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Within the European Employment Strategy benchmarking and learning from good practices are main mechanisms to improve national performance. This is also the case for WLB strategies which are reinforced because of economic reasons to increase employment and population growth. The paper asks for the main criteria for public policies to promote WLB and whether or under which conditions such policies are transferable between the successful Nordic countries and the less successful conservative countries like Austria and Germany. Denmark and Finland are used as ‘good practice’ examples. The analysis shows that childcare leave regulations are an important instrument to encourage mothers for continuous working careers. But the consequences of these regulations concerning employment turn out to be quite different, even in measures with similar orientation. What we can learn from the Nordic countries is that the consistency of welfare state regulations and institutions are an important precondition for a successful WLB. This calls for an interplay of different fields and means that the imbalance of family and work and family reconciliation can hardly be solved by flexible working contracts or longer parental leave possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In European societies there are some differences in the way and extent of women's integration into the labour market due to different economic development, political ideas and cultural traditions. In this paper two countries are compared, namely Finland and Germany, which differ considerably concerning women's employment patterns, employment prospects and their life orientations. While most Finnish women are participants of the labour force in full-time jobs, the working pattern of German women is of rather discountinous nature, depending on their chosen intimate relationships in private life, implicating their role as unpaid carers. As there is no sufficient provision of public care services, many German women are dependent on a male breadwinner while leaving their jobs for family purposes. In contrast, Finnish mothers return to their full-time jobs after maternity leave as the welfare state provides enough public care services for children and the dependent elderly. Thus it appears that Finnish women have gained financial autonomy and economic independence, a pre-requisite for living in democratic, individualized intimate relationships with equal decision power. Even if, during the last decades, empirical evidence has revealed the transformation of the well known breadwinner model to a modernized version, or partially a shift to an 'adult worker model', in Germany there is still no evidence for a general trend to a fully individualized life pattern of women with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]