Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry into Paid Work: Recent Evidence From Norway

ABSTRACT

Universal parental leaves with job protection and earnings compensation increase women's labor market attachment, but very long leaves may have negative consequences at both individual and societal levels. Using panel data from the period 1996–2010, we study whether it is possible to offset the potential negative effects on women's labor supply of long parental leaves by policies targeted especially at fathers, and policies making formal daycare cheaper and more easily available. Norway is used as example, since all recent extensions in the parental leave scheme have been reserved for fathers and at the same time the daycare sector has expanded rapidly. We find that Norwegian mothers did enter work faster after childbirth in the late 2000s than a decade earlier. The latest initiatives may thus have contributed to a shortening of women's career interruptions and a more equal division of paid and unpaid work among parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Women's labor supply
• childbirth
• childcare
• parental leave
• father's quota
• gender equality

JEL Codes:

• J13
• J22
• I38

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Marit Rønsen is Senior Researcher at the Unit for Social and Demographic Research, Statistics Norway. She has a MSc in Economics from the University of Oslo. Her main research interests are within the fields of fertility, labor supply, family welfare, family policies and gender equality. She has been involved in the evaluations of several recent family and welfare policy reforms.

Ragni Hege Kitterød is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Research. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oslo. Her research interests include labor market participation, gender equality, family policy, allocation of family work and paid work in couples, time-use surveys, and the distribution of childcare and economic resources among parents living apart.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway and Statistics Norway and constitutes part of the research project “Mobilizing Unutilized Labor Reserves: The Role of Part-Time Work and Extended Employment Interruptions (185194/S20).” The paper has previously been presented at the European Population Conference, Stockholm, June 2012, and at a Norwegian Research Council conference in February 2012. We thank conference participants and colleagues in Statistics Norway for constructive discussions. We also appreciate valuable comments and suggestions from four anonymous referees and the editors of Feminist Economics.

Notes

¹ The father's quota was extended further to twelve weeks in 2011 and fourteen weeks in 2013.

² For more documentation, see http://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/aku/kvartal/2013-07-31?fane=om#content.

³ Only 7 percent of the mothers are at work when the baby is 1–5 months old.

⁴ The survival time is shorter for all work entries than for full-time and part-time entries, since the former is the sum of part-time and full-time entries.

⁵ The odds ratio is equal to , where βˆ_j is the estimated logit coefficient related to event j. An odds ratio greater than one signifies a positive association, while a coefficient smaller than one signifies a negative association. The marginal effect is computed as , where p_ij is the predicted probability, and X_ij is the vector of covariates related to individual i in event j. When the independent variable is a dummy variable (as are most of the variables in our models), the appropriate marginal effect is , where x_k is the dummy variable, and X_* denotes the means of all the other covariates in the model (Willian H. Greene 2000).

⁶ For more details, see Marit Rønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød (2012).