Employment-family relations in Europe. Socio-economic foundations of women's behavior in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Summary Our thesis proposes a comparative analysis of women's work-family coordination behaviors in Europe. First, a critical review of the foundations of microeconomic models of labor supply is presented. It is shown that, by considering that the relationships established between family members have only an instrumental value, "standard" utilitarian approaches operate a reductionism that is unable to grasp the heterogeneity of the trade-offs made in terms of job/family coordination. Against this line of argument, we suggest, in the second part, that these trade-offs vary according to the nature of the relationships valued by the spouses in the household, and imply alternative "models" of job/family coordination. We then argue that countries provide varying degrees of support for these different models through their policies and the institutional system set up to regulate employment/family relations. Regime differences were then identified describing the coherences established between types of policies and the privilege given to certain models, adapting for this purpose the typology of Welfare regimes identified by ESPING-ANDERSEN. This distinction has allowed us to make certain hypotheses about the different configurations of relations between the family formation process and the female labor supply to be observed in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the relevance of which is verified in the third part of the thesis on the basis of the European Labor Force Surveys published annually from 1992 to 1999. The perspective opened by the European Employment Strategy to promote women's participation in employment is finally discussed.