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Despite Sweden having more comprehensive work-family policies to support working-age women than the US, examining several traditional indicators of positive opportunities and outcomes for working women (i.e., labor force participation, concentration in part-time work, and occupational segregation) does not suggest that Sweden outperforms the United States on all of these indicators. Accordingly, two questions arise: how can one explain these results, and how should one evaluate how positive the opportunities and outcomes for working-age women are in the United States compared to Sweden? I hypothesize that traditional methods of cross national analysis lack the ability to provide an insightful comparison of the US and Sweden in terms of the opportunities and outcomes they provide working-age women because they focus too much on the institutional differences in work-family policies between the two countries instead of the differences in the actual impacts and meanings of these institutions at the national level. Drawing on Locke and Thelen’s contextualized comparison approach, I posit that instead of assuming that the observation of a more traditionally ‘positive’ outcome in one country automatically implies the existence of a more traditionally 'negative' outcome in the other, it is necessary to determine if the labor market structures in each country are actually providing women with the experiences that they desire. With this in mind, I argue that because the differences in the 'positive' and 'negative' opportunities and outcomes experienced by working age women in the US and Sweden may actually correspond to divergences in the work-family preferences of working-age women from each country, both countries may be providing working-age women with the opportunities and outcomes that are more positive for them. To assess the validity of this argument, I examine the attitudes of working-age women from the US and Sweden towards work and family issues, their reported levels of work-family conflict, and their reported levels of well-being utilizing data from the ISSP 2012 Family and Changing Gender Roles module and the ISSP 2015 Work Orientations module. I find evidence to support my argument that women’s own values and ideas about combining work and family life, as well as their job preferences, would contribute to different opportunities and outcomes being positive for women in the US than for women in Sweden. Furthermore, the apparent differences in labor market opportunities and outcomes for women between the US and Sweden align with what the preferences of working-age women in each country would predict. I also find that working-age women in the US and Sweden do not report highly different levels of work-family conflict and that on the whole, working-age women in the US report higher levels of well-being in terms of their general happiness, family life satisfaction, and job satisfaction than their Swedish counterparts. Broadly, it appears that the contrasting labor market and work-family policy structures of the US and Sweden each promote (or at least do not prevent) the fulfillment of the needs and desires of working-age women living in these countries. This finding seems to suggest that countries would benefit from an individualized approach to developing work-family policies that meet the needs of their unique populations. Furthermore, it highlights the need for novel approaches to measuring the impact of work-family policies within their unique contexts.
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