WORK, LIFE COURSE, AND GENDER: Career and non-career jobs in context

Norway is among the highest scoring countries on the UN's GDI index, having one of the most generous welfare states in the world, including one of the longest parental leave schemes (Ellingsæter 2003; Lewis et al. 2009). However, the labour market remains gender-segregated; there is a majority of men in the private sector of the economy and a majority of women in the public sector. Men occupy the highest positions in both sectors (Tronstad 2007; SSB 2010a). In families the division of labour between men and women is mainly traditional – women spend more time on housework and care work than men (Knudsen and Wærness 2009). The contemporary family ideal in most western countries is ‘the adult worker family model’ (Lewis 2007) where gender equality is defined as economic independence between partners and an equal sharing of housework and childcare. A precondition for the realisation of this ideal is that men increase their share of work in the domestic sphere, whilst women must pursue careers in the sphere of work (Knudsen and Wærness 2009).

There is wide political agreement about measures to advance gender equality by increasing the number of women in higher positions in the occupational hierarchy, and about family-friendly policies to help change the gendered division of labour in families. However, recent Norwegian research shows that, for women, having children explains 40 percent of the gendered wage gap, and that long maternity leave is the main factor (Hardoy and Schøne 2008). Findings from Sweden, which has a very similar welfare state model to Norway, indicate that the length of maternity leave affects women's careers over the life course. Women who take long maternity leave are less likely to be promoted (SCB 2007). While such findings could be construed to indicate that generous family-friendly policies counteract aims of achieving gender equality in both the private and public spheres (Skrede 2004), a detailed examination of the particularities of men's and women's work trajectories shows that different types and layers of context need to be taken into consideration.

Not all occupations involve ‘careers’ in the sense of offering promotion opportunities. Applying the typologies ‘career’ and ‘non-career’ jobs as sensitising concepts in the analysis, this paper explores how educational level, life course phase and period-specific phenomena are important for understanding how mothers and fathers within the same organisational settings think about and act in relation to their work trajectories over the life course. Circumstances during the life course phase that involves care for young children, and the effects of this phase in the longer term must be considered within this complex set of factors.

The aforementioned tensions between family policies and gender equality measures form an overarching frame for the discussions. In what follows a first section will briefly outline aspects of national policies and organisational characteristics relevant for the current discussion. The broader analytical approach is then described with particular reference to typologies. Cases from each organisational setting are then described, and within organisation comparisons form the basis for a final section where comparisons across organisations are discussed with reference to careers and non-careers against the overarching framework. Family-friendly policies that include opportunities to work flexibly and part-time, long maternity leave and cash-for-care, can contribute to easing the conditions for some fathers and mothers of young children when circumstances allow. In other instances circumstances in the life course and period-specific events preclude such options being considered.

The empirical basis of the paper is Norwegian data from an EU framework 5 study, which focussed on three levels and collected data at each of these.¹ A multilevel logic was at the core of the comparative project (Nilsen and Brannen 2005; Lewis et al. 2009). The overarching framework of gender equality policies and family-friendly policies aimed at parents as employees is formulated at the state level. At the organisational level employees’ rights and entitlements are negotiated and aims of equal opportunities are implemented. A private sector multinational company (NMC)² and the public sector social services represent contrasting cases of organisational settings. The third level is biographical data concerning men and women employed in different occupations within organisations. This constitutes an embedded case study design: state, organisation, and individual. Space only allows for a brief description of the main features of state- and organisational policies.

The current Norwegian family policies have been described as ‘generous reproduction support’ (Skrede 2004: 168) because they are focussed on support for mothers combining work and family, rather than encouraging equality between mothers and fathers in families. However, beyond the maternity leave,³ most of these policies are formulated in gender neutral terms and include the right to 10 days of paid sick child leave per year until the child is 10; flexible working hours; and the right to work part-time.

Most gender equality measures are aimed at women to qualify for higher positions in the occupational hierarchy,⁴ and are thus gendered. In Norway the Equal Opportunities Act of 1978 defines what measures are permitted in order to enhance gender equality in the sphere of paid work. Examples of gendered measures include that when advertising higher managerial positions announcements are to explicitly encourage qualified women to apply; another example is the Act of 2006 that oblige companies to appoint 40 percent of women to their boards (Roedland 2008).

