Sacrificing their Careers for their Families? An Analysis of the Family Pay Penalty in Europe

This paper examines the extent of and the mechanisms behind the penalty to motherhood in six European countries. Each country provides different levels of support for maternal employment allowing us to determine institutional effects on labour market outcome. While mothers tend to earn less than non-mothers, the penalty to motherhood is considerably lower in countries with policy support for working mothers. The paper establishes the United Kingdom and West Germany to have the least policy support for working mothers as well as the largest penalties to motherhood

Women between Part-Time and Full-Time Work: The Influence of Changing Hours of Work on Happiness and Life-Satisfaction

This paper asks whether part-time work makes women happy. Previous research on labour supply has assumed that as workers freely choose their optimal working hours on the basis of their innate preferences and the hourly wage rate, outcome reflects preference. This paper tests this assumption by measuring the impact of changes in working-hours on life satisfaction in two countries (the UK and Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey). We find decreases in working-hours bring about positive and significant improvement on well-being for women

New Evidence on Work among New Mothers: What Can Labour Unions Do?

This article examines the employment patterns of new mothers from one year before the birth of their first child until its fifth birthday in Sweden, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Japan. Data on the labour force status of mothers was drawn from household panel data from each country. That data showed significant differences in the employment patterns of new mothers. This article discusses the developments in family policies that may explain differences between employment patterns of new mothers in the five countries. In particular, the authors contrast family policies in Sweden with those of the other countries because since the 1970s Sweden has had the most wide-ranging set of policies to benefit the dual-career family. In addition, using a few examples from the Netherlands and Sweden, this article discusses what trade unions can do in their respective countries in order to move society towards truly shared breadwinning and shared parenthood between women and men