Chanigng Role of Women

increasingly entered the labour market and remained in it throughout the period of family formation. Yet, most research on women’s employment changes has been based on cross-sectional or time-series data. When longitudinal data have been used, the attention has typically gone to single cohorts, or, in case of comparison across cohorts, to single countries or to specific crucial phases in female life courses, namely on transitions around the birth of first child. By contrast, this paper compares two countries, Italy and Great Britain, and, by drawing on the BHPS and the ILFI up to 2005, it uses event history data and methods to explicitly analyse changes across four subsequent birth cohorts in the effect of marriage and children on women’s transitions between paid market work and unpaid family-care work. Moreover, it looks at a wide span of women’s life courses (from the time they leave full-time education to their forties) in order to capture also exits and re-entries occurring at later ages and to see to what extent and for whom the timing of interruptions has been postponed from the period around marriage to the period around first or second childbirth, while the timing of re-entries has been anticipated.
My findings show that both in Italy and Great Britain women from younger cohorts are more attached to the labour market, but that the type and causes of such increasing attachment differ importantly. In Great Britain women’s employment has gradually expanded from exiting the labour market when marrying and re-entering at the end of childrearing, to exiting when having the first child and re-entering more often between births and more quickly after childbearing. Moreover, the employment of married women and mothers has become more accepted but, in turn, also more differentiated by education, social class and work experience. In Italy women’s employment has grown but “compositionally”. Ceteris paribus, in Italy the influence of education, marriage and children...