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The article presents information on employment and career mobility of women in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. For women, family commitments cause interruptions, restrictions on time, or even total renunciation of gainful employment. This "double role" of women is often adduced as the reason for the numerous handicaps experienced by women in working life. On the average women have lower-status occupations than men, they earn less, are on the average less qualified, and have poorer chances for advancement than their male counterparts. The antagonism between housework and professional work, in line with the antagonism between "direct satisfaction of a need" and "exchange," is, the source of "female work capacity." The skills and proclivities peculiar to women, formed in the context of housework, result in occupational discrimination, and become a structural "competitive disadvantage." Women tend to consider job content and personal interest more important than occupational advancement. In the social service occupations in particular, the "requirements of performing meaningful work stand in competition and conflict to the requirements of pursuing a professional career." Women's learned behavior is adduced to explain occupational discrimination. Women become "problem groups and marginal groups" on the labor market because they retain the patterns of behavior so necessary for family duties on the labor market. "Because they do not ruthlessly push ahead, shoving everything from their path, they receive smaller incomes and fewer chances of advancement."

Based on large national samples of male labour forces, the paper investigates differences in the amount and pattern of worklife mobility in France and Germany during the five year period 1965-70. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis of a dominantly organizational mobility space in France and a dominantly qualificational mobility space in Germany. In Germany, people are sorted into a narrow range of occupations and orderly career lines according to educational certification. In France, occupational placement during worklife is less dependent on generally valid credentials but more on specific work and training experiences and on attributes of the employing firm. In consequence, much more mobility occurs in France than in Germany, but mobility of a less orderly and directed kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]