-30. ISSN 0873-6529.  https://doi.org/10.7458/SPP2013722616.

This article analyses the influence of individual working preferences on women’s labour market behaviour in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, addressing the question: to what extent do individual preferences have a causal effect on women’s average weekly working hours? Using longitudinal panel data from all three countries, a fixed-effects model is applied to measure the effect of individual preferences in year t-1 on women’s average weekly working hours in year t. The data is pooled from 1992 to 2002. After controlling for a number of individual, household and job characteristics we see that individual preferences are most influential in the Netherlands. However, the data do not support the idea that choice is more important than constraint because individual, household and job characteristics remain significant. In addition, the results demonstrate that it is important to understand individual preferences within the institutional context. Therefore, within the theoretical and policy debates about women’s labour market participation we must consider possible barriers that hinder women when making labour market “choices”.

Keywords : cross-national comparison; female labour market patterns; longitudinal panel data; working preferences.

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