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The Structure of Women's Employment in Comparative Perspective
Abstract
In this paper we analyze social survey data from 19 countries using multi-level modeling methods in an effort to synthesize structural and institutional accounts for variation in women's employment. Observed demographic characteristics show much consistency in their relationship to women's employment across countries, yet there is significant variation in the effect of demographic characteristics on women's employment across countries. Disentangling specific policy conditions from overall policy generosity leads us to discover important non-linearities in the effects of parental leave on the employment of women with young children, and that federally supported childcare is positively related to the probability of employment of married women and women with young children.
... Extended exits from employment can have strong effects on later re-engagement in the form of skill atrophy by losing skills in which they are not actively practicing and/or skill deterioration by missing out on developing new skills that are up-to-date. Highly educated women are less likely to leave the labour market after becoming mothers (Pettit and Hook 2005). This may be due to the fact they earn higher incomes and have more interesting and rewarding jobs, as compared to those with less education. ...
... As an alternative to an interruption in employment, part-time employment may help women avoid the penalties associated with career breaks (Stier, Lewin-Epstein, and Braun 2001). Depending on the national context, this type of employment may act as either a 'bridge' to later full-time work or as a 'trap' into long-term low-hour employment (Pettit and Hook 2005). ...
... Both childcare services and paid parental leave are essential in supporting labour market participation after family formation (Gornick and Meyers 2006). Although publicly supported childcare has been shown to increase the probability of married women and women with young children being employed (Pettit and Hook 2005), there is debate in the literature about the optimal length of maternity leaves for encouraging mothers' labour market participation (Nieuwenhuis, van der Kolk, and Need 2017). The availability of childcare before and after school and on school holidays is also a contributing factor. ...
This article compares the education, employment, and care work biographical sequences of Canadian and German women and men from late adolescence into mid-adulthood. Through the lenses of comparative gendered life course theory and welfare regime theory, sequence and cluster analyses are used to determine the adult life course sequences of women and men in each country and to assess the extent to which they differ across contexts. The analyses reveal clear gender differences in work-family balance in labour market participation and unpaid care work. Groups also differ strongly on educational attainment, income, and family composition. Comparatively, gender differences are less marked in the Canadian context. These results suggest that differing gendered trajectories result in diverse outcomes depending on the national context, shaping different outcomes for women cross-nationally. Our findings highlight how historical and contemporary country specific welfare state policies support or hinder women as active and productive members of society.
... This, in turn, has important consequences for women's careers. There is wide evidence that mothers are less often employed than childless women (Pettit and Hook 2005), have poorer promotion prospects (Correll et al. 2007;Heilman and Okimoto 2008), and tend to receive lower wages (Budig et al. 2012; Cukrowska-Torzewska and Matysiak 2020). ...
... Gender differences in labour market outcomes vary substantially across countries and this diversity is usually attributed to the variation in family and labour market policies. Highly accessible public childcare with long opening hours is probably one of the most efficient instruments supporting mothers' participation in the labour market (De Henau et al. 2011;Pettit and Hook 2005) and their relative pay (Budig et al. 2012(Budig et al. , 2016. Not much is known, however, on whether an increase in the childcare quality would encourage an earlier labour market (re-)entry of new mothers. ...
... When it comes to leave policies, empirical evidence suggests a non-linear relationship between leave duration and women's employment (Pettit and Hook 2005), earnings (Budig et al. 2012(Budig et al. , 2016, or promotion (Evertsson and Duvander 2011). This evidence is largely consistent with theoretical predictions which presuppose that short leave should have a positive influence on mothers' employment as it allows for taking time off from work without terminating work contract and for arranging proper childcare before employment (re-)entry. ...
... This study aims to contribute to an understanding of the effects of different types of leave, unpaid parental leave in particular, on how family responsibilities are shared by the two partners. According to the literature, the latter widen the gender gap in paid employment (Pettit & Hook, 2005;Boeckmann et al., 2015;Rossin-Slater 2017), in turn magnifying the imbalance in the distribution of unpaid work. ...
... A substantial corpus of research shows that full-time parental leave has a variable impact on employment. Pettit and Hook (2005), for example, analysing time-use surveys in 19 countries, found the relationship between parental leave and mothers' employment to fit an inverted U-shaped curve: whereas short-term leaves, associated with an early return to the workplace, had a beneficial effect on employment, when taken for longer times the effect tended to be adverse. Using similar data for approximately the same countries, Boeckmann et al. (2015) show that employment was impacted not only by leave duration but also by remuneration: unpaid leaves tended to be associated with wider employment rate and working hour gaps between mothers and childless women, while paid leaves were either neutral or associated with narrower differences. ...
... The impact of leave-taking for over 1 year may be attributable to legal provisions whereby return to the same position is not guaranteed after 12 months, perhaps weakening the incentive to resume employment and enhancing dedication to childcare. That finding deviates from earlier results (Saraceno & Keck, 2008;Pettit & Hook, 2005;Boeckmann et al., 2015) according to which mothers' use of unpaid leave of whatsoever duration amplifies inequality. A number of external factors may underlie this divergence, one possibly being the selective bias inherent in the use of the leave. ...
Objective: The question addressed in this study is the possible effect of mothers' use of parental leave on the share of childcare and housework assumed by each parent.
Background: Whilst the length of parental leave is greater in Spain than in other European countries, as it is unpaid, take-up rates are low. Such leaves are taken more frequently and for longer periods by women than men.
Method: To determine the answer, two multivariate regression models were applied to National Statistics Institute 2018 Fertility Survey data. The main independent variables were fathers' and mothers' use of parental leave. The models also controlled for the effects of family and socio-economic variables on the share of childcare and housework assumed by each parent.
Results: The findings showed that mothers' use of unpaid full-time parental leave traditionalises the distribution of domestic chores only when the leave extends beyond one year, whereas part-time leave-taking has no effect whatsoever. That such reversion to tradition can be neutralised when fathers take leaves attests to the advisability of encouraging paternal use. The effects apply to childcare only, however, for other household chores are still distributed along very traditional lines.
Conclusion: Unpaid parental leave use by mothers "traditionalizes" the allocation of childcare within the couple, but only when it takes longer than a year.
... We connect the dissimilation perspective to the literature discussing several core factors shaping women's employment (see Van der Lippe and Van Dijk, 2002;Pettit and Hook, 2005;Spierings, 2015a;Guveli and Spierings, 2021). The most relevant of these factors are also central to our theoretical discussion below. ...
... young) children increases care needs in the household. Because providing care is considered more women's than men's role, the presence of young children decreases women's available time and is thus theorized to lead to lower employment (Van der Lippe and Van Dijk, 2002;Pettit and Hook, 2005;Spierings, 2015a). ...
When compared with native-born women, migrant women have lower employment likelihoods. However, to reveal the relationship between migration and employment, migrant women need to be compared to those remaining in the origin regions and across generations. This study is the first to fill this gap by employing a dissimilation-from-origins and across-generations perspective. We test the hypothesis that migration to more welfare-state based and liberal contexts increase women’s employment likelihood among migrants and the second generation. The 2000 Families data enable a unique comparison of Turkish international migrants, including Turkish-origin women born in Europe, and their non-migrant counterparts from the same regions in Turkey. Furthermore, we theorize and test whether differences in employment are explained by differences in family composition, education, and culture (religiosity and gender attitudes). We find migration leads to a higher likelihood of paid employment for the second generation and international migrant women, in that order. Education and religiosity are the main explanatory factors for differences between non-migrants and the international migrants, including the second generation. Parenthood, while explaining differences between migrant and destination ‘native’ women, hardly explains differences between migrant women and their non-migrant counterparts. Overall, we find strong support for the hypothesis that migration increases women’s employment.
