Supports for Working Families: Work and Care Policies across Welfare States

Familienpolitik, Sozialpolitik, Sozialstaat, Eltern, Erwerbstätigkeit, Familie, Kinderbetreuung, Vereinigte Staaten, Westeuropa, Family policy, Social policy, Welfare state, Parents, Labour force participation, Family, Child care, United states, Western

Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries: Assessing Generosity and Gender Equality

This report examines the parental leave policies in 21 high-income nations and identifies five "best practices" for parental leave policies. The study shows that the U.S. has the least generous leave policies of the 21 countries examined in the report. The states exhibiting the five best practices include Finland, France, Greece, Norway, Spain, and Sweden

Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries: Assessing Generosity and Gender Equality

This report examines the parental leave policies in 21 high-income nations and identifies five "best practices" for parental leave policies. The study shows that the U.S. has the least generous leave policies of the 21 countries examined in the report. The states exhibiting the five best practices include Finland, France, Greece, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.parental leave

Presentation: Gornick & Meyers

Presentation by Janet C. Gornick, City University of New York and Marcia K. Meyers, University of Washington on Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, for the event: The Great American Time Squeeze: The Politics of Work and Family in a 24/7 World on March 3, 2005

Netting down gross earnings data in the LIS database: an evaluation of two procedures

LIS researchers who seek to perform country-comparative and / or trend analyses have to account for the fact that in some LIS datasets income variables were reported net of taxes and social security contributions, while in other datasets income variables were reported gross of taxes and social security contributions. In this technical paper we discuss, develop, and evaluate two `netting down procedures' that help reduce bias that would be introduced by directly comparing net and gross datasets. Results of evaluating the performance of these netting down procedures indicate that the validity of the comparison of net and gross datasets can be greatly improved when netting down procedures are applied. In several cases, however, substantial amounts of bias remain

Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States

Despite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns of mothers\u27 employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers\u27 employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy packages , these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions. The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined. The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women\u27s labor market attachment. Prior findings on women\u27s labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers\u27 employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family policies that specifically help women to combine paid work with parenting

Building the Dual Earner/Dual Career Society: Policy Developments in Europe, CES Working Paper, no. 82, 2002

A new model of work and family life is emerging out of contemporary debates on social citizenship and the characteristics of the“woman-friendly” welfare state. The dual-earner/dual-carer model refers to a social and economic arrangement in which men and women engage symmetrically in both paid work in the labor market and in unpaid work in the home. Parents’ ability to balance family and market responsibilities, and to allocate employment and childcare-giving equally between mothers and fathers, could be facilitated by a package of state policies. Three areas of supportive policy – all invarious states of development across Europe – include: (1) family leave schemes that provide job protections and wage replacement for parents of young children; (2) affordable, high quality early childhood education and care, to a limited extent for very young children and to a much larger extent for children aged three to school-age; and (3) labor market regulations aimed at shortening the standard work week and strengthening remuneration for reduced-hour employment. In this paper, we review European policy provisions, and then turn our attention to the United States case. We suggest that embracing the vision of the dual-earner/dual-carer society may help to draw diverse but unified support for family policy development in the United States

A Service of zbw Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper Series Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), asbl The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work Week, Gender and Education in 17 Countries The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work We

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work Week, Terms of use: Documents in Gender and Education in 17 Countries Peter Frase * Janet C. Gornick † December 13, 2009 Abstract Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by gender and education levels in 17 high-and middle-income countries in order to assess whether this finding holds cross-nationally. In contrast to many prior studies of working time, we use a measure of weekly rather than annual hours worked, which we argue provides a better window on the discretionary time available to individuals and households. We find that: 1) average weekly male hours in the United States do not appear exceptional, with averages exceeding 40 hours per week in both the U.S. and most western European countries; 2) U.S. women work longer hours than women in most other rich countries; 3) the within-country difference in average hours by education is not uniform, with higher-income countries more likely to show the U.S. pattern, and middle-income countries showing the reverse pattern, with the less educated reporting longer hours. We conclude by assessing some possible macro-level explanations for this variation, including per capita GDP, tax rates, unionization, and earnings inequality