Is Part-Time Employment after Childbirth a Stepping-Stone into Full-Time Work? A Cohort Study for East and West Germany

ABSTRACT

Does part-time work support first-time mothers’ employment by providing a stepping-stone into full-time work in Germany? Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984–2012, this study compares three different age cohorts of first-time East and West German mothers to investigate whether there has been any convergence between East and West Germany in the way women use part-time employment. Results show that mothers in West Germany in all cohorts tended to remain in part-time employment for longer periods than those in East Germany. Part-time employment more often provided a stepping-stone into full-time employment in East Germany than in West Germany. East German women who gave birth after reunification were less likely than older cohorts to experience a transition from part-time to full-time work. Thus, part-time employment not followed by subsequent full-time work has become more common in the East.

KEYWORDS:

• Part-time work
• female labor force participation
• employment

JEL Codes:

• J01
• J20

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to the scientists at German Center of Gerontology (DZA), WZB Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), and Humboldt University of Berlin (HU Berlin) who commented on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks go to the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for very thoughtful suggestions and comments.

Notes

1 In 2013, the limit was increased to €450.

2 We have taken into account all SOEP samples up to this point in time.

