Abstract
This paper shifts the comparative analysis of gender and welfare states from a focus on differences to a search for common features. The rise in women's labor force participation and resulting tensions between time allocated to work and to caregiving have led to a search for policies to reconcile productive and reproductive roles and a quest for gender equality in work and family life. Two questions result: first, why are structural changes in postindustrial society associated with efforts to increase the compatibility of domestic and market roles? And second, how and why are work and family restructuring and related social policies linked to a more egalitarian gender contract? Parsons' AGIL paradigm of evolutionary change suggests four functional exigencies that pull the various components of work-and-family policy in the direction of gender equality: (1) working-time policies promote adaptation to new demands; (2) equal employment opportunity and provision of child and elderly care promote role differentiation that enables heightened goal attainment both in work and caregiving; (3) broader eligibility for entitlements promotes integration of formerly excluded groups; and (4) value generalization of an adult worker/carer ideal and work-family reconciliation accomplish the legitimation of the new order in the cultural system as a whole. This analysis classifies social policies according to their function in facilitating the work-family nexus and thereby suggests the key elements that are required to reconcile work and family life in postindustrial society.