Supporting Women’s Employment: An International Comparative Analysis of Policies across 44 Cities

Introduction: Women’s labor force participation remains substantially lower than men’s worldwide, reflecting persistent gender inequalities in the division of labor and enduring social expectations surrounding women’s caregiving roles. A wide range of social policies—including childcare, family leave, eldercare services, flexible work arrangements, and employment support programs—has been introduced across welfare contexts to facilitate women’s participation in the labor market. Yet existing research has focused primarily on childcare and leave policies, with limited attention to policy bundles and their combined effects on employment outcomes. In addition, most comparative studies have been confined to OECD countries and other high-income settings. This study addresses these gaps by examining policies that support women’s employment from a global comparative perspective. We ask two questions: What policy packages do countries adopt to support women’s employment? How are different policy typologies associated with the gender gap in labor force participation?

Methods: We compiled policy data for 44 cities worldwide. To address the first question, we use Fuzzy Set Ideal Type Analysis (FSITA) to identify distinct configurations of work-supportive policies. To address the second, we use Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to examine which policy combinations are associated with smaller gender gaps in labor force participation. Our framework includes three dimensions: Substitution, Work–Family Reconciliation, and Training and Services. Substitution captures policies that reduce unpaid care burdens, including childcare provision, access to foreign domestic helpers, and eldercare services. Work–Family Reconciliation includes flexible work arrangements and family leave policies that help individuals combine employment and caregiving. Training and Services covers employment-oriented supports such as job training, hiring subsidies, and women’s entrepreneurship support. Based on theory and prior literature, each policy attribute is coded on a 0–1 scale, with higher scores indicating stronger support. The outcome for the fsQCA is the female-to-male labor force participation ratio.

Results and Conclusion: The most common configuration, found in 31.8% of cities, combines strong reconciliation and training support with weak substitution policies (e.g., Toronto, Beijing, Buenos Aires). A further 27% of cities provide strong support across all three dimensions (e.g., New York City, London, Oslo, Seoul, Berlin), while 20.5% emphasize training and services but remain weak in the other two dimensions (e.g., Mexico City, Nairobi, Cape Town, Bangkok). Although many developing economies provide limited substitution support, many have expanded reconciliation and employment-related measures. Next, our fsQCA results show that where substitution support is weak, other policies do not close the gender gap in labor force participation, even when reconciliation and training support are strong. In every statistically significant pathway associated with a smaller gender gap, high substitution support is present. The most robust policy package combines strong substitution policies with strong reconciliation measures.

Implications: This is, to our knowledge, one of the first studies to examine work–family policy configurations across a broad range of countries. By analyzing how different policy combinations operate across diverse institutional contexts, the study offers cross-national insights into pathways that support women’s labor force participation and underscores the importance of integrated policy frameworks for promoting gender-equitable labor market outcomes.