Society is man-made ?? but also woman-made. In the long term, social institutions are the product of people?'s choices, rather than the cause of them. Two social revolutions in the last three decades have created even greater scope for genuine and free choices and wider opportunities for women....

Catherine Hakim argues that social and family policy must now be gender-neutral, but should cater for diversity in lifestyle preferences. Copyright (c) 2008 The Author. Journal compilation (c) 2008 ippr.

Preference theory is a new approach to explaining current and future patterns of employment and fertility among women in modern societies. Although economists usually claim that preferences cannot be measured, methods for identifying women's and men's lifestyle preferences were developed and...

In the mid-1990s the Census Office released for the first time 1% and 2% Samples of Anonymised Records (SARs) from the 1991 British Census. This pathbreaking study presents the results of the first analysis of labour market data from the new SARs, drawing comparisons with research results for...

This paper comments on the lead symposium article, “Reaching the Top?–On Gender Balance in the Economics Profession,†by Christina Jonung and Ann-Charlotte Ståhlberg. Jonung and Ståhlberg demonstrate that the economics profession recruits few women even in (or especially in)...

This paper reviews trends in self-employment up to the 1980s and beyond, and looks at the composition and characteristics of the self-employed workforce. It examines the causes of the current rise in self-employment - in particular employers' strategy of transferring jobs and functions from...

Current debates about changing patterns of work tend to be structured around Atkinson's model of the flexible firm, which is similar to Loveridge's model of firm-specific labour markets. Two spring 1987 national surveys, of workers and of employers, are analysed to show that the balance between...