Changes of female professional activity in France and in Germany since the 1960s: low-level jobs in the public sector.
The status of female activity is always different in two otherwise similar European countries: unlike in France, being married and having children in Germany always increases the gap between women with a continuous professional activity and those without one. Starting from this general assessment, this article aims at analysing the extent to which jobs in the public sector, as well as the practices of women in these jobs, influence this tendency. I particularly study the role of a prototype of female salaried activity considered as poorly qualified through a qualitative analysis of the relation to work and to employment in a subgroup of employees as a social and professional category (or CSP in French), namely the operators of the telephone information service.