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Gender Differences In Welfare State Policies

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I. Introduction The main aim of this paper is to introduce the gender differences that occur because of certain welfare state policies. The focus will be on three types of regimes: liberal, social-democratic, and conservative-corporatist; and how these three regimes incorporate the gender differences in their social policies. Welfare state policies, or social provisions began during the 1880s making this period known as the “formative period of the welfare state”. The policies were meant to improve and reinforce the family wage system with men as the main wage earners and women as the main household caretakers. These policies were not fit for working women, because most women did not have jobs other than domestic commitments. Nowadays, the …show more content…

These regimes tend to promote the traditional family relations. This regime tends to redistribute income moderately with the main goal of maintaining the social status that is achieved in the labor market. Regimes like this provide free public education, benefits for the poor and social insurance for the employers. These benefits are linked to the contributions of the employees and their income level. Conservative-corporatist regimes tend to focus on family which is considered to be the main source of welfare. Hence the main social-insurance benefits are focused on the families’ breadwinner, thus they pay the least attention to women and minorities and focus more on the people who earn and provide the …show more content…

full-time work. In Germany and in Sweden there are a lot of part-time women employees. Out of the three countries, Sweden has the most sex-segregation in numerous occupations. Despite the fact that Germany has a smaller amount of part-time female workers, more German women tend to work at home. The US has the smallest sex-segregation at work in comparison to Germany and Sweden, whose high female employment was accompanied by segregation. As a result, it is expected for a conservative-corporatist Germany to preserve the economic-dependency of women. Decline of sex-segregation in the liberal United States is surprising as well as it is unexpected for social-democratic Sweden to have a high sex-segregation of occupations and part-time

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