Concepts of citizenship and gender

In the last decades of the millennium, women have increasingly been integrated into Western European labour markets. However, there were considerable differences in the development paths of European labour markets concerning the structures of labour market integration and labour market exclusion, indicated by the development of labour force participation rates of women. The differences also concern the forms in which women were integrated into waged work. In most countries, it is mainly the part-time employment of women that has increased. The proportion of women working part time today varies to a high degree in the European Union, from 11% of all employed women in Finland to 67% of all employed women in the Netherlands (OECD, 2000). How can such differences be explained?

Social integration and social exclusion of women within labour markets was in the last years often discussed in the framework of a broader debate on welfare state policies, social inequality and social citizenship. This debate was inspired by T.H. Marshall's work on social citizenship, conceptualised as a means to measure the degree to which welfare states promote social integration of all citizens on the basis of equality (Marshall, 1950, pp 5-6). Feminists have criticised this approach for it was based on a male norm: on waged work being the implicit basis of citizenship (Pateman, 1988). It was argued that women were for a long time excluded from paid work and are still not yet fully included; instead, they are seen as being responsible for unpaid domestic care work (Orloff, 1993; Lewis and Ostner, 1995). According to this argument, citizenship rights based on domestic care work in Western societies are of minor quality – women are seen as ‘second class’ social citizens (Orloff, 1993; Sainsbury, 1994).

The question of which type of social citizenship can contribute to comprehensive and full social integration of women into society, to the improvement of gender equality and the gaining of “equal social worth” of women and men according to Marshall's ideas (1950), is crucial for the analyses and interpretation of cross-national differences in the labour force participation of women in European countries, particularly also in relation to part-time work of mothers.