Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

Abstract

Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and child care, using administrative data covering the labor market and birth histories of Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates into a decomposition framework building on Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2019) to compute counterfactual gender inequality series. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.

Motherhood and flexible jobs: Evidence from Latin American countries

“…The causal evidence is less conclusive. While some studies find support on the positive effect of maternity leave on female labour market outcomes (Kluve and Tamm 2013;Baker and Millingan 2008), others find no effect at all (Lalive and Zweimüller 2009;Dahl et al 2016;Kleven et al 2020b). Differences in design may account for these mixed results.…”

Motherhood and the Allocation of Talent

“…Results are consistent with our finding for employment: longer maternity leave seems to be correlated with lower levels of all three outcomes up to a threshold. 25 It is important to note, however, that recent evidence for Austria finds almost no effect of the large expansion of parental leave since the 1950s on gender gaps (Kleven et al, 2020).…”

Does Biology Drive Child Penalties? Evidence from Biological and Adoptive Families

“…Estimates of long-run child penalties in female earnings range from 20-25% in Scandinavian countries to 30% in the United States and a staggering 60% in Germany (Kleven, Landais and Søgaard 2019a;Kleven et al 2019b). In fact, most of the remaining gender inequality in highincome countries can be attributed to the unequal impacts of children on men and women (Kleven, Landais and Søgaard 2019a;Kleven et al 2020).…”