The world of women's work: the benefits of cross-national research on women's employment

Much has been written on the nature of gender segregation in the labour market, but it is only recently that researchers have turned to cross-national comparisons as a means of developing more sophisticated analyses. This paper presents the findings of one study of women's employment in three different countries, and argues that cross-national comparisons have a crucial role to play in theory-development in the area of women's employment. The paper focuses in particular on evaluating cross-national research methodologies.