Resource-related inequalities in mothers’ employment in two family-policy regimes: evidence from Switzerland and West Germany

ABSTRACT

Using data from the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2012) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (1994–2010), this paper compares the impact of mothers’ education and her partners’ income on maternal employment within the second to the fourth year after childbirth in Switzerland and West Germany. The broadly similar institutional context in the two countries makes for a more controlled and narrower comparison. Around the turn of the millennium, both family-policy regimes did little to foster dual-earner families. However, they differed in their support for families’ caring role (familialistic policies), with West Germany being much more generous. It is expected that these familialistic policies widen the educational gap in maternal employment, by selectively encouraging less-educated mothers to stay at home. Moreover, they are also expected to lower the economic pressure on low-income families to have a second income, thus diminishing the impact of partners’ income. Results confirm this expectation only within the fourth year after childbirth but not within the years before. This is somehow surprising, as central country-differences with respect to familialistic policies refer to the first three years after childbirth.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal employment
• gender equality
• gender-class intersection
• family policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lena Liechti is a scientific collaborator at the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. She did her Ph.D. at the Division of Sociology, Social Policy, and Social Work at the University of Fribourg. Her research focuses on gender inequality across different social classes and the development of gender arrangements within families.

Notes

1 In order to get means-tested benefits, the household income must not exceed a certain level.

2 There are two extra months paid, if both parents take leave.

3 Leitner’s (2003) approach focuses on the family as a collective unit. Therefore, unlike other concepts (e.g. Lister 1994; Orloff 1993), (de-)familialization, here, does not mean the degree of women’s (in-)dependency from a provider within the family.

4 The GSOEP started with West German households only and extended to East Germany in 1989.

5 Considering three consecutive waves precludes pregnant women having an additional child soon, which is likely to affect women’s labour market decision.

6 Drasch (2013: 985) argues that the possibility of receiving more means-tested benefits for a shorter period after 2000 could narrow the educational gap in the timing of mothers’ labour market return after a family-related interruption. However, the author could not find empirical evidence for depolarizing trends in the reformed parental leave cohort. Moreover, Swiss parental leave policy regulation has also changed, with the introduction of maternity insurance in July 2005. However, theoretically, the mechanism remains the same. One could interpret the compulsory (and paid) eight-week mother protection after childbirth as a shorter version of maternity insurance.

7 Swiss regions, mainly along linguistic boarders, do also vary with respect to child-care coverage, beliefs about gender arrangements and maternal employment (Bühler 2002; Djurdjevic 2005; Losa and Origoni 2005). However, in favour of a larger sample size, all Swiss regions are used.

8 Average marginal effects, and predicted probabilities, are obtained in STATA using the post-estimation command margins (see Williams 2012).

9 Models excluding partner’s educational attainment were also tested, in order to check for multicollinearity with partner’s income. However, in the German sample, significances do not and effect sizes hardly change. In the models for Switzerland, excluding partner’s education weakens the income effects, as the two effect signs point in the inverse direction.

10 This might be counter-intuitive, as the effect of partner’s income during the second year after childbirth is significant in Switzerland but not in Germany. However, as Gelman and Stern (2006) show, the difference between being significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant.