A Stalled Revolution? Change in Women's Labor Force Participation during Child‐Rearing Years, Europe and the United States 1996–2016

Abstract

While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter-century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child-rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child-rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in the association of these events with women's LFP (i.e., behavioral). We use data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys and the US Current Population Survey in Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition models to decompose trends in women's LFPR from 1996 to 2016 across 18 countries by educational attainment, partnership status, and parental status for women aged 20-44. Compositional and behavioral shifts positively contribute to higher LFPR in most countries, but lower rates in several others. Behavioral change is not widely shared across groups of women. Partnered mothers without college degrees are the main contributors to behavioral change and show the greatest variability across countries. We suggest greater research attention to this "missing middle," as their LFP is key to understanding change during this period.

Equalizing or not? Public childcare and women’s labour market participation

“…The effect slightly decreases (differences not significant) to about 3 percentage points for mothers with intermediate-level education and is absent for high-educated mothers. In order to investigate the importance of labour market demand-side factors, and in line with Hook and Paek (2020a), we also focus on women’s labour market participation – that is, on their ‘activity’ (including being employed or unemployed and actively searching for a job) versus ‘inactivity’ (Panel A). Results do not differ substantively from those found for employment except that they provide stronger effects, especially for low-educated women, for whom an increase of 10 percentage in childcare goes hand in hand with labour market activity that is almost 9 percentage points higher.…”

“…In terms of individual characteristics, mothers’ level of education, in particular, has frequently been expected to yield heterogeneous effects (Korpi et al, 2013; Pettit and Hook, 2009; Steiber et al, 2016; Hook and Paek, 2020b). From a theoretical perspective, there are good reasons to expect that the relationship between EC provision and mothers’ labour market participation – for mothers with different levels of education and who thus belong to different social strata – could be positive or negative (Hook and Paek, 2020a, 2020b). On the one hand, high-educated women gain the most from employment and should therefore be more prone to taking advantage of public childcare opportunities (Bertrand et al, 2010).…”

“…A long-standing debate exists regarding both the preconditions for fostering women’s labour market participation and how effective family policies are at promoting this participation (Erhel and Guergoat-Larivière, 2013; Keck and Saraceno, 2013; Hook and Paek, 2020a; Landivar et al, 2022). Within the debate, the availability of public childcare services has received particular attention.…”

Are highly educated partners really more gender egalitarian? A couple-level analysis of social class differentials in attitudes and behaviors

“…Higher education, particularly tertiary education, is thought to be associated with more egalitarian attitudes in part because higher education may provide exposure to universal values, a diversity of experiences, and more egalitarian ideas and peer groups, as well as more critical evaluation of gender stereotypes (Bryant 2003;Davis and Greenstein 2009;Kalmijn 1998). Moreover, more educated individuals are thought to be early adopters of new cultural values (Hook and Paek 2020;Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988).…”

“…In response to this literature, other scholars suggest that processes of change in gender roles are rather slow and may be stalling in some Western societies (Hook and Paek 2020;Kan et al 2022) and that they occur to a differential extent across social classes, as reflected, for example, in variation across groups with and without tertiarylevel education (Cherlin 2016;Goldscheider and Sassler 2018;Miller 2020;Pessin 2018;Sullivan, Billari, and Altintas 2014). Indeed, previous research suggests that educational level is associated with gender egalitarianism and that there may be gender differences in these educational gradients.…”