Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ways that personal biographies of individuals are related to their gender roles. Using biographical methods, the chapter develops a conceptual scheme for linking past experience to current life patterns. Modern work-centered women and the new care-oriented men are different from their traditional counterparts in their identity, social networks, goals and ambitions, and strategies for combining education, work, and family life. They are likely to seek out roles that allow them a greater degree of crossover in working and caring. A question for the future is how such preferences form and how they shape the broader gender contract of the larger society.