This study examines how the workplace situation of both parents affects fathers’ parental leave use. We used parental leave‐taking register data from Statistics Sweden for dual‐earner couples who resided in Stockholm and had children in 1997 (n= 3,755). The results indicate that fathers shorten their parental leave if their workplaces are such that one can expect leave to be associated with high costs and that fathers appear to be influenced by the leave use of other fathers in the workplace. Mothers’ workplace situation appears to be less important for fathers’ leave use. The results point to the importance of actors other than parents (such as employers) for understanding the gender‐based division of child care.

We ask whether growing up with persons of the same national background (which we refer to as coethnics), in the immediate neighbourhood, influences future educational careers of children of immigrants. We use administrative data to follow an entire cohort of immigrant children who graduated from Swedish compulsory schools in 1995. We have information on their parents and on their ethnic environment during the period they were 10 -15 years old. The dependent variable studied is the highest completed education in years at age 24. We are able to account for unobserved heterogeneity with neighbourhood fixed effects and ethnic group fixed effects. We find that the effect of the quantitative side of the ethnic environment (the number of coethnics) on educational attainment is strongly conditioned by the qualitative side of this environment (the educational success of coethnics). The individual's educational career is positively related to the number of young coethnics in the neighbourhood, but only if they can be characterized as being educationally successful. Growing up in a large ethnic community with average or poor educational success is harmful for the future educational success. The effect of the ethnic surrounding on the highest completed education is fully mediated by success in compulsory school.3

In research on fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties in career-related outcomes, employers' discriminatory behaviours are often argued to constitute a possible explanation for observed gender gaps. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence of such discrimination. Utilizing a field experiment design, we test (i) whether job applicants are subject to recruitment discrimination on the basis of their gender and parenthood status, and (ii) whether discrimination by gender and parenthood is conditional on the qualifications required by the job applied for. We applied for 2,144 jobs in the Swedish labour market, randomly assigning gender and parenthood status to fictitious job applicants. Based on the rate of callbacks, we do not find that employers practise systematic recruitment discrimination on the basis of the job applicants' gender or parental status, neither in relation to less qualified nor more highly qualified jobs.

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The way employee flows generate ethnic and gender segregation across workplaces is investigated using a population sample of 80,139 workplaces with 977,978 employees in the Stockholm area. Comparisons of actual stocks and flows of employees across workplaces to counterfactual simulations of these reveal that segregation clearly has a random component to it: Even with random allocation of employees to workplaces, segregation would still be substantial. Systematic (non-random) segregation appears to be upheld primarily because employees recruited to workplaces are similar to those already employed there, not because underrepresented groups within workplaces are systematically screened out. This tendency appears to be less connected to between-group differences in education, occupation or industry, but instead largely sustained by the tendency of employers to select new employees from a pool of workplaces where their employees have been employed previously. Network recruiting might generate this pattern, but unobserved individual and workplace factors cannot be ruled out as potential confounders. The results speak to theories of homosociality applied to segregation processes: If homosocial biases affect segregation, they apparently do so mostly in the recruitment process to workplaces, but less so through processes of exclusion of minorities from workplaces.

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