Most welfare states have a large public sector that includes a range of teaching and caring occupations. In Norway women comprise 70 percent of the employees in the public sector, where the part-time rate is very high. In the private sector, 63 percent are men. Around 50 percent of managers in the public sector are women. In the private sector 74 percent of managers are men, and women comprise less than 20 percent of top managers (SSB 2010a). Promotion opportunities are different in the two sectors as the occupational hierarchies differ, and the wage level is higher in the private sector (Tronstad 2007).

A number of studies have focussed on organisations to study processes of gender segregation (Kanter 1977; Kvande and Rasmussen 1990; Acker 1992; Hochschild 1997). Recent Norwegian studies conducted in ‘knowledge production organisations’ conclude that the increased demands from the sphere of waged work in many ways are incompatible with the welfare state's focus on granting rights for parents that makes it feasible to combine work and family (Kvande and Rasmussen 2008).⁵

While these studies focus on structural features for understanding and explaining gender segregation in the labour market, there is also a strong tendency in current sociological theory to emphasise the importance of individual choices in a societal climate that is said to become more individualised.⁶ This debate is not an explicit concern in the current paper; however, the empirical evidence presented here demonstrates how individual choices with regard to employment must be seen in view of structural circumstances at different levels.

The opportunity structures offered by the public sector social services and the private sector NMC were very different and the latter provided more opportunities for highly qualified employees to have an upwardly mobile occupational trajectory over the life course than did the former.

The private sector company in Norway was a large multinational with several branches in different countries. It was a hierarchical ‘for profit’ organisation. The study was done at a main branch in a Norwegian city with approximately 1,000 employees where the majority of the workforce had higher degrees from universities. The promotion system was related to what type of activities employees were involved in and was bifurcated: one path where personnel and financial management was involved, and another that was more involved with planning and carrying out specific projects. Salary rises involved a complicated system of a finely graded wage hierarchy, and were granted on the basis of individual negotiations between the employer and employees based on merit. The wage level in this organisation was generally higher than the average wage level in the country. The company, like most other private sector organisations, had a male-dominated workforce.

The social services were organised by the public sector and operated on a ‘for service’ logic. The budgets of the services were decided at the political level. In the city where the study was done there had been budget difficulties over several years.⁷ Occupations in the social services included a majority of social workers with degrees from social work colleges. Social work was organised in several autonomous units that included clerical workers and agency cleaners. The social services were female dominated and many worked part-time. The wage level was lower than in the multinational company. Wage increases were collectively bargained. Promotions in most cases happened through a transparent procedure of applying to positions higher up in the occupational ladder. However, the hierarchy within the social services had few levels. The highest position of unit manager was in most instances held by an experienced social worker. Social workers could seek different jobs within the hierarchy to become group coordinators or line managers, the tendency for clerical work was outsourcing, and cleaning was entirely outsourced.

The concept ‘career’ can have many meanings.⁸ For the current purpose the focus is on occupational careers over the life course. A ‘successful occupational career’ is still thought of in terms of upward mobility, although the very notion has been contested in recent theoretical debates (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Sennett 1998). For the current purpose employment trajectories are examined in the context of the life course and period-specific conditions relating to national policies and organisational frameworks.

Qualitative data do not lend themselves to statistical generalisations. Qualitative cases can however be judged by their external validity (Bryman 2004) or their transferability (Lincoln and Guba 1985). The case analyses are based on ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 2000 [1973]) which yield knowledge that is transferable and relevant to studies of work and gender beyond the current one. A context-sensitive approach to analysis also invites insights from grounded theory as formulated by Glaser and Strauss (1967) as well as an exploratory logic (Blumer 1956; Stebbins 2001).

For the purpose of this paper it is helpful to make a distinction between careers and non-careers as typologies for describing extremes on a continuum of employment trajectories over the life course. The concept ‘typology’ may have many meanings (McKinney 1969), from the rigorous Weberian ‘ideal type’ to different forms of illustrative and analytical categories that aim to be ‘descriptive’, ‘classificatory’, or ‘explanatory’ (Elman 2005). Typologies can be helpful analytical devices that focus on essential characteristics of phenomena to highlight contrasts in the empirical analysis.⁹ Characteristics in typologies will thus not be a total fit with the empirical evidence it sets out to examine. In the following the typologies will be used as ‘sensitising concepts’ (Blumer 1956) for exploring the cases.

In Table 1 characteristics of careers and non-career jobs as typologies are outlined to draw an analytic distinction between the two.