... Jaumotte (2003) concluded that in OECD countries, the optimal leave duration is approximately twenty weeks. On the contrary, Pettit and Hook (2005) found a negative impact of leave taking on mothers' employment only after the third year of leave in some countries (e.g., Finland, Germany, and Hungary), but found no association in France. Other authors have found no clear relationship between leave duration and labor market outcomes in European countries (Keck and Saraceno 2013). ...
... First, we expect a negative association between leave duration and women's wages, because leave-taking entails a deterioration of human capital or because it is interpreted as a signal of low commitment by employers. As previous research has shown, this negative relationship might be curvilinear (Pettit and Hook 2005). Second, we also expect that the use of part-time parental leave is associated with a smaller penalty than the use of full-time leave of the same duration, because both the deterioration of human capital and the signaling effect are lower. ...
The persistence of a wage gap between mothers and non-mothers has been widely analyzed. However, we know little about the impact of family policies on this relative motherhood penalty. This study investigates the extent to which unpaid leave granted for longer-term care of young children after an initial spell of maternity leave affects the motherhood wage gap, and whether full-time leave and part-time leave differ in this respect. We use panel data from the Continuous Sample of Working Lives and rely on a sample consisting of 959,359 women aged twenty-five to forty-seven between 2005 and 2012. We find first a negative association between use and duration of unpaid parental leave and mothers’ wages, and second that a full-time unpaid leave carries higher wage penalties than a part-time unpaid leave of the same duration. This study has major implications for policymaking.
... Young mothers who have no leave or only very short leave are more likely to become NEETs (OECD, 2011;Nieuwenhuis et al., 2012). However, if parental leave is too long, the resulting human capital depreciation and foregone work experience also create an impediment for women who seek to return to work (Pettit and Hook, 2005;Boeckmann et al., 2014;Nieuwenhuis et al., 2017). So, we may expect that: ...
... This could be due to the use of overly long leaves that have a negative impact on education and labour market outcomes. For example, previous literature has shown that overly long leave schemes create more distance from the labour market due to human capital depreciation and experience loss (Pettit and Hook, 2005;Boeckmann, Misra, and Budig, 2014;Nieuwenhuis, Need, and Van der Kolk, 2017). This makes it more difficult for women to get back into employment or education after their leave. ...
This book studies young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET); a prime concern among policymakers. Moving past common interpretations of NEETs as a homogeneous group, it asks why some youth become NEET, whereas others do not. The authors analyse diverse school-to-work patterns of young NEETs in five typical countries and investigate the role of individual characteristics, countries’ institutions and policies, and their complex interplay.
Readers will come to understand youth marginalization as a process that may occur during the transition from school, vocational college, or university to work. By studying longitudinal analyses of processes and transitions, readers will gain the crucial insight that NEETs are not equally vulnerable, and that most NEETs will find their way back to the labour market. However, they will also see that in all countries, a group of long-term NEETs exists. These exceptionally vulnerable young people are sidelined from society and the labour market. The country cases and cross-national studies illustrate that policies intended to help long-term NEETs to find their way in society are very limited.
The book provides useful theoretical and empirical insights for scholars interested in the school-to-work transition and marginalized youth. It also provides helpful insights in vulnerability to policymakers who aim to combat youth marginalization.
Available via Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003096658/dynamics-marginalized-youth-mark-levels-christian-brzinsky-fay-craig-holmes-janine-jongbloed-hirofumi-taki
... Comparatively, childcare leave (e.g., extended) with low levels of bene ts may support and emphasise maternal care of children at home Wall & Escobedo, 2013). Extensive leave durations were argued to be associated with traditional breadwinner model, with women combining motherhood and work sequentially rather than concurrently (Pettit & Hook, 2005;Wall & Escobedo, 2013). Accordingly, the activity rates of women without or with children (aged six and below) differ signi cantly, and maternal employment levels are low in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Poland (Wall & Escobedo, 2013). ...
Gender disparities in paid work persist, despite implementing family-friendly work conditions (FFWCs) aimed at increasing women’s paid work participation. Global evidence demonstrates an interaction between gender and welfare regimes that underpin FFWCs, which may render them ineffective in achieving the goal of equitable participation. However, the existing findings are not easily transferrable to the Malaysian context. Evidence for hidden inequities in FFWCs documents in the context of gender and welfare regime in Malaysia has not been comprehensively uncovered. This document analysis aids in exploring which FFWCs has been documented and uncovering FFWCs’ interpretation in the context of gender concepts and welfare regime in Malaysia. Thirty-six documents on FFWCs were reviewed. Findings showed some distinction in the identified FFWCs between public sector, private and international organisations, yet the differences indicated all organisations maintain and conform with Malaysia’s welfare regime. While the intent of FFWCs focuses on women’s inclusion in the workforce, there appeared to be tensions with the values underlying welfare regime in preserving values associated with traditional family systems. This paper offers a way forward in Malaysian FFWCs by accounting for the influence of traditional gender role ideology and reframing women's and gender narratives, including the use of gender-neutral language.
... As difficulty reconciling work and family has become a more visible social issue over the last half-century (Chung & van der Horst, 2018;Lewis, 2009;Pettit & Hook, 2005;Ruppanner & Huffman, 2014), so social policy research has investigated patterns and drivers of institutional support for work-family reconciliation (Bettio & Plantenga, 2004;Daly, 2010;Gornick & Meyers, 2008;Hook, 2015;Pettit & Hook, 2009). Although more research examines public provision (Baum, 2006;Daly & Ferragina, 2018;Hank & Steinbach, 2019), employer-provided family policy is also a major source of institutional support for employees (Glass & Fodor, 2018;Ooms, 2019). 1 Public family policy research tends to interpret patterns of provision as shaped by economic as well as normative considerations (Bergqvist & Saxonberg, 2017;Ferragina & Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015;Sarna et al., 2013). ...
Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.
... relationship between social policies and the well-known motherhood penalty (Mandel and Semyonov 2005;Pettit and Hook 2005;Mandel 2012;Keck and Saraceno 2013;Abendroth et al. 2014;Adema et al. 2014) is often combined with cultural attitudes (Budig et al. 2012) or pandemic-related issues (Del Boca et al. 2020;Yavorsky et al. 2021). Recent studies have begun to approach this issue using a qualitative research framework (Ferragina 2020) or by simply revising the literature (Ferragina 2019). ...
... Analyses of women's employment trajectories over multiple time periods in the United States demonstrate that most women experience changes in their employment status over the life course, often as a result of particular events, such as childbearing (Aisenbrey and Fasang 2017;Killewald and Zhuo 2019;Lu et al. 2017;Pettit and Hook 2005). Furthermore, this research shows that these employment experiences can be clustered in meaningful ways that can help us understand the relationship between women's employment and other dimensions of the lives of women and their families. ...
