Rosemary Crompton, Women and Work in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, paper £9.99, xi+155 pp.

Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations, London: Routledge, 1997, paper £13.99, x+245 pp.

Sue Hatt, Gender, Work and Labour Markets, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997, paper £16.99, xi+200 pp.

Ann Brooks, Academic Women, Buckingham: Open University Press, paper £18.99, xii+174 pp.

Is the condition of women in society improving or getting worse? The answer of course is both.

I was particularly struck by this statement – the publisher's blurb on the back jacket of one of the reviewed books – since it seems to capture perfectly the ambivalence about patterns of change which has dominated recent research on the topic of gender inequality and the labour market. We stand at the turn of a century which has seen significant and far-reaching change in the lives of women and men, and which – in the last thirty years – has generated a wealth of scholarship on gendered patterns. Yet it seems to me that the conclusions that can be drawn about both the nature of key changes and the current state of gender difference are still far from clear. The complexity of the patterns that are being uncovered undoubtedly offer a difficult challenge to theories of gender inequality and gender differences yet, paradoxically, a period of great theoretical caution seems to be underway.