This article studies the relevance of different types of support for satisfaction with work life balance. More specifically, it investigates the relevance of state, instrumental and emotional workplace and family support, based on a survey of 7867 service-sector workers in eight European countries. The article starts by mapping available state, workplace and family support in order to determine which source dominates in which country and whether these sources match Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime typology. The impact of the different support sources is then examined. Findings indicate that support for employee work-life balance satisfaction has a direct and moderating effect. Finally, results show that emotional support and instrumental support in the workplace have a complementary relationship. Whereas emotional family support has a positive impact on work-life balance satisfaction, instrumental family support does not.

The present study analyzes workers' non-use of telework in German workplaces. Recent research has focused mainly on the implications of telework for employees. Non-users of telework, and their reasons for non-use are under-researched. We ask to what degree cultural barriers, besides technical barriers, contribute to the non-use of telework. The analyses are based on the second wave (2014-15) of the German Linked Personnel Panel (LPP). Factor analyses confirm the importance of technical and cultural barriers for the non-use of telework. Linear regression analyses show that because men work more often than women in areas where telework is technically unfeasible, they are more likely not to use telework due to perceived job unsuitability. Women-independent of their status positions-are more likely to forgo telework due to perceived cultural barriers. In workplaces with a pronounced ideal worker culture, employees are more likely to forgo telework because they perceive cultural barriers. Finally, company-level work-life balance support diminishes the non-use of telework due to perceived cultural barriers.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the context dependence of the implications of telework for work-family conflict. It examines whether and how the implications of telework for strain-based and time-based work-family conflict depend on work-family-supportive and high-demand workplace cultures. Based on a sample of 4,898 employees derived from a unique linked employer-employee study involving large organizations in different industries in Germany, multilevel fixed-effects regressions were estimated. The results show that telework is associated with perceived higher levels of both time-based and strain-based work-family conflict, and that this is partly related to overtime work involved in telework. However, teleworkers experience higher levels of work-family conflict if they perceive their workplace culture to be highly demanding, and lower levels if supervisor work-family support is readily available.

Research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women. We demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood. Interrogating supply- and demand-side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective, we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short-term and long-run career implications of parity-specific births. We analyze longitudinal data from the European Community and Household Panel for 13 European countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001. Our fixed-effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short-term but accumulate over the career. The timing of a birth in a woman’s life course matters only for older women, who experience a significant penalty to third births. Although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood (e.g., having only one child) prove ineffective, our cross-national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in occupational status.

To contribute to the understanding of gender inequalities within the workplace, this article explored gender differences in claims-making for career advancement and how they depend on workplace contexts based on unique German linked employer–employee data. Applying organizational fixed-effects models, we found that women were less likely than men to make claims, especially when they had children, and that this was related to their working fewer hours. The gender gap in claims-making further depended on workplace characteristics that influenced women’s ability and their feeling of deservingness to work in more demanding positions. Although claims by mothers’ increased in work–life supportive workplaces, highly demanding workplace cultures seemed to hinder women’s attempts to negotiate for career advancement. Thus, the dominance of the ideal worker norm was a relevant driver for the gender gap in claims-making. Whereas this gap in making claims was found to be only partially related to the workplace gender structure, the formalization of human resource practices, such as performance-based evaluations in the workplace, fostered mothers’ claims-making, indicating that these evaluations were used to legitimize their claims in the workplace.