Background: Across the globe, employment for pay outside the home plays a key role in the lives of women, and increasing the proportion of women involved in high-quality jobs is a critical component of reaching several sustainable development goals. While existing research from high-income societies demonstrates that women's employment is not constant over the life course, relatively less is known about women's employment trajectories in low-income countries. Objective: We examine employment trajectories among women in rural Nepal, accounting for job type, employment intensity, and earnings. Methods: Using eight years of quarterly employment data from the 2016 Female Labor Force Participation and Child Outcomes Study component of the Chitwan Valley Family Study, we identify typologies of employment trajectories by conducting sequence and cluster analyses. Results: First, half of the women in our sample were never employed in the study period. Second, among women who were ever employed, there were considerable transitions into and out of the workforce. Third, women's employment trajectories are largely determined by job type (wage labor, salaried jobs, and self-employment), with little movement across job types. Additionally, self-employed women and those with salaried jobs had higher earnings and higher employment intensity than women with wage labor jobs. Conclusions: We see intense stratification into job types, including no employment at all, and substantial transitions into and out of the workforce among workers. Women experience many employment disruptions over the life course, with little sign of upward employment mobility. Contribution: This study provides new empirical portraits of women's employment in low-income settings by investigating the multiple dimensions of women's employment from a life course perspective.
... Over two decades ago, Gornick et al. (1997) showed how national policies to facilitate paid employmentincluding parental-leave policies, tax policies and childcare policiesare strongly related to maternal employment. Pettit and Hook (2005) focused on how state policies impact on employment rates of mothers with young children versus childless women. They found that the 'child penalty' was smaller in countries where public childcare services are sufficiently available and parental-leave entitlements are generous. ...
... Another limitation is that this study did not investigate variation in the effects of parental leave reform between subgroups of women, documented in previous research (Andersson et al., 2006;Cannonier, 2014;Cygan-Rehm, 2016;Võrk et al., 2009). Nor did our study address the effect of leave taking on parents' subsequent labour market position and earnings (Budig et al., 2012;Evertsson & Duvander, 2011;Lalive & Zweimüller, 2009;Pettit & Hook, 2005). We expect that some of these issues can be addressed in our future research. ...
Previous studies have documented varying fertility responses to changes in parental leave provisions. We contribute to this literature by investigating the effects on
the transition to second and third births of a policy reform that introduced generous earnings-dependent parental leave benefits in Estonia in 2004. Our study employs
a mixture cure model, a model with some useful properties that has been seldom
applied in fertility research. The advantage of the cure model over conventional
event history models is the ability to distinguish the efect of the covariates on the
propensity to have a next child from their effect on the tempo of childbearing. The
results show that the transition to next birth accelerated as parents responded to so-called speed premium, a feature that allowed them to avoid a reduction in benefits caused by a reduction of earned income between births, through the closer spacing of births. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the introduction of generous earning-related parental leave was associated with a substantial increase in the progression to both second and third births.
... Over two decades ago, Gornick et al. (1997) showed how national policies to facilitate paid employmentincluding parental-leave policies, tax policies and childcare policiesare strongly related to maternal employment. Pettit and Hook (2005) focused on how state policies impact on employment rates of mothers with young children versus childless women. They found that the 'child penalty' was smaller in countries where public childcare services are sufficiently available and parental-leave entitlements are generous. ...
... This could be explained by an anchor effect (Kluve and Schmitz, 2018): if the maternity leave increases the probability of job continuity, employers would reward this return to work by raising job quality, thus avoiding a negative influence on the gender wage gap. Hence, our results for the special case of young university graduates do not support the idea that excessively long leaves could undermine women's position in the labor market as others have pointed out (Datta Gupta et al., 2006;Pettit and Hook, 2005). Nevertheless, in our data, maternity leaves appear to have no effect on reducing the employment gender gap in access to top wages. ...
This article analyzes the gender gap in wages and access to managerial positions among university graduates in 12 European countries and explores the capability of work-family balance policies to close these gaps. Using the REFLEX database, we apply the coarsened exact matching algorithm to construct a balanced sample of women and men with the same academic characteristics (field of study, internships, and academic achievement, among others). The analysis reveals that the academic program characteristics play a relevant role in labor market outcomes as the gender gaps diminish when controlling for academic features. We find that gender differences in hourly wages and access to top wages are smaller in countries with longer paid paternity leaves and larger enrollment rates of children aged 0-3 years in preschools. In contrast, work-family reconciliation policies have little effect on the constraints women face in accessing high-level positions that require strong commitment and availability.
... Многочисленные эмпирические исследования свидетельствуют о том, что влияние гарантий по сохранению рабочих мест молодых матерей на вероятность и качество их последующей занятости является неоднозначным. В работе (Pettit, Hook 2005) было показано, что эффект длительности родительского отпуска на последующую занятость не линеен. Зависимость вероятности трудоустройства матери от длины отпуска имеет перевернутую U-образную форму: для не слишком больших значений этот эффект положительный, наличие отпуска способствует сохранению связи матерей с рынком труда, однако его продление заметно снижает вероятность трудоустройства. ...
В данной работе мы изучаем длительность пребывания молодых матерей в отпуске по уходу за ребенком и факторы, которые оказывают на нее влияние. Для оценок мы использовали регрессионный анализ длительности событий, примененный к двадцатилетней панели данных национального репрезентативного обследования РМЭЗ НИУ-ВШЭ. Как показывают результаты исследования, при прочих равных более раннему выходу на работу из отпуска способствуют лучшая связь с рынком труда (более высокий уровень образования, наличие оплачиваемой работы накануне рождения ребенка), а также наличие внешних и внутрисемейных ресурсов по уходу за ребенком. Наоборот, сдерживают выход молодой матери на работу более зрелый возраст, рождение следующего ребенка, а также проживание в регионах с относительно низкой средней заработной платой. Также было показано, что вероятность более раннего выхода на работу после рождения первого ребенка в 2010-х годах значимо снизилась по сравнению с 2000-ми, что мы объясняем введением программы материнского капитала и усилением материальной поддержки семей с детьми, которые в совокупности со стагнацией трудовых доходов могли снизить заинтересованность семей в быстром возвращении молодых матерей на работу. Международные сравнения показывают, что Россия относится к группе стран с наибольшей длительностью оплачиваемого отпуска по беременности и родам и уходу за ребенком, находясь при этом лишь в 4-м квинтиле по уровню экономической активности женщин 15-64 лет. С учетом полученных результатов мы предлагаем совершенствовать политику в отношении родительских отпусков. Среди возможных способов модернизации существующей схемы могут быть рассмотрены гибкий отпуск (сокращение длительности при сохранении суммарных выплат), прерывистый отпуск (предоставление родителям права при необходимости вернуться к неоплачиваемому отпуску), а также введение непередаваемого отцовского отпуска.
... however, there is still a gender gap in that participation, and particularly so when women have children (cf. Lewis 2009;Pettit and hook 2005). At the same time, the assumption that women who are not in paid work or are not "primary workers" due to care can derive an income through the family obligates women to maintain a tie to (male) breadwinners, while economic dependency underpins power relations within a household (Orloff 1993). ...
In high-income countries, both single parents and migrants face elevated risks of living in poverty, but research has paid little attention to the intersection of single parent and migrant status. I examine the ways in which immigration policies make migrants dependent either on the labor market or on their families as a spouse or partner and how these dependencies present risks to migrant women who are single parents. I draw on qualitative data on migrant women’s experiences in the first five years after migration to the UK, which include their transitions to single parenthood, to explore how their legal status affects the risks that they experience. Those risks concern exclusion from access to social protection and permanent legal residence, where access is contingent on the ability to maintain a relationship to the market as a worker or to the family through marriage or a stable partnership.
... Economic growth, a prerequisite of a nation's development, requires both men and women in the workforce. One of the most significant social transformations of the second half of the 20th century entailed a major inflow of women into the paid labour force, which culminated in the establishment of childcare centres in most European cities, with the first in Great Britain in 1860 (Pettit and Hook, 2005). Non-parent childcare for infants under 12 months is becoming more common in many countries due to parental work commitments (Brownlee et al., 2007). ...
Purpose
This study aims to explore whether the working parents' perception about the necessity of childcare centres for their work efficiency is associated with their anxieties and concerns related to their dual responsibilities, i.e. providing proper parental childcare and maintaining work efficiency.
Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 100 employed parents, from the Jashore region of Bangladesh, was surveyed, and descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data.
Findings
It was revealed that there is a strong association between the perceived negative impact on job performance, childcare, child development, work efficiency and perceived need for a childcare centre.
Research limitations/implications
The limitation of this study is that it was confined to Jashore University of Science and Technology. The results may differ from those of the study conducted outside this study area and the methodology used here.
Practical implications
This study has significant practical implications for employers, childcare service providers and policy makers, especially in Bangladesh. The employers will be able to understand the demand for childcare services centres among the employed parents in respective organizations. It will draw attention of employers of knowledge intensive industries and grants commission to the issue of conflict of work and childcare-related responsibilities of employed parents. This will also make employers conscious about the dilemma that is undergone by employed parents motivating them to take actions for minimizing such conflicts to ensure better job performance of working parents.
Social implications
Based on this study, childcare providers and other policy makers will be able to ascertain the potential size of the childcare market and determine the requirement for investment in childcare-related human resources development. As the work and childcare responsibilities compete for limited time of working parents, either childcare or job performance suffers. This causes concerns, anxieties or remorse, which again hampers the job performance further. Therefore, this study may motivate the university authority around the world, specifically those in Bangladesh, to provide childcare facilities for its faculties, students and other employees.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature on growing demand for centre-based childcare services in an emerging economy context. It provides evidence of high demand for on- and off-site childcare centres to enhance work efficiency of working parents.
... High replacement rates are not commonly found for periods of leave much longer than a year, and we do not consider leave payments in the second or third year in the measure. Longer leave lengths may not align with the principles of social investment-oriented support as there is some evidence that labour market attachment can be negatively affected (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2017;Pettit & Hook, 2005;Thévenon & Solaz, 2013). To capture the full degree of earnings-relatedness, the parent on leave is assumed to have worked two years before childbirth, earning an average production worker´s wage, before spending a leave period with the new born. ...
This study analyses the influence of family policies on women’s first and second births in 20 countries over the period 1995 to 2007. Welfare states have shifted towards social investment policies, yet family policy–fertility research has not explicitly considered this development. We distinguish between social investment-oriented and passive support that families may receive upon the birth of a child and consider changes in policies over time. These indicators are merged with fertility histories provided by harmonized individual-level data, and we use time-conditioned, fixed effects linear probability models. We find higher social investment-oriented support to be correlated with increased first birth probabilities, in contrast to passive family support. First birth probabilities particularly declined with higher passive family support for women over age 30, which points to a potential increase in childlessness. Social investment-oriented support is positively related to first and second births particularly for lower-educated women and has no relationship to childbirth for highly educated women, countering the Matthew-effect assumptions about social investment policies. Passive support is negatively related to second births for post-secondary educated women and those who are studying. Family policies that support women’s employment and labour market attachment are positively linked to family expansion and these policies minimize educational differences in childbearing.
... This study examines the relationship between factors that have been studied in context of other employer-family policies or with regard to childcare in other countries to address to what extent these help explain employerprovided childcare in the United States. It is necessary to isolate childcare as opposed to other family policy instruments that employers can offer (such as flexible working or parenting leave policies), as previous research suggests that outcomes vary depending on the family policy instrument (Ferragina, 2019;Pettit & Hook, 2005). Importantly, this study examines only voluntary employer provision, as opposed to mandatory provision which is an important component of the public family policy package in many countries (Baum, 2006). ...
Persistent work-family conflict in the wake of heightened female labor force participation is one of the pressing social issues that has been carried over from the late 20 th into the early 21 st century. Insufficient childcare in particular has been an area of focus for policymakers across the OECD. Yet as efforts to increase public childcare and study its effects on various social outcomes have increased, employer-provided childcare has been overlooked. This is particularly true in the United States, where the context of a weak welfare states makes employer-provided family policies of particular relevance. This article picks up the employer-side of the work-family conflict debate and examines what factors help explain employer-provided childcare in the United States. It is the first to do so using a representative sample since 1997. Analysing employer data from the year 2016, the logistic regression results show that the size of the employer by number of employees, skills and female executives are the most relevant predictors of employer-provided childcare.
... A weakness of this approach is that it considers parenting leaves as familialistic policies without considering that differences in their design for instance their length, level of pay or the structure of parental leave entitlementssignificantly alter both their goals and outcomes 3 . For instance, there is considerable empirical evidence showing that very long leaves have negative effect on mothers' labour market participation, while leave of moderate length contribute to retain women in employment (Budig et al., 2012;Pettit & Hook, 2005). ...
This chapter locates the analysis of parenting leaves across thirty years of development of comparative gender and welfare state research. It shows that while parenting leaves did not receive much consideration in early welfare regime analysis, their prominence grew as scholars started to pay attention to other levels of analysis and the influence of care regimes and policy instruments on gender relations. This scholarship has been strategic in highlighting the transformative potential of some leave policy designs, while also placing parenting leaves within broader policy configurations. However, as research on leave developed and became more sophisticated, it still remained focused on an undifferentiated notion of woman and narrowly focused on issues relating to employment, motherhood and parenthood. This chapter concludes by making a case for the greater integration between different levels of analysis and attention to intersectionality as well as the recognition of the pervasiveness of care needs along the life course of every individual.
... Neoclassical economic theory suggests that women's decision to enter the labor market is the result of changes in the cost-benefit relationship of wages relative to activities such as housework, home production, and leisure time (Pettit and Hook, 2005). ...
The aim of this work is to study the link between women's employment rate in the labor market and waste management in Tunisia on the one hand and on the other hand to analyze the nature of the empirical relationship between these two indicators. We adopt the perspective of Malik et al (2018) while relying on an updated survey to identify the fundamental problems at the household level to find strategic steps and practices in the implementation of waste management during a ten-year period (2010-2019). The results shows that there is a positive correlation between women's activity rate and waste management.
... While many countries continue to Complimentary Contributor Copy place legal obstacles in the way of women seeking paid work, others establish measures to encourage participation (Alfarran, Pyke, and Stanton 2018;Lahey 2005). These include economic incentives for companies that hire women, tax quotas for managerial positions held by women, facilities for family reconciliation such as increased leave periods for the birth of a child or breastfeeding, financial aid, as well as reductions in working hours for mothers who decide to apply for them (Hegewisch and Gornick 2011;Pettit and Hook 2005). ...
This article interrogates the impacts of different types of family benefits expenditures on the positive relationship between female employment and fertility rates in developed welfare states. It does this by theorizing how these family benefits align with welfare state regimes’ preferences for different normative gender-role ideologies. Rather than treating family benefits as a monolith, this article investigates the impact of disaggregated expenditures in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) family policy database (1. services and in-kind benefits, 2. child-related cash benefits and 3. tax-based financial support for children) on both female employment and fertility rates. This is done using pooled time-series analysis covering the period 2000–9. The analysis yields evidence that expenditure most reflecting a ‘full egalitarian’ gender ideology including service and in-kind benefit provision has the most positive association with female employment and fertility due to an emphasis on defamiliarization. The picture for child-related cash benefits is mixed due to the presence of cash transfer provisions not employment-contingent captured in the indicator. In contrast, tax-based financial support for children harms female employment, reflecting a maternalistic ‘traditional’ ideological orientation, but is positive for fertility rates indicating a moderate pro-natal effect of tax-based financial support for children.
Purpose
This study aims to investigate whether social investment (SI) policies improve employment among single mothers.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes the potential effects of SI policies on vulnerable individuals and workers at the macro level by using the employment position of single mothers as a dependent variable. Time-series cross-national data from 18 OECD countries between 1998 and 2017 are analyzed. Multilevel model analysis is also used for robustness check.
Findings
I find that public spending on education and family support is positively associated with the employment rates of single mothers. In contrast, active labor market policy (ALMP) spending is negatively associated. ALMP’s negative effects stand out particularly with public spending on job training. Of all family support policies, family allowances are positively associated with single mothers’ employment, which runs counter to the conventional argument that family allowances are a disincentive for women’s or mothers’ employment. Paid leave (length and generosity) is also associated with higher employment for single mothers. There is also some tentative evidence that public spending on maternity leave benefits (spending level) may raise the odds of single mothers being employed, when individual-level factors are controlled for in multilevel analysis we implement for robustness check.
Research limitations/implications
This paper does not analyze the effects of the qualitative properties of SI policies. Future research is necessary in this respect.
Originality/value
The effects of SI policies on employment among single mothers have not yet been examined in the literature. This paper seeks to be a first cut at measuring the effects.
Previous studies have documented gender differences in fields of study as well as interest in school subjects. Boys are on average more interested in mathematics, and girls show greater interest in languages. The extent to which these disparities are the result of biological or environment influences is still an open debate. On the one hand, brain organisation theory suggests that physiological and behavioural differences may be linked to prenatal hormone levels. On the other hand, sociological and psychological perspectives highlight the importance of gender socialisation. This paper combines biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives to examine the emergence of gendered academic interests in children.
The study draws on data from 9‑year-old children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Our results suggest that for both boys and girls, medium to high compared with low prenatal exposure to circulating maternal testosterone might increase children’s interests in mathematics relative to English, although results vary depending on how prenatal testosterone exposure is measured. As the distributions of prenatal androgen exposure and the relationships with maths versus English interests are very similar for boys and girls, prenatal androgen exposure does not contribute to explaining gender differences in academic interests. However, we find some evidence that the relationship with parental gender socialisation varies by prenatal androgen exposure. A more gender-equal parental division of domestic work is more strongly associated with less gendered academic interests for girls with low prenatal androgen exposure and for boys with medium to high androgen exposure.
Economic and social shifts have led to rising income inequality in the world's affluent countries. This is worrisome for reasons of fairness and because inequality has adverse effects on other socioeconomic goods. Redistribution can help, but government revenues are threatened by globalization and population aging. A way out of this impasse is for countries to increase their employment rate. Increasing employment enlarges the tax base, allowing tax revenues to rise without an increase in tax rates; it also reduces welfare state costs by decreasing the amount of government benefits going to individuals and households. The question is: can egalitarian institutions and policies be coupled with employment growth? For two decades conventional wisdom has held that the answer is no. This book provides an assessment of the experiences of rich nations since the late 1970s. It examines the impact on employment of six key policies and institutions: wage levels at the low end of the labor market, employment protection regulations, government benefit generosity, taxes, skills, and women-friendly policies. The analysis includes twenty countries, with a focus on Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The book concludes that there is some indication of tradeoffs, but that they tend to be small in magnitude. There is no parsimonious set of policies and institutions that have been the key to good or bad employment performance. Instead, there are multiple paths to employment success. The comparative experience suggests reason for optimism about possibilities for a high-employment, high-equality society.
Social scientists critically examine the role of higher education in women’s empowerment. In the Indian context, gender, religion, caste, class and region are crucial in determining access to education. The gender gap has been a significant obstacle in India’s pursuit of educational goals. The status of Muslim women’s education has been a contested policy from state and community vantage. Prominent scholarly writings argue that Muslim women were even more isolated from the social and cultural changes than their men were and even more invisible in the public arena of society. Their condition is more pathetic in educational and cultural realms. The primary objective of this paper is to empirically outline the negotiation and strategies employed by Muslim women students in negotiating with their families, religion, communities and careers. The study followed qualitative methodology to understand Muslim women’s educational choices, the rationale behind their educational decisions, and their agency in negotiating with their families and the career prospects of young Muslim women. The current paper argues that there is a remarkable growth in the history of women’s education in India, especially after the 90s, which could not change the social structure and social status of women in society in general and Muslim women in particular. Still, the gender differences remained stable in the educational practices, in the families, and even in the equity-minded educational committees. According to various government reports and studies, despite the improvement in the educational enrolment rate of Muslims, the representations of the Muslim community in general and Muslim women, in particular, are minimal in higher education. More than looking at the representation of Muslim women in education institutions, the current paper will analyse the challenges and experiences of Muslim women to reach the secondary and higher secondary levels of education.
Objective
This study examined cross‐national variations in marriage and motherhood penalties between Western and East Asian countries.
Background
Little is known about how and to what extent motherhood affects women's labor market outcomes in East Asia compared to Western welfare countries. We examine employment, wage, and labor income with regard to the motherhood penalty.
Method
We selected the five countries of Finland, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States and applied probit and Heckman selection models using Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Wave IX and Korean Labor and Income Panel Survey data.
Results
Variations between Western countries and East Asian welfare states are highlighted. Married mothers with children in East Asian countries are greatly disadvantaged in employment compared to those in Western countries. Having a child is associated with lower labor income and wages by 2.9% to 4.5% across the countries, but we do not find a significant association in Germany and Korea.
Conclusion
Women experience various dimensions of motherhood penalties across countries. East Asian women are more likely to face both marriage and motherhood penalties than others.
Implication
Marriage and motherhood in East Asian countries should be understood differently from those in Western contexts. Marriage and motherhood are life events that are associated with women's employment decisions and work opportunities in East Asian countries.
As women's labor force participation has risen around the globe, scholarly and policy discourse on the ramifications of this employment growth has intensified. This book explores the links between maternal employment and child health using an international perspective that is grounded in economic theory and rigorous empirical methods. Women's labor-market activity affects child health largely because their paid work raises household income, which strengthens families' abilities to finance healthcare needs and nutritious food; however, time away from children could counteract some of the benefits of higher socioeconomic status that spring from maternal employment. New evidence based on data from nine South and Southeast Asian countries illuminates the potential tradeoff between the benefits and challenges families contend with in the face of women's labor-market activity. This book provides new, original evidence on links between maternal employment and children's health using data associated with three indicators of children's nutritional status: birth size, stunting, and wasting. Results support the implementation and enforcement of policy interventions that bolster women's advancement in the labor market and reduce undernutrition among children. Scholars, students, policymakers and all those with an interest in nutritional science, gender, economics of the family, or development economies will find the methodology and original results expounded here both useful and informative.
Status-based theories of labor market inequality contend that, even when workers have identical qualifications and performance, employers evaluate them differently based on stereotypes about their status group. Gender and parenthood are status characteristics that affect decisions about hiring, pay, and promotion through stereotypes that mothers should not work, fathers should not take leave, and caregivers of either gender are less reliable, committed workers. We contend that family-leave laws mitigate these status effects by conveying a consensus that both men and women can legitimately combine work and family. An experiment testing this theory shows that, when the law is not salient, participants pay mothers (whether or not they take leave) and fathers who take leave less and rate them as less promotable than other identical workers. Participants also rate these employees as less competent, committed, and congenial than other identical workers. By contrast, when participants review family-leave laws before they evaluate employees, they treat mothers and caregivers no worse than other workers. Reviewing an organizational family-leave policy did not reduce the effects of stereotypes as much as reviewing formal law. These findings suggest that making law salient during workplace evaluations can reduce inequality through law’s expressive effects.
Social investment policies advocate for more and better jobs by supporting families' work-life balance and investing in human capital. But do they really help to boost employment prospects for women? Earlier literature suggests a positive relationship, but not enough attention has been paid to the type of employment, or to who the actual beneficiaries of these measures are. This article combines ISSP survey data with OECD and national data in a multilevel analysis to determine whether social investment policies benefit female employment, improve job prospects, and apply to all women irrespective of their educational level. We find that training and childcare policies are associated with higher employment levels, however, the claim that social investment increases chances for better job prospects finds little empirical support. These findings suggest that active labour market and childcare policies are associated with more women's employment, but they might still be following a push to ‘just work’.
This study provides novel evidence on trends in job stability in the United Kingdom and Germany, two capitalist economies with distinct sets of institutions and labour market reform trajectories. While we find evidence of an increase in short‐term jobs for men in both countries, we also find important differences in the overall patterns of change in the distribution of job tenure duration. The United Kingdom follows a masked instability pattern with opposite job stability trends for men and women. On the other hand, we find evidence of a polarization of the job tenure distribution among men and women in Germany. These findings are partly consistent with expectations from the dualization literature, emphasizing a growing segmentation of the labour market between insiders and outsiders. More generally, this study highlights the existence of multiple paths towards increased job instability that appear to be rooted in institutional differences.
Access to child care centers reduces the care burden of parents, promotes child development, and creates employment opportunities. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, however, many child care centers closed or reduced capacity because of restrictions and declining demand for in-person care. The authors use anonymized and aggregated mobile phone data to track year-over-year changes in visits to child care centers across most counties in the United States during each month of the pandemic. The findings reveal that two-thirds of child care centers closed in April 2020, while one-third remained closed in April 2021. Moreover, non-White families are more likely to be exposed to child care closures than White families. The findings point to widening inequalities in access to child care and potential inequalities in the pace of labor market recovery after the pandemic subsides. The authors make their monthly updated database on child care closures publicly available.
Die familiale Situation hat erhebliche Auswirkungen auf das Erwerbsverhalten von Frauen und kann ebenfalls die Berufstätigkeit von Männern beeinflussen. Der Übergang zur Mutterschaft wirkt sich negativ auf die Erwerbsbeteiligung, den Erwerbsumfang und die Einkommenshöhe von Frauen aus. Bei Männern sind hingegen sowohl positive als auch negative Effekte auf die Arbeitszeit zu beobachten. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt verschiedene Theorieansätze zum Einfluss familialer Übergänge auf das Erwerbsverhalten und skizziert den empirischen Forschungsstand. Dabei wird auch diskutiert, inwiefern Effekte der Elternschaft durch individuelle Merkmale, familienpolitische Rahmenbedingungen und den kulturellen Kontext geprägt werden.
The term glass ceiling is applied to the well-established phenomenon in which women and people of color are consistently blocked from reaching the uppermost levels of the corporate hierarchy. Focusing on gender, we present an agent-based model that explores how empirically established mechanisms of interpersonal discrimination coevolve with social norms at both the organizational (meso) and societal (macro) levels to produce this glass ceiling effect for women. Our model extends the understanding of how the glass ceiling arises and why it can be resistant to change. We do so by synthesizing existing psychological and structural theories of discrimination into a mathematical model that quantifies explicitly how complex organizational systems can produce and maintain inequality. We discuss implications of our findings for both intervention and future empirical analyses and provide open-source code for those wishing to adapt or extend our work.
The birth of a new child continues to exacerbate gender specialization among different-sex couples. This study considers the potential of paid leave policies to intervene in this key life-course juncture and promote greater gender equality in paid and unpaid work. While previous research has examined the impact of paid leave policies on paid or unpaid work among mothers or fathers separately, this study provides an integrated framework and examines comprehensively how these benefits shape both mothers' and fathers' paid and unpaid work outcomes. I use data from the Current Population Survey 1990–2020 and the American Time Use Survey 2003–2019 and quasi-experimental differences-in-differences models to examine the impact of the introduction of paid leave policies in California and New Jersey. The results show that the policy increased mothers’ and fathers’ short-term time off from paid work after new births, increased mothers’ care work more than fathers’, and increased fathers’ housework more than mothers’. I call this pattern differentiated egalitarianism, denoting changes increasing men’s involvement in housework while simultaneously reproducing mothers’ primary caregiver role.
The relationships between public spending, employment, and growth are already complex and yet this complexity increases when considering employment disaggregated by gender. This paper analyzes the effects that public spending on social infrastructure (healthcare and education) has on women’s relative employment using a panel dataset of 138 countries from 1995 to 2011. The panel data consisted of publicly-available data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the Educational Attainment Dataset, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, and the World Governance Indicators. Employment was estimated under three separate specifications (the female employment rate, the male employment rate, and a measure of gender equality in employment) which were included in a three-stage least squares simultaneous equation estimation. The results indicate that both categories of social infrastructure spending are positively related to women’s relative employment. Furthermore, the process of industrialization, the size of the population, and trade are all negatively related to women’s relative employment. This paper has significant social and practical implications for gender-sensitive public policy discussions by providing empirical evidence in support of healthcare and education.
Despite a sizable literature on the labor market effects of maternity leave regulation on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women’s work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This study examines how extending the maternity leave requirement affects women’s decision to work in the informal or formal sector in Vietnam. We use a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the 2012 Amendments to the Vietnam Labor Law, which imposes a longer maternity leave requirement than before. We find that the law increases formal employment and decreases unpaid work among women. This is driven by women switching from agricultural household work to employment in the private formal sector, especially in the manufacturing industry and among the middle-skilled occupations such as plant and machine workers, craft and related workers, as well as clerks.
