The relationship between work-family policies and pro-environmental behaviour of single mothers as economically disadvantaged group

ABSTRACT

Single mothers are among the group with the highest risks of poverty. At the same time, pro-environmental behaviour research introduced the ‘motherhood effect’, theorising that the carer role of mothers makes them more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour (PEB). Considering that PEB is often expensive, the expectation is that economic insecurities make single mothers hardly able to choose for PEB. In this article, I theorise and test the ability of work-family policies to moderate the relationship by giving the otherwise lacking resources. Estimating multilevel models based on survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (2010) and the OECD Family Database for 21 OECD country years, I find that generous spending on early childhood education and care increases the likelihood for PEB among single but not among partnered mothers. The paper contributes to the environment-welfare nexus by demonstrating the need for intersectoral and inclusive policy approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Pro-environmental behaviour
• single mothers
• work-family policies
• OECD
• cross-national
• multilevel analysis

Acknowledgements

I thank Simon Schaub, Linda Degen, Jale Tosun and Charlene Marek and two anonymous reviewers for very constructive feedback on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available. The ISSP is stored at the Gesis website at https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13921 (ISSP 2020) and https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13271 (ISSP 2010), reference number ZA7650 data file version 1.0.0 (ISSP 2020) and ZA5500 data file version 3.0.0 (ISSP 2010). The OECD Family Database (2009 to 2019) is stored at the OECD website at https://www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2024.2353754.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Marie Parth

Anne-Marie Parth holds a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg and is employed as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Munich. Her thesis dealt with the influence of social policies on attitudes and behavior in times of rising inequalities and climate change. She is interested in social inequality, the welfare-environment nexus and public opinion.