Fontaine, Anne Marie <br/><br/>
Values Shared by Working Couples 

 -  2006.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 3 
<br/><br/> Women’s professional role has brought new demands for the family life. The balance of family and professional roles is a salient field revealing what is acceptable or desired for each role. For this, the couples take into account social values and their influence in the distribution of roles and in the share of family tasks. The present study aims to analyse the values shared by young couples with toddlers by comparing the adherence to cultural values in 9 different countries: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland. The country comparison showed differences according to the dominant styles - egalitarian or conservatism - as well as in the homogeneity of the adherence to the cultural values by the couples. Most of the Swiss, German and Dutch couples hold egalitarian values while most of the Italian and Portuguese couples hold conservative values. The cultural values shared by the couples in these countries are more homogeneous than those shared by the Belgium, French, Finnish and Austrian couples.