Making welfare regime analysis sensitive to gender relations

This paper is a discussion of the most representative contributions to the study of gender and welfare states from the comparative perspective. In the first section of the paper we follow the development of the gender and welfare state analyses that brought these two separate theoretical and empirical interests together; in the second section we follow the internal development of the comparative welfare regime analysis with respect to gender relations, which was brought about by this convergence. Building on these contributions, we describe our own framework for the analysis of the implications of the socio-economic transformation in post-socialist countries on gender inequality in economic wellbeing. We introduce a three dimensional classification of women on which rather abstractly defined gender content of welfare regimes could be actually empirically measured.