The main focus of this Research Area is on the development of the constellation of institutions that frame the family, care and the employment of those who provide care (childcare, elderly care).  In the age of globalisation of markets, including labour markets, and ageing populations, it is an important issue why in many countries; women are still less comprehensively integrated into the labour force than men. Even if in the majority of post industrial countries the cultural value of gender equality is meanwhile supported by a majority of people and the main institutions, gender equality is still persisting in many countries. In this context, it is a main question how societies organise childcare and elderly care, and how far women are still responsible for caring. Moreover, it is important to analyse institutional incomplementarities which are connected with the different types of organisation of care, and the factors that explain differences in this regard. We are applying a cross-national and a cross-regional perspective.  We assume that cross-national differences in the patterns of family, care and the employment of carers can be analysed on the basis of the interaction of institutions, cultural values and models, and social and economic factors, according to the theoretical approach of the ‘arrangement of work and family’ (or ‘gender arrangement’) and the “gender culture” that Pfau-Effinger (1996, 2004) has introduced for comparative analyses. This interplay can be coherent or characterised by contradictions, social cleavages and conflicts between groups of social actors. We also analyse to which degree path dependence in the dominant cultural family models contributes to explaining the differences. Also conditions of path departure are analysed (Pfau-Effinger 2004a, b, Pfau-Effinger et al. 2009).

Moreover, household relations and the division of household labour in couples are examined in this Research Area. Although often understood as private, intimate and idiosyncratic arrangements, the aim of research conducted in this Research Area is to embrace the broader social context to advance our understanding of the division of household labour. Leveraging on country-to-country differences in domestic organization, it can be shown that these differences are systematically related to national differences in welfare regimes, social policies, employment structures, and cultural expectations. Novel conceptual frameworks are needed for understanding why the household remains a traditional bastion of gender relations, even as massive social forces of globalization, welfare state retrenchment, and individualisation call into question existing relations between the citizen and the state as well as gender inequalities in employment relations.