The causes of the expansion and cross-national variation in the provision of welfare state goods and services are examined. Social democratic governance is by far the most important determinant of the public delivery of services and is one of the most important determinants of the public funding of the provision of welfare state goods and services. Christian democratic governance is an important determinant of public funding of services, but is not related to public delivery. State structure is also an important determinant. Women's labor force participation is an important determinant of the expansion of public social welfare services net of other social, political, and historical factors. The analysis also shows an interactive effect of women's labor force participation and social democratic governance on public delivery of welfare state services. We conclude that public delivery of a wide range of welfare state services is the most distinctive feature of the social democratic welfare state and that this feature is a product of the direct and interactive effects of social democracy and women's mobilization.
This article examines women's employment patterns during the child-rearing period and the consequences of those patterns for earn- ings later in life, in 12 industralized countries. This study proposes an analytic framework that combines "welfare regime" and gender- specific policies to explain country differences. The findings pre- sented here suggest that institutional arrangements mediate the costs to women's part-time and intermittent employment. Within welfare regimes, employment continuity is highest among countries in which the state provides support for working mothers. Furthermore, this study finds that lower support for mothers' employment is associated with higher wage penalties to employment discontinuity.
Since the mid-twentieth century, part-time work has increased more than full-time work in most advanced capitalist countries. Part-time work is still mostly women's work, yet the level of part-time employment varies across nations, from approximately one-fifth of employed US women, to more than half of employed Norwegian women in the 1980s. In this article, we discuss how country-level labour demand, work and family policies, and political and labour institutions are associated with the share of employed women who work part-time. Using aggregate-level data from nine advanced industrialized countries, we find that the organizational power of labour and the proportion of employed women in the state sector have some of the strongest and most consistent effects on the extent of a country's part-time female labour force.
This paper uses cross-nationally comparable data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to analyse the patterns and consequences of part-time employment among women across five industrialized countries - Canada, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States - as of the middle 1990s. The results reveal the influence of dependent care responsibilities related to the presence of young children and elderly household members. We also find unadjusted part-time wage penalties everywhere, ranging from 8-12% in Canada and Germany, to 15% in the UK, to as high as 22% in the US and Italy, meaning that part-time workers earn that much less than full-time workers. The sources of the observed wage gaps vary markedly across countries; only in Germany do we find evidence of 'discrimination' against part-time workers.
This article compares 14 OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support moth ers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on 18 policy indicators are pre sented. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differ entiating policies that affect maternal employ ment from family policies more generally, these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions.
The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare-state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the 14 countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that sup ported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed no tably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined.
The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment. They are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of sup port for mothers' employment. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of schol arship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare-state regimes.
Over the past decade, meta-analyses have played an increasingly important role in summarizing clinical information and informing policy. Consequently, a new generation of meta-analysts have come forth and the demand for a streamlined modeling approach has emerged. In particular, compared to linear model estimation, many aspects of selecting and fitting models for meta-analysis involve nonstandard data structures and statistical assumptions. For example, each data point in the analysis is associated with its own measure of precision that must be accounted for in the estimation process. Other study variables such as study design covariates, within-study predictors, and other aspects of the studies also play an important role when making inferences. Model-selection therefore can be considerably facilitated by exploratory graphical analyses. In this Chapter, we discuss exploratory methods and a unified modeling approach to meta-analysis which integrates fixed, random and mixed effects models, as well as Bayesian hierarchical models into one framework.
This volume focuses on the relationship between change in the family and change in the roles of women and men on contemporary industrial societies. Of central concern is whether change in gender roles has fuelled - or is merely historically coincident with - such changes in the family as rising divorce rates, increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing, declining marriage rates, and a growing disconnection between the lives of men and children. Covering more that twenty countries, including the USA, the countries of western Europe, and Japan, each essay in the volume is organized around an important theoretical or policy question; all offer new data analyses, and several offer prescriptions of how to fashion more equitable and humane family and gender systems. The second demographic transition and microeconomic theory of marital exchange are the dominant theoretical models considered; several chapters feature state-of-the-art quantitative analyses of large scale surveys.
PART I THE LOGIC OF HIERARCHICAL LINEAR MODELING Series Editor 's Introduction to Hierarchical Linear Models Series Editor 's Introduction to the Second Edition 1.Introduction 2.The Logic of Hierarchical Linear Models 3. Principles of Estimation and Hypothesis Testing for Hierarchical Linear Models 4. An Illustration PART II BASIC APPLICATIONS 5. Applications in Organizational Research 6. Applications in the Study of Individual Change 7. Applications in Meta-Analysis and Other Cases where Level-1 Variances are Known 8. Three-Level Models 9. Assessing the Adequacy of Hierarchical Models PART III ADVANCED APPLICATIONS 10. Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models 11. Hierarchical Models for Latent Variables 12. Models for Cross-Classified Random Effects 13. Bayesian Inference for Hierarchical Models PART IV ESTIMATION THEORY AND COMPUTATIONS 14. Estimation Theory Summary and Conclusions References Index About the Authors
Gender and Welfare State Regimes focuses on how social provision, taxation, and labour market policies structure and transform gender relations in several advanced industrial democracies. A central question is whether gender policy regimes coincide or cut across welfare state regimes. The first chapters examine the construction of gender in policies of countries representing the same welfare state regime—the conservative, liberal and social democratic regimes—while the subsequent chapters compare policies across welfare state regimes. The book argues that policy variations across the countries are shaped by differing strategies and demands of women's movements, the organizational strength of labour and industrial relations frameworks, and the constellations of parties supporting equality measures, policy legacies, and state structures.
Gender and Welfare State Regimes focuses on how social provision, taxation, and labour market policies structure and transform gender relations in several advanced industrial democracies. A central question is whether gender policy regimes coincide or cut across welfare state regimes. The first chapters examine the construction of gender in policies of countries representing the same welfare state regime—the conservative, liberal and social democratic regimes—while the subsequent chapters compare policies across welfare state regimes. The book argues that policy variations across the countries are shaped by differing strategies and demands of women's movements, the organizational strength of labour and industrial relations frameworks, and the constellations of parties supporting equality measures, policy legacies, and state structures.
We use event history analysis to study the effects of family-related factors on the employment behavior of U.S. and (West) German women in a dynamic life course perspective. Data from the National Survey of Families and Households and the German Socioeconomic Panel are analyzed to examine the differential determinants of entry into and exit from full-time and part-time employment during the family life course and the differences in these processes between the two countries. Marriage and childbearing continue to influence exit from and entry into paid work in both countries. Family structure plays a stronger role in women's working lives in Germany than in the U.S., and part-time work in Germany is more closely related to childbearing.
When researchers investigate how school policies, practices, or climates affect student outcomes, they use multilevel, hierarchical data. Though methodologists have consistently warned of the formidable inferential problems such data pose for traditional statistical methods, no comprehensive alternative analytic strategy has been available. This paper presents a general statistical methodology for such hierarchically structured data and illustrates its use by reexamining the High School and Beyond data and the controversy over the effectiveness of public and Catholic schools. The model enables the researcher to utilize mean achievement and certain structural parameters that characterize the equity in the social distribution of achievement as multivariate outcomes for each school. Variation in these school-level outcomes is then explained as a function of school characteristics.
