Les femmes sur le marché du travail aux États-Unis. Évolutions mises en perspective avec celles de la France et de la Suède

This article describes the changes over decades of the female participation to the labor market in the United States. Theses trends are compared to the French and the Swedish cases. In general, gender inequalities have decreased since the 1950?s. But in average, gender gaps are larger in the United States than they are in France or in Sweden. Even though, the most educated American women take advantage of more career opportunities than French or Swedish women. The first main conclusion of the paper is that the average decrease of gender inequalities in the USA have been came along with an explosion of social inequalities since the 1980. The second conclusion deals with the fact the decrease in gender inequalities did not concern all women: the less educated women have known almost no significative improvement of their situation, and the inequalities between skilled and unskilled women have dramatically increased. JEL Classification: D63, H31, J31, J21, J71