WOMENS PART-TIME WORK - A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON

Since the mid-twentieth century, part-time work has increased more tha n full-time work in most advanced capitalist countries. Part-time work is still mostly women's work, yet the level of part-time employment v aries across nations, from approximately one-fifth of employed US wome n, to more than half of employed Norwegian women in the 1980s. In this article, we discuss how country-level labour demand, work and family policies, and political and labour institutions are associated with th e share of employed women who work part-time. Using aggregate-level da ta from nine advanced industrialized countries, we find that the organ izational power of labour and the proportion of employed women in the state sector have some of the strongest and most consistent effects on the extent of a country's part-time female labour force.