In this article, selected quality characteristics of the early care and education (ECE) systems in 15 European Union (EU) countries are examined. To understand the systems in their respective national contexts, statistics concerning maternal employment, single-parent families, and birthrates are presented. Issues discussed for each country include the availability and affordability of ECE provisions for parents and children, the level of public support provided for in-home parental care, teacher educational requirements, and the quality of care and education experienced by children. Although several of the EU countries provide adequate services to support families with young children, there are areas that need improvement in many countries. The problems of insufficient services to meet the needs of children under 3 years of age and inadequate funding of ECE services in most of the EU countries are discussed.
A series of changes in the nature and organization of productive activity, and thus in the structure of employment, are under way around the world. Manufacturing employment is in decline, and service-related employment is on the increase. Technological changes have facilitated the internationalization of finance, as well as the possibilities of employment relocation and transfer. These globalizing (or internationalizing) trends are also associated with an increase in the level of women's paid work, which seems to be universal.1 Many of the jobs created within the service sector are 'women's' jobs - e.g. in teaching, caring and the leisure industry, and electronicsrelated light assembly work is replacing jobs in heavy manufacturing. In contemporary debates, the increasing importance of such 'global' trends has been associated with theoretical arguments which suggest that the national or 'societal' level has become of less significance in sociological explanations. Global capital can bypass national attempts at control and regulation. Similarly, it is suggested that (in part because of the impact of electronic media), dominant national cultures are also becoming of less relevance. Paradoxically, however, it is argued that the decline of the 'national' is accompanied by a renewed importance of the 'local', as subnational and regional cultures become more prominent. Increasingly, therefore, there is a celebration of diversity of practice and individual identities - arguments centrally associated with the closely related theme of 'postmodernism' (Kumar 1994:122).
Has the relationship between economic prospects and marriage formation in the United States changed in recent decades? To answer this question, a discrete-time event-history analysis was conducted using data from multiple cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. Among women, results indicate growth in the importance of earnings for marriage formation between the early baby-boom cohort (born between 1950 and 1954) and late baby-boom cohort (born between 1961 and 1965). Evidence of cohort change in the relationship between men's economic prospects and marriage, however, is limited. Despite important racial differences in the economic and attitudinal context of marriage, key results are generally similar for whites and for African Americans. Taken together, these findings imply that men and women are growing to resemble one another with respect to the relationship between economic prospects and marriage, although this convergence is driven primarily by changing patterns of marriage among women. These results are largely supportive of Oppenheimer's career-entry theory of marriage and suggest that Becker's specialization and trading model of marriage may be outdated.
The paper provides a comparative analysis of childcare and leave policies in four Central European countries. The first part considers developments in policy since the 1960s, including the first extended leave scheme introduced in Hungary in 1967 and the changes that have taken place since the end of the communist regimes. Although the transition process during the 1990s had many similarities, the emergence of national, cultural and religious identities contributed to some diversification of policies. After certain divergent trends, the Czech Republic and Hungary converged again towards the end of the 1990s, as both countries returned to a pro-natalist approach. Slovakia has retained a balance between pro-natalist and pro-traditional approaches. Poland had less generous policies before 1989: the subsequent political resurgence of Catholicism has accentuated the specificity of that country's policies. The second part discusses major issues arising in the post-1990 period: population policy and fertility; women's employment and the gap between rights and practices in the division of household work; and the specific situation in the Czech Republic. El articulo aporta un análisis comparativo de las políticas del cuidado infantil y permiso laboral (baja por maternidad/paternidad) en los cuatro países centroeuropeos. La primera parte considera el desarrollo de la política desde los 1960s, incluida la primera esquema de permiso prolongado introducido en Hungría en 1967 y los cambios desde el fin de los gobiernos comunistas. Aunque había muchas semejanzas, la aparición de identidades nacionales, culturales y religiosas contribuyó a una diversificación en la política. Después de ciertas tendencias divergentes, la República Checa y Hungría convergieron hacia el fin de los 90s, como ambos países volvieron al planteamiento pro-natalidad. Eslovaquia ha guardado un equilibrio entre enfoques pro-natalidad y pro-tradicional. Polonia tenía políticas menos generosos antes de 1989: el posterior resurgimiento del catolicismo ha subrayado la especificidad de las políticas del país. La segunda parte discute cuestiones que surgieron después de 1990: la política de población y la fertilidad, el empleo de mujeres y la distancia entre derechos y practicas en la división de tareas domesticas, y la situación especifica en la República Checa.
Despite the great influx of women into the labor market, the gap between men's and women's wages has remained stable at 40 percent since 1950. Analysis of labor data suggests that this has occurred because women's educational attainment compared to men has declined. Recently, however, the wage gap has begun to narrow, and this will probably become a trend. (KH)
In a number of industrialized countries, on the assumption that fertility remains at or close to present levels, populations will start to decline, in some cases quite rapidly in the near to medium future. Many governments are alarmed by this prospect, especially since it goes hand in hand with a further and acute ageing of the population. From the fears in the 1930s about population and family decline, to the fears in the 1970s about over-population, and contemporary talk of 'family-friendly' policies, governments' attitudes towards and interventions in family policy have changed considerably. What is today referred to as family policy differs widely from the first forms of government support before the Second World War. This book argues that demographic changes have been a major force in bringing population and family issues on to the political agenda. The decline in fertility, the increase in divorce rates and lone-parenthood, and the entry of women into the labour force have all reduced the relevance of systems of state support aimed at traditional families. From this perspective, the author examines the changes that have affected families over the past 100 years, and the policies that have been adopted by different governments in response to these changes. Data from twenty-two industrialized countries are used to provide an original analysis of legislation, initiatives, and measures aimed at better supporting families. The book assembles arguments from demography, sociology, and economics to explain population policies, their origins and aims. It shows that despite major similarities across countries in the ways family policy has evolved, and in the ways governments have viewed and supported families, there are major dissimilarities shaped by country-specific events, ideologies, and circumstances. It concludes by drawing a typology of models of family policy bases on these inter-country differences.
This paper uses Swedish and German micro data on wages, hours of work and human capital related variables for German and Swedish couples. When separate taxation was introduced in Sweden in 1971, incentives for married women to supply more labor to the market, was an important argument. A comparison with the behavior of German women, who are confronted with the high marginal taxes of split taxation, is a way of evaluating this policy. Effects of the specific tax systems are incorporated in logit analysis or married women's labor force participation. German and Swedish regressions differ significantly. Children are for example a major detering factor for German women's labor force participation but not for Swedish women.
"The focus of this paper is an empirical analysis of the effects of taxation on women's incentives to contribute to family income. Data on earnings and individual characteristics in 1984 for married or cohabiting Swedish couples...are used together with similar data on German couples.... The main features of the personal income taxation of the two countries have been programmed, and are used for simulating after tax incomes using both tax systems for both countries.... The difference between the Swedish and German tax systems is an important factor in explaining why Swedish women participate more than German women in the labor market, although paid parental leaves and subsidized childcare are other important explanations for the Swedish situation."
This paper investigates the relationship between educational attainment and earnings inequality in eight nations using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database. Although the results should be considered exploratory rather than definitive until verified and qualified by more detailed comparative studies, two basic conclusions can be simply stated.
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