National Family Policies and the Occupational Segregation of Women and Mothers in European Countries, 1999–2016

• In Event: 4437 - Work, Family, and Inequality in the US and Europe

Abstract

Although researchers generally agree that national family policies play a role in shaping mothers’ employment, there is considerable debate about whether they have unintended consequences. Some scholars hypothesize that although family policies help incorporate women into the labor market, they do so by integrating women, and mothers specifically, into female- dominated occupations. One form of this argument suggests that although these policies are “good” for lower-educated women, these policies harm higher-educated women by limiting their integration into management and concentrating them in female-dominated professions. We revisit this debate using the highest quality data brought to bear on this question to date. We use the EU-Labour Force Survey 1999–2016 (n = 22 countries, 282 country-years, millions of working aged men and women), combined with an original collection of country-year indicators. Specifically, we examine how the two most widely studied family policies – early childhood education and care (ECEC) and paid parental leave - affect the extent and consequences of occupational segregation for women and for mothers. Using three-digit occupational codes, we model the effect of family policy on five outcomes: the extent of segregation, the attainment of management and lucrative management occupations, and the consequences of segregation for socioeconomic standing and prestige. We pay particular attention to understanding individual-level variation by women’s educational attainment and to country-year variation in the extent to which women and mothers are in the labor force. Findings have the potential to shed light on a thorny debate in the literature.

Authors

• Jennifer L. Hook, University of Southern California

• Eunjeong Paek, University of Southern California

• Meiying Li, University of Southern California

• Cotter Brigid, University of Southern California