Is there such a thing as too long childcare leave?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to revisit the question whether women’s employment is negatively affected in countries with very long periods of childcare leave. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed data on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18-countries, combined with country-level data on childcare, unemployment and service sector size. Findings The authors found that in countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, while in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is bigger than with short periods of leave. Originality/value The authors argued that to correctly answer the long-leave question – the relationship between duration of leave and employment of women should be explicitly hypothesized as being curvilinear; and childcare leave should be expected to affect only mothers, not women without children; testing the long-leave hypothesis requires the use of country-comparative data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time; and is best tested against person-level data.

Work–family reconciliation policies and women’s and mothers’ labor market outcomes in rich democracies

“…An extensive literature beyond these seminal works has fueled the debate on paradoxes and tradeoffs (Bergmann 2009;Dieckhoff et al 2015;Kluve and Tamm 2013;Lalive and Zweimueller 2009;Morgan and Zippel 2003;Mun and Jung 2018;Nieuwenhuis et al 2017;Ziefle and Gangl 2015). For brevity, we review only a sample.…”

“…Consistent with claims of employer discrimination against women in countries with generous leaves, scholars have shown that Scandinavian countries tend to have high levels of occupational sex segregation (Charles and Grusky 2004). Much literature has scrutinized whether long parental leaves undermine women's careers (Morgan and Zippel 2003;Nieuwenhuis et al 2017). For example, Aisenbrey and colleagues (2009) found that in countries such as Sweden and Germany, long leaves hurt mothers' career attainment (also Evertsson and Duvander 2010; but see Keck and Saraceno 2013).…”

“…Second, the literature has focused more on gaps between women and men without fully scrutinizing gaps between mothers and childless women (see Nieuwenhuis et al 2017). Yet work-family policies are designed to facilitate mothers' employment as much as to alleviate sex inequalities (Gornick et al 1998;Meyers 2003b, 2008).…”

“…While it is unlikely that one can fully eliminate all omitted confounding variables, longitudinal data enable inclusion of country fixed effects that absorb stable differences between countries. To the best of our knowledge, relatively few cross-national studies include panel data or fixed effects (Abendroth et al 2014;Dieckhoff et al 2015;Nieuwenhuis et al 2017), even though Pettit and Hook (2009) included multiple survey waves for several countries. At the same time, fairly universal cultural and historical changes have shaped gender inequality cross-nationally.…”

The triple bind of single-parent families

“…Paid parental leave facilitates the ability for parents, especially mothers, to continue their careers without completely withdrawing from the labour market. However, if the leave is too long, it can have negative consequences on women's employment (Nieuwenhuis et al, 2017).…”