Do Regions Matter? Regional Differences in Female Labour-Market Participation in Germany

Over the last twenty years, fundamental changes have taken place in the structure of employment in the highly developed countries. In particular, the number of jobs in manufacturing has decreased, but service employment has increased considerably. This has been associated with an increase in the number of women in paid work, as well as with regional shifts in growth and decline. However, despite these fundamental changes, in Germany the pattern of female labour-market participation has, in contrast, been stable over the last 100 years. The authors aim to develop an explanation for this contrast.

Labour-market analysis does not provide an adequate explanation, for there is no simple relation between female participation in employment and the presence or absence of typical ‘female’ jobs. Rather, explanations lie outside the remit of current labour-market explanations. To this end the authors examine regional differences in the ‘modernisation’ of life-styles since industrialisation in the nineteenth century. Industrialisation progressively removed paid employment from the home, which became more purely a site for housework undertaken by women. However, this process varied regionally, and resulted in regionally specific female roles of dual orientation to paid work and unpaid housework. Female participation in the labour force, therefore, took different forms—and means different things—in different regions.