Introduction

Seeking to account for the complex sequencing of states and events that span individual lives from birth to death, sociologists have looked primarily to historical and institutional factors. The degree to which and the manner in which societies are socially and spatially differentiated, the impact of institutions such as the educational system, the family, the labour market and the welfare system, and the historical circumstances which shape the opportunity structure and institutional fabric of society have all been seen as the most important mechanisms framing the regularities (or discontinuities) of lifecourses.

Within this approach, one would expect gender regimes to be crucial in documenting the diversity of life paths. Strikingly, however, gender, along with education, class and ethnicity, has largely been put forward as just one more social variable, rather than as a major institution defining a fundamental social order that creates specific biographical contingencies. The gender perspective has played a marginal role in lifecourse research (Krüger and Lévy, 2001; Grunow, 2006; Widmer and Ritschard, 2009).

This is not to say that it is absent. Although male and female biographies are often seen to follow the same incorporated timetable of the life stages which provide individuals with continuity commitment, the frictions between gender, family and the employment system have been shown to impose constraints on female life trajectories both in the past and in the present (Hareven, 1982; Rossi, 1985; Hochschild and Machung, 1989; Moen, 2001; Pfau-Effinger, 2004). Gender has been especially highlighted as an important life marker in early and middle adulthood, in particular in the transition to parenthood and while children are young, and for both younger and older cohorts (Billari, 2001; Shanahan, 2000). Recent analyses of the connections between the gender divide and de-standardisation of the lifecourse in some European countries also point in the same direction (Lévy et al, 2013; Elzinga and Liefbroer, 2007; Grunow, 2006; Widmer and Ritschard, 2009). Men in the first part of adult life, both in younger and older cohorts, have fairly stable and linear occupational trajectories, while women's are more diverse. Contemporary female de-standardisation during adulthood stems mainly from moving between full-time, part-time and unpaid work in the family, suggesting that women are required to be more adaptable than men, and face greater uncertainty.