At the structural level opportunities for upward mobility are in most instances related to qualifications that involve higher education, in an occupational structure that invites promotions. Work on the lowest rungs of the occupational ladders can be described as non-career jobs. In most western countries such jobs demand little or no formal education. There are few promotion opportunities. Another distinguishing feature at this level is time. Careers demand ‘unlimited’ amounts of time spent on work. Non-career jobs, on the other hand, have fixed working hours with some flexibility at the start or end of the working day. Whereas careers are result-oriented, non-careers are more likely to be time-oriented. Connected to this is the distinction between where work is done; career work can be done from home or in an office whilst non-career jobs are space-bound, e.g., cleaning and clerical work. For employees who have careers wages are often negotiable at an individual level, whereas non-careers have fixed wages per time unit.

At the individual or agency level employees with non-careers are likely to be more collectivist-orientated in that, for instance, wage negotiations are collectively bargained. Commitment to work may be high although activities in other arenas in life may take as much time and attention as work. Because of the demands put on employees with careers and because of the non-space bound nature of the work, the home–work boundaries are likely to be blurred. Non-career jobs that require employees to do work on site, as it were, invite more fixed boundaries between home and work.

Used as sensitising concepts in the analysis these typologies serve to highlight aspects of organisational features and individual cases that can help draw out important dimensions in the material, e.g., that employees may have career type work in an organisational setting that encourages careers but be in a life course phase where they do not think or talk about their work in career terms.

What follows is an embedded case study analysis from a life course perspective (Nilsen and Brannen 2005). At the individual level the biographical interviews are cases that make it possible to explore questions in a longer time frame that involves both educational and work trajectories. In the Norwegian material there were 21 biographical interviews in the two organisations, 15 women and six men. For this paper three cases from each organisation were selected for analysis and comparisons on criteria of gender, education, birth cohort, children, and occupational level. After a brief presentation of cases in each organisation, within organisation comparisons will be made to highlight how gender and differences in educational level and life course events affect how employees think about and act in relation to their employment trajectories. On the basis of intra-organisational comparisons, a final section will discuss cases across organisational contexts in relation to the overarching framework of the paper.

Anders and Anita both had degrees in engineering, and Astrid was a cleaner with compulsory schooling. Anita and Anders were matching cases across gender, whereas Astrid was a contrasting case in terms of a different life course and her occupational position.

Anders was 40 at the time of the interview and had two children (4 years old and 8 months, respectively). He came from a middle class family and had a higher degree that combined engineering and economics. He had been with the company for seven years and was well established in his career when the children were born. His wife had a higher degree in engineering and was at the time of the interview on maternity leave. Anders’ educational and work trajectory had no gaps in it apart from doing his conscripted military service and paternity leave when his first child was born. Later that year he would have 4 weeks leave with the younger child when his wife returned to work. He had always worked long hours and was a team manager at the time of the interview. He got up at five every morning to work from his home computer until 7.30 am when he took the older child to the nursery on his way to work, and picked her up on his way home at 4 pm. He tried to get as much time as possible with the children in the evenings and afternoons, but he was very conscious of what was expected from him at work.

He continued this section of the interview by talking about his wife's job in a financial institution, and the situation she might find herself in when she returned to work after the second maternity leave. Before the leave she worked as the project coordinator.

Anders justified his rather long hours with the fact that he earned more than his wife and they had just bought a new house and had a substantial mortgage. Economic security was very important for him. Asked about the future in 10 years time he said he thought he'd stay with the company and not change employer.

Anita was 36 years old and had a one-year-old child. She came from a middle class family and had a higher degree in engineering and had an uninterrupted education and work trajectory until the maternity leave. Her husband was also an engineer. She had been with the company for six years and had also put in long hours at work before they had the child. She was well established in her career. At the time of the interview Anita had just returned to work after eight months of maternity leave. She chose to share the leave with her husband who took four months leave (unpaid). It is not common for mothers to have such a short leave period. Anita was very engaged in her work and took the opportunity to change work tasks after returning from leave.

In spite of having the opportunity to work from home, Anita tried to keep work and home separate and not log on to work from her home computer.

Anita liked the business and challenges of her work. She preferred her job to ‘a job where you start yawning before lunch’. The main difference motherhood had made was to make her work less, but she was still on full time. Asked what she thought about the future she said:

Astrid was 33 at the time of the interview and worked as a cleaner in an agency hired by NMC. She came from a working class family and had no education beyond the compulsory nine years of school. She had been a housewife for eight years and had three children (16 years, 11 years, and 19 months old, respectively). Her partner was the main breadwinner until he became ill and had been on disability pension since. Astrid was at the time of the interview the main breadwinner. She had been with the cleaning company for eight years and at the NMC for two years. When she had the third child she had gained the right to take fully-paid maternity leave for one year, a right she not been entitled to before. She talked about how she would have liked to be a stay-at-home mother, but that the economic circumstances did not permit that. The youngest child was in day care and her partner looked after the other children when they came home from school.

