The Reshaping of Gender Roles and Families' Capacity of Resilience to Face the Reconciliation Problems. the Analysis of the Relationship Between Work and Family in the US and in Europe.

During the last decades the socio-economic structure of Western society, also as a result of the overlap between demographic and economic changes, has seen important transformation that have eroded guarantees and safety, destabilising the principal mechanisms of socio-economic regulation.  All of this has occurred in a context in which the welfare systems are not able to provide a social safety net to protect those who are most affected by the negative situation and by the consequent risk of marginalisation. The recent crisis has worsened an already difficult situation, causing imbalances in the distribution of resources and opportunities. Family and work represent two of the main dimensions, to understand  the contemporary social changes. At the same time, the analysis of the relation between family and work offers a possibility to understand the capacity of the families to be resilient, in a scenario where the work-family policies are often the weak link of the welfare systems. About these topics the US and Europe represent an interesting field of analysis. This paper aims at analyzing the resilient capacity of the family to face the changing, starting from the analysis of the different models of the work family organization and from the different role played at the protection of the policies. The analysis is based on OECD data (comparative databases on social policy and  family policy  in Europe and in the US) and on  EUROSTAT and US CENSUS data,  in order to analyze the work family models.