Employment Regulation, Welfare-States and Gender Regimes: A Comparative Analysis of Part-time Work.

The paper aims to develop a framework to understand the variant use and structuring of part-time work in the UK and US, and the implications different working-time patterns have for women's work-life balance. Women's economic activity has remained stable and high at 69 percent in both the US and the UK. However, working-time patterns among women in the UK and US are quite distinct. For instance, in the UK in 2004, over 40 percent of women in employment worked part-time, while the corresponding figure in the US was less than 20 percent (OECD 2005). How can diversity within liberal regimes be explained? Both countries can be characterised as operating a neo-liberal forms of capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001) and welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990). However, it is argued in this paper that distinctions within these interwoven systems can be elaborated with a gender sensitive analysis provided through Walby's Gender Regime theory, which examines the historical transformation to a public gender regime, from a private one. Furthermore, it is argued that the lack of co-ordination between these dimensions, as found in the UK, may explain women's likelihood of adapting to dual social and economic pressures and opting for part-time work as a means of compromise, which contrasts with the 'archetypal' form of liberalism found in the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]