As a contract cleaner the employer could move her to another workplace if the contract with NMC was discontinued.

Although Astrid stated at the beginning of the interview that she would have liked to stay home with the children, she emphasised the relationship with colleagues as the most important part of her work, and that she earned money. Asked what she thought she would do in 10 years time she said she supposed she would be with the same employer.

Birger and Beate were social workers and were matching cases across gender in terms of education and occupation. Bastian was a clerical worker and a contrasting case in terms of the above criteria.

Birger was a 36-year-old father of two (7 and 4 years old, respectively) who came from a lower middle class family. He had a college degree in social work, as did his wife. His educational and work trajectories were uninterrupted apart from a 15-month paternity leave when his first child was born, and a three-month unpaid leave for the younger. The longer leave period was financially helped by the ‘cash-for-care’¹¹ scheme which did not, however, compensate the wage fully. He made a deliberate choice to take a long leave when the older child was born because he thought it important to spend as much time as possible with the child..

About his work he said:

Birger also talked about the economic situation for the family and dilemmas involved:

When talking about the future in 10 years time, Birger referred to the children again:

Birger was a very committed father who had made deliberate choices to be involved in the care for the children. He wished to stay on with his employer but hoped to work a regular 8–4 schedule.

Beate was a 31-year-old mother of two (3 and 4 years old, respectively) who came from a middle class family. She had a degree in social work and a one-year course at university. Her husband was a lawyer. Her work trajectory included short-term jobs between university courses and the social work college. The children were born within a short time span just after her graduation and she was at home with them for three years. At the time of the interview she was on a short-term contract as a social worker with a very heavy case load. Beate would have liked to work 80 percent but since she was on a short-term contract she did not think it appropriate to ask for it, however much entitled she was to this by law.

At the time of the interviews reorganisation was taking place in the public sector, the social services were particularly affected since the smaller units were being merged into larger ones. In this situation it was unclear how many people would be made redundant and hence only short-term contracts were available.

Work and being independent were very important in her life:

Bastian was 35 at the time of the interview and had three children (10, 8, and 4 years old, respectively). He came from a working class background and had some vocational upper secondary education (clerical). He had had various short-term contracts in different branches of the social services before he was granted a permanent contract with his current employer in 1995 and had only taken paid paternity leave. His wife was also a clerical worker in the public sector. He spent most of his free time with his children and took part in some of their leisure activities. One of his main concerns was to be able to support his family. On why he chose this particular occupation he said:

Bastian was involved with union activities and was worried about the future for clerical occupations in the public sector. He saw that clerical positions were not announced when vacancies occurred; rather, the municipality chose to employ agency workers on short-term contracts. These concerns were evident in his thoughts about the future in 10 years time:

All the cases in the material belonged to the same 10-year birth cohort which was the second largest cohort of the twentieth century in Norway. While Anders and Anita's life courses followed a standard for their social class and educational background, Astrid, who came from a working class background, in contrast to the majority of her peers (75.7 percent; SSB 2010b) did not take upper secondary education. She became a mother early in life and had a long period as a housewife. This is a life course pattern that has more in common with earlier generations of women than her peers.

In their current life course phases as parents of small children, the earlier events and phases in their lives give different outcomes in terms of options and circumstances. Astrid's employment trajectory as a cleaner has followed a typical non-career pattern, while Anita and Anders followed career trajectories and were well established in their chosen occupations when they became parents. None of them had taken long parental leave, and both had supportive partners. Anders had managerial responsibilities in his team but these did not involve personnel or finance management. Astrid would not be one to benefit from the state's equal opportunities measures since she had no higher education and would not be qualified for positions in the higher echelons of the occupational hierarchy. However, the family-friendly policies that grant mothers long parental leave was to Astrid's advantage once, with her third child, she had earned enough time in employment to be entitled to paid leave. Cleaning is hard work, and for Astrid it felt necessary to have the longer break to regain her strength after the pregnancy and birth.

On the topic of gender differences it is worth noting that Anders talked about promotion and salary rises unprompted, whilst Anita did not mention such themes at all and, like Astrid, talked about the importance of good colleagues. Both Anita and Anders talked about how they had worked longer hours before they had children. An interpretation of their attitudes could be that they had both reached the occupational level they were comfortable with and hence need not make an effort to continue ‘climbing’. But another difference between them is that Anders referred to the family economy and the mortgage as a concern, whilst Anita did not bring this up. A third difference is that Anders logged on to work from home thus blurring the home–work boundary. Anita had made a decision not to do so.

A culture of long working hours existed in the NMC and work commitment was regarded as essential for Anita's and Anders’ occupations. This echoes the studies referred to above where results and not time is the crucial factor in the new employment contract (Hochschild 1997; Sennett 1998; Kvande and Rasmussen 2008). Astrid's work as a contract cleaner in the same organisation was time and site bound with few if any prospects of promotion. The multinational company can be thought of in terms of a ‘greedy institution’ (Coser 1974) but mainly for occupations in the higher levels of the organisation.

The three cases from the social services belong to the same birth cohort as the NMC employees. Birger's educational and work trajectory followed a standard for his cohort and social background. Beate, on the other hand, five years his junior, had a patchier trajectory where employment and education is concerned. They both became parents after completing their degrees. Bastian did not take full upper secondary education and had his first child before he had a permanent work contract.

While Birger was established in his occupation when he became a father and the period-specific circumstances made it possible for him to take long leave, Beate had not yet started out in her occupation when she became a mother and for a period was a full-time carer for her two children born only a short time apart. None of them had ‘careers’ in the strictest sense of the term but were qualified to climb the few rungs in the organisational ladder that existed. The main work pattern for women in Beate's occupation and family situation is to work part-time (Tronstad 2007). Beate did not consider this an option because she entered employment at a time when reorganisation took place and new employees were only offered short-term contracts. The historical period is therefore important for her attitude to what it took to be considered a committed employee and a ‘full member of working life’. In other studies this topic has been addressed in terms of an ‘informal career system’ (Kanter 1977) where employees are not eligible for promotions if their work commitment is in doubt. The concern for Beate was not about promotion but about getting a permanent work contract. Bastian's situation was, in contrast to the other two, precarious in that municipal clerical workers on permanent contracts were increasingly replaced by short-term agency workers. Unlike Beate and Birger, who both had social work degrees and therefore a wider range of options with regard to work and further education, Bastian's educational background did not offer many options were he to lose his job.

While Birger and Beate had made use of the cash-for-care scheme and Birger had taken prolonged paternity leave, Bastian had only been on the paid paternity leave he was entitled to.

In this final section, comparisons across organisational are discussed with reference to careers and non-careers against the backdrop of a perceived tension between gender-neutral family policies and gendered equality policies.

Anita and Anders had higher positions in the same multinational company that was prosperous and expanding on the world market and offered a range of promotion opportunities to the highly educated, male-dominated workforce in the upper echelons of the organisation. Compared to Beate and Birger, Anders and Anita were far better paid and had more career-like work situations because of the structure of the organisation and because of their education. On the other hand, for their chosen occupations Beate and Birger had sufficient education to get promoted within the structure of their organisation, however few rungs there were on the promotion ladder. The organisational changes that were going on in the public sector at the time of the interviews made for period-specific circumstances that affected Beate more than Birger. This demonstrates how life course phase and historical period must be brought to bear on the interpretation of cases within particular organisational settings.

Astrid and Bastian both had precarious work situations, albeit for different reasons and with different outcomes. Neither of them had a degree; indeed Astrid only had compulsory schooling. She was employed with an agency and had a permanent work contract. The precariousness of her situation was related to a lack of control over many aspects of the work situation. She had no personal choice with regard to workplace; as an agency worker she had to go where the company won a bid for a contract. Work was time and site bound, with limited flexibility. Bastian also had a permanent contract. His work situation was less flexible than for the social workers at his workplace. Like Astrid he had to put up with the unpredictability concerning his colleagues because of the high turnover rate of staff, with agency workers replacing permanent clerical staff as vacancies occurred. Like Astrid he lacked full upper secondary education. Unlike Astrid he brought up the importance of being a breadwinner and being able to provide for the family since the family income was low in spite of both partners working. Astrid's situation was similar but she did not bring it up as a breadwinning issue.

Employees are by law entitled to a number of rights. The family-friendly policies that the NMC and the social services both subscribed to, such as flexible working hours, part-time work, extended parental leave, etc., are all in line with statutory obligations. They are gender-neutral and do not take into consideration the gendered context of work where parents’ rights are negotiated. In the NMC a company-specific measure of providing employees with free computers to access their work files from home was regarded by many as a mixed blessing, since it could give employees flexibility but could also put pressure on them to be available at all hours. As demonstrated above, Anita and Anders chose different ways of coping with the pressure of availability and long working hours. Anders’ home–work boundaries were more blurred than Anita's.

Part-time work is another employee right. For Beate this made no difference since the organisational circumstances were such that part-time work for a short-term employee would be regarded as low work commitment, and could affect her chances of getting a permanent work contract.

Before Beate became an employee she did, however, make use of the state's cash-for-care scheme for three years while she was home with her children. Since she had not been in employment immediately prior to her maternity period, she was not entitled to paid maternity leave. Birger also made use of the cash-for-care scheme during the unpaid 15-month leave from his permanent work contract. His personal circumstances and the historical period made it feasible for him to do this.

Astrid had the right to paid maternity leave for her third child and chose the longest leave period. In contrast to Astrid is Anita, who took only eight months leave but transferred the rest to the father. Rather than interpreting this as a difference in work commitment it is better understood against the differences in these two women's life courses, their different occupations and their different family situations.

The state and organisations have aims of creating equal opportunities between men and women in workplaces, with special emphasis on increasing the percentage of women in the higher positions of the occupational structure. The wider theoretical framework for this analysis has been the distinction between careers and non-careers. At the structural level the organisations discussed are different in that the NMC has an occupational structure that makes promotions part of the system and is thus more career ‘friendly’ than the social services, with its few levels in the occupational hierarchy. At the individual level these two concepts can be seen as analytical devices to examine how employees orient themselves to work and shape their work trajectories in particular contexts. Top positions are associated with careers: in order to get to the top you have to climb the occupational ladder. Thus seen from an equal opportunities viewpoint more women must have careers in order to be eligible for the higher positions in the labour market. Moreover, they have to think of their work in career terms and act accordingly; they have to apply a ‘career logic’ in their approach to work. Of the cases discussed here only Anders and Anita had careers in the strictest sense. They had both worked long hours before they became parents and were highly committed to their occupations. When they became parents they were both in secure positions they felt comfortable with. Although both had reduced their working hours, they both still put in longer working hours than the national average.

Neither top positions in the occupational hierarchy nor work-life balance are achievable by individual choice alone. As this paper demonstrates structural features at the level of state and organisational policies, as well as life course circumstances, set the framework for parent's actions and choices. These parameters are also present in the discourses of parents when thinking and acting in relation to work and family. The dominant discourses have the potential to become a rhetoric that forms such parameters against which people think of their lives (Brannen and Nilsen 2005). Both men and women in this analysis are committed to their work. They are also committed parents. However, only the fathers referred to work in terms of promotion and salary size in their interviews, and all three did so unprompted. In Birger's case he seemingly had to justify not being committed to making a career and lacking the ambition to climb the occupational ladder. Anders also talked at length about promotions and salary rises, albeit with reference to his wife's job and to his own attitude at an earlier phase in his life. Bastian mentioned the differences between employment in the private and the public sector and said he might be considered a ‘coward’ for not pursuing job opportunities in the private sector. A question that can be raised based on such findings is whether the ‘career discourse’ is still highly gendered; is it a discourse and a vocabulary that more men than women relate to when they think of their occupational trajectories from a life course perspective – regardless of parenthood and regardless of actual promotion opportunities on the occupational ladder in question?

In the current work climate career-driven work is becoming more important in the ‘knowledge economies’ of the western world (Hochschild 1997; Kvande and Rasmussen 2008). Equal opportunities measures are associated with a ‘career logic’ and parent-friendly policies are more ‘friendly’ for non-career jobs. In a hierarchical, gender-segregated occupational structure there are fewer top positions to compete for than occupations at the middle and lower end of the hierarchy. Many women work in non-career occupations at the lower end of the occupational ladder. As this paper has demonstrated, the relationship between gender equality measures and family-friendly policies need not be considered as characterised by tensions; it must rather be discussed in relation to a complex set of circumstances in men's and women's life courses that include family, education and occupation as well as organisational settings that for the many do not involve career jobs.

Ann Nilsen is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her fields of expertise are general sociological theory and methodology and life course and biographical research. She has carried out a number of empirical studies and participated in cross-national teams in studies of young people's transition to adulthood and young Europeans’ transition to parenthood. Her publications include the co-edited books Futures in Transition: Young Europeans Work and Family (2002) and Work Families and Organisations in Transition: European Perspectives (2009). She has also contributed to methods texts including Handbook of Social Research (Sage, 2008) and Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioural Research (Sage, 2010), and published several journal articles