The impact of attitudes and work preferences on Dutch mothers' employment patterns

In the last decades, preference theory has gained significance in the academic literature on the determinants of female employment patterns. Mostly, within these studies gender and work attitudes and work preferences (the number of hours a woman prefers to work) are treated as one concept. However, in this article it is argued that relatively variable work preferences act as a mediating factor between more stable gender and work attitudes and actual labour market behaviour. With a path analysis of a representative survey among 940 Dutch mothers, the study demonstrates that the effect of gender and work attitudes on mothers’ labour market behaviour is largely mediated by the variable work preference, which influence on actual labour participation appears much larger than the influence of objective background characteristics. Next, the analysis supports the claim that more or less stable gender and work attitudes have a balancing effect on otherwise more flexible work preferences.