Return-to-job during and after parental leave

Abstract

Despite a rising career orientation among females and growing efforts of firms to alleviate work–family conflicts, female employees often find it difficult to combine career development with having children. Female careers appear more boundaryless than male careers, and gender differences in the sociological role model persist. Using exceptional longitudinal company data, this paper studies the return-to-job of female employees after first birth in the case of Germany with long Parental Leave coverage. Parental Leave durations often last for 3 years or longer. Our results show that more than 50% of those in Parental Leave do not return to their job afterwards. About 31% of female employees return to part-time work during Parental Leave, and among these, only 57% continue working in their job after the end of Parental Leave. And, having returned to their job after the end of Parental Leave, only 81% continue to work in their job one year after return. Furthermore, female employees have their first child, when their careers have been particularly successful. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the view that the birth of the first child and the experience of the subsequent work–life conflict can lead to a major reassessment of work preferences among female employees. Although a higher career orientation before birth is positively associated with a return-to-job, management must be aware that a sizeable share of female employees, even among the most career oriented and the most successful, may not return to their job after first birth.

Keywords:

• boundaryless careers
• career orientation
• female employees
• parental leave
• personnel data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Van Steenbergen and Ellemers (2009) find that work–family conflicts reduce individual productivity and lead to increasing health problems. Some firms offer explicit work–life balance measures, others try to implement a firm culture of higher job commitment. Often work–life balance depends on the relationship between employee and direct supervisor. Major et al. (2008) find all these instruments to have a significantly negative impact on work–family conflicts. In contrast, Ngo et al. (2009) and Taylor et al. (2009) suggest that formal work–family policies have no significantly positive impact on work–life balance.

^2. PL is to be distinguished from mandatory paid Maternity Leave from the job lasting 8–14 weeks around the time of birth. While Maternity Leave applies only to the mother, PL can be taken by the mother or by the father (see Alewell & Pull, 2002 for further details). However, in the early 2000s (our time period of analysis) the share of fathers taking PL is very low in Germany.

^3. The economic literature discusses the endogeneity of births with respect to work decisions (Fitzenberger et al., 2013). In this study, we apply a reduced-form model, where we do not model work and birth decisions simultaneously.

^4. A total of 727 mothers are missing, compared to the 6744 mothers taking PL in the master data.

^5. Tenure is measured at the time of first birth.

^6. This probability is predicted based on an ordered Probit regression of the wage groups. We cumulate the fitted probabilities for all wage groups below the actual one and one half of the probability to be in the actual wage group, see Additional Appendix.

^7. In order to account for possible differences in the time paths of exits by covariates, we have also estimated the regressions with interactions between time since birth and other covariates. The main results do not change. These additional estimation results are available upon request.

^8. These results are similar to Probit estimates, which are available upon request.

^9. This regression is estimated based on data for childless females and on data before birth for female employees giving birth to a child.

^10. During the observation period, we loose some observations due to right-hand side censoring, which reduces the sample of 713 individuals, who are observed to return-to-job after PL by 24.

^11. We discuss the coefficients of the interaction terms in the next section.

^12. Because the number of observed females who leave the company after part-time during PL is very low, we do not show estimation results here.

^13. German equivalent to A-levels.

^14. The education information is available for 10,154 and missing for 3590 individuals.

^15. Estimation results are available upon request.