Gender regimes involve a whole lot more than the state's policies with respect to taxes, transfer payments and child-care subsidies. Still, the way in which those policies are gendered is an important if incomplete fact about the gender regime of any given country.

What we have found is that countries differ significantly in their gendering of those policies, and those differences form recognizable patterns. Those patterns fit broadly, but not perfectly, within traditional ‘regime’ categories. Our findings suggest a new set of cross-cutting dimensions that students of gender regimes might want to add to those conventional ones.

In summary form, our findings can be stated as follows:

Women have most temporal autonomy in social-democratic regimes. They have 5 or 6 hours a week more discretionary time there than they do in liberal or corporatist regimes, respectively. Once again, however, that is largely due to factors outside the scope of our study.

In all regimes, women have less temporal autonomy than do men. Generally their discretionary time is less than men's by 2 to 3 hours a week. The outliers – in both directions – are countries conventionally categorized as traditional-conservative ‘corporatist’ regimes (5.5 in France, 0.5 in Germany).

That gender gap would everywhere be greater if it were not for state taxes, transfers and child-care subsidies. By how much differs, however. Liberal regimes reduce the gender gap by over an hour, social-democratic ones by less than half-an-hour. Within the corporatist cluster, countries once again differ.