Operationalising breadwinning work: gender and work in 21st century Europe

The past decade has witnessed the proliferation of a range of societal typologies which have been constructed to signify differences and similarities in the ways that breadwinner work is organised by gender across countries. At the core of these typologies lies the familiar proposition that the traditional male breadwinner model is in decline and is being replaced by more gender equal arrangements of breadwinner work. The first question of this paper is how this theoretical concept of breadwinning work has been operationalised. The second question concerns to what extent the new typologies reflect the reality of the gender distribution of breadwinning work in the EC in 2000. Using a descriptive analysis of data from the European Community Household Panel Survey, a range of approaches to operationalising breadwinner work are considered. The various approaches largely result in familiar rankings of societies according to their levels of gendered breadwinning – with dual breadwinning remaining an elusive ideal - but a number of aberrations alert us to the need to consider more fully just how we operationalise this pivotal concept in the study of gender and work. It is concluded that a new multidimensional approach to ‘breadwinning’ is required.