The South revisited: The division of labor and family outcomes in Italy and Spain

Social provisions and market services assist families in balancing production and reproduction, so that women´s employment need not be associated with lower fertility. Yet men´s participation in childcare has not kept pace with women´s rising labor force participation. Here, the effect of men´s childcare hours on the likelihood of second births is analyzed for Italian and Spanish couples using the European Community Household Panel. While different sources of care, such as another household adult and private childcare, significantly increase the odds of second births, so, too, among the youngest cohort of Italian couples, does a father´s greater time in childcare. This suggests that even in a country with strong cultural support for the male breadwinner model, this model is family sub-optimal in modern economies.

Gender Agency at the Intersection of State, Market and Family: Changes in Fertility and Maternal Labor Supply in Eight Countries

Current debates on the welfare state entail two intertwined questions. First, does a nation have sufficient active labor force participation to maintain the benefits for non-participants? Second, do social provisions exacerbate or attenuate class, ethnic and other distinctions within society? As predominantly structural or institutional debates, these discussions tend to exclude the impact social provisions have on facilitating individual agency among members of social groups. Yet the institutions of state, market and family interact to shape a gender order which specifies the types of social or civil claims that can be made by individuals. The gender order yields the societal boundaries within which agency can be exercised. This paper will present comparative evidence of how the package of social provisions in combination with market factors manifests in women's agency regarding family choices in eight countries. This, in turn, provides material evidence of whether the institutionally-framed gender order encourages gender difference or equity in terms of paid and unpaid work.

Impact of Dual Careers on Average Family Size: Comparison of 11 Countries

The dissolution of the sexual division of labour remains, in Hochschild's (1989) words, a 'stalled' revolution. While more and more married women participate in paid work, men have not equalized the division of labour by appreciably increasing the time they devote to unpaid domestic tasks. The state can assist in managing this double time burden on women by enabling families to externalize a portion of it via social provisions supporting maternal employment. This paper presents a formal model of family time and resource distribution, women's constraints therein, and the impact the market or social provisions can have in alleviating the strains between production and reproduction. The extent to which the externalization of the burden of care maintains both female labour force participation and family size is then analyzed for 11 countries in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s using data from the Luxembourg Income Study.

Gender equity and fertility in Italy and Spain

Gender equity and its effects on fertility vary across socio-political contexts, particularly when comparing less with more developed economies. But do Subtle differences in equity within more similar contexts matter as well? Here we compare Italy and Spain, two countries with low fertility levels and institutional reliance on kinship and family, but with employment equity among women during the 1990s slightly greater in Italy than Spain. The European Community Household Panel is used to explore the effect of this difference in gender equity on the likelihood of married couples having a second birth during this time period. Women's hours of employment reduce the birth likelihood in both countries, but non-maternal sources of care offset this effect to different degrees. In Spain, private childcare significantly increases birth likelihood, whereas in Italy, father's greater childcare share increases the likelihood, particularly among employed women. These results suggest that increases in women's employment equity increase not only the degree of equity within the home, but also the beneficial effects of equity on fertility. These equity effects help to offset the negative relationship historically found between female employment and fertility

Paradox or Mitigation? Childless and Parent Gender Gaps across British, Finnish, and German Wage Distributions

Part of the welfare paradox is that generous family policies increase private sector employer discrimination particularly against higher-wage women. We argue instead that bundles of generous policies mitigate gender productivity differences among parents, and in turn the discrimination also affecting childless women. We test these assertions by estimating the two gaps across the British, Finnish, and German private sector wage distributions using 2000-2018 panel data and unconditional quantile regression. Because of smaller motherhood penalties below the median, parenthood gaps are smallest in Finland and Germany. In contrast, fatherhood premiums constitute most of the parenthood gap for high-wage German and British women, whereas high-wage British women are disadvantaged by motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums. The childless gap is also smaller across the bottom of the Finnish and German wage distributions. Overall, our advanced modeling strategy finds strong support for the mitigating effects of generous family policies on gender wage gaps

Wives’ part-time employment and marital stability in Great Britain, West Germany and the United States

Many hail wives’ part-time employment as a work—family balance strategy, but theories offer competing predictions as to the effects of wives’ employment on relationship stability. We use panel data to test these competing hypotheses among recent cohorts of first-married couples in Great Britain, West Germany 1 and the United States. We find effects of wives’ employment on marital stability var y across the countries. In West Germany with its high-quality part-time employment, couples where the wife works part time are significantly more stable. In the more liberal British and US labour markets, neither wives’ part- nor full-time employment significantly alters divorce risk. In the United States, however, mothers working part time have significantly lower divorce risk. West German and British husbands’ unemployment proves more detrimental to marital stability than wives’ employment. These results highlight the importance of the socioeconomic context in structuring the optimal employment participation of both partners