.... As recently as 1990, the United States had one of the top employment rates in the world for women, but it has now fallen behind many European countries. After climbing for six decades, the percentage of women in the American work force peaked in 1999, at 74 percent for women between 25 and 54. It has fallen since, to 69 percent today.

In many other countries, however, the percentage of working women has continued to climb. Switzerland, Australia, Germany and France now outrank the United States in prime-age women’s labor force participation, as do Canada and Japan.

While the downturn and the weak economy of recent years have eliminated many of the jobs women held, a lack of family-friendly policies also appears to have contributed to the lower rate. In a New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll of nonworking adults aged 25 to 54 in the United States, conducted last month, 61 percent of women said family responsibilities were a reason they weren’t working, compared with 37 percent of men. Of women who identify as homemakers and have not looked for a job in the last year, nearly three-quarters said they would consider going back if a job offered flexible hours or allowed them to work from home.

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Nearly a third of the relative decline in women’s labor-force participation in the United States, compared with European countries, can be explained by Europe’s expansion of policies like paid parental leave, part-time work and child care and the lack of those policies in the United States, according to a study by Ms. Blau and Lawrence Kahn, also of Cornell. Had the United States had the same policies, they calculated, women’s labor force participation rate would have been seven percentage points higher by 2010.

Starting in the 1970s, people began marrying later, having fewer children and divorcing more often, so women invested more in their education and careers. “Women could be more serious in college, plan for an independent future and form their identities before marriage and family,” Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, wrote in a history of women’s economic roles.

But some attitudes in the United States have also stalled since the feminist revolution. A Pew Research Centersurvey from 2007 reported that 41 percent of adults say it is bad for society when mothers with young children work and just 22 percent say it is good. A recent Harvard Business School study found that among its graduates in their 20s, men expected that their careers would be more important than their wives’ and that they would do less child care, while women expected equality. Because of these conflicting attitudes, women sometimes feel unable to work even if they want to, said Ms. Stone, an author of the Harvard study. “Often the best they can do is not what they prefer, but what’s available to them.”