Causes and Consequences of the Divergent Working-Time Patterns of Employed Mothers in the UK and the US: Developing a Comparative Analysis

The paper aims to develop a framework to understand the variant use of part-time work by employed mothers in the UK and US. In particular, this paper seeks to explore how diversity in the use of part-time work can be explained when both countries are associated with a neo-liberal form of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage, 2001) and welfare regime (Esping-Andersen, The three worlds of welfare capitalism, 1990). It is argued here that by combining aspects of the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) and welfare regimes literatures with Gender Regime theory (Walby, Social Politics, 11(1):4–29, 2004), a gender centred analysis of both the causes and consequences of divergent working-time patterns can be more adequately achieved.

Jennifer TomlinsonEmail: