Responses of French Family and Employment Policy to the Unemployment Crises: Impacts on the Gendering of Paid and Unpaid Work

Abstract

This article analyses the evolution of family and employment policies in France and evaluates the extent to which they may have ‘stalled’ France's gender revolution. It considers the ‘universal breadwinner’ employment model of women's full-time and continuous participation in the labour market evolving in France in the 1970s and 1980s, due to early state support for childcare, restrictions on part-time working and demand for women's labour in the growing service sector. However, according to some commentators, from the late 1980s onwards the development of this model was curtailed by the unemployment crisis and the attempts of the French state to resolve it both through its employment and family policy. The encouragement of part-time work, the introduction of paid parental leave, the reorientation of childcare services away from collective crèches to individualised forms of care and the subsidies available for hiring a domestic helper are the policies which have provoked most controversy.