Our goal was to explore how women and men’s employment interacts with family policy and social norms to produce differences in gender inequalities in the relationship of employment to partnering and first birth. Using comparable panel data from the 2000s across eight high-income countries, we estimated identical models of individual employment on women’s and men’s partnership entry and their transition to first parenthood, including for women unpartnered first births. Two countries were from ‘dual-earner’ (Norway and France), and three each from ‘liberal’ (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and ‘conservative’ (Germany, Italy, and Switzerland) family-policy regimes. We tested three hypotheses generated from theory of reproductive polarization, in which family policy is claimed to play a central role in generating or mitigating socio-economic heterogeneity in family formation. We found support overall for our hypotheses. Women and men in ‘dual-earner’ regimes, in particular, had higher rates of entry to first parenthood when ‘full-year, full-time’ employed in the year prior to fertility exposure compared to those employed little or not at all in the year prior to fertility exposure. We found substantial variation between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ regimes in fertility responses to employment, with unexpectedly positive relationships of being ‘full-year, full-time’ employed to first birth rates among German women, in contrast to expected negative relationships of employment to first birth rates among Australian women, especially when unpartnered. Partnered women’s proportions in full-time, full-year employment were surprisingly as much as 15 to 25 percentage points lower than partnered men’s proportions across the five countries for which we made this comparison. Later partnership entry in ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ regimes was an additional “regime” difference, offsetting the unexpectedly faster first entry to parenthood among employed partnered women and men especially in Germany.
Employment Impacts on Partnership and Parenthood Entry in Different Family-Policy Regimes / Michael S., Rendall; DE ROSE, Alessandra; Ann, Evans; Edith, Gray; Doris, Hanappi; Frauke, Kreuter; Trude, Lappegard; Lori, Reeder; Marit, Rønsen; Laurent, Toulemon. - STAMPA. - (2014). ( European Population Conference Budapest 25-28 June 2014).
Employment Impacts on Partnership and Parenthood Entry in Different Family-Policy Regimes
DE ROSE, Alessandra
;
2014
Abstract
Our goal was to explore how women and men’s employment interacts with family policy and social norms to produce differences in gender inequalities in the relationship of employment to partnering and first birth. Using comparable panel data from the 2000s across eight high-income countries, we estimated identical models of individual employment on women’s and men’s partnership entry and their transition to first parenthood, including for women unpartnered first births. Two countries were from ‘dual-earner’ (Norway and France), and three each from ‘liberal’ (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and ‘conservative’ (Germany, Italy, and Switzerland) family-policy regimes. We tested three hypotheses generated from theory of reproductive polarization, in which family policy is claimed to play a central role in generating or mitigating socio-economic heterogeneity in family formation. We found support overall for our hypotheses. Women and men in ‘dual-earner’ regimes, in particular, had higher rates of entry to first parenthood when ‘full-year, full-time’ employed in the year prior to fertility exposure compared to those employed little or not at all in the year prior to fertility exposure. We found substantial variation between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ regimes in fertility responses to employment, with unexpectedly positive relationships of being ‘full-year, full-time’ employed to first birth rates among German women, in contrast to expected negative relationships of employment to first birth rates among Australian women, especially when unpartnered. Partnered women’s proportions in full-time, full-year employment were surprisingly as much as 15 to 25 percentage points lower than partnered men’s proportions across the five countries for which we made this comparison. Later partnership entry in ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ regimes was an additional “regime” difference, offsetting the unexpectedly faster first entry to parenthood among employed partnered women and men especially in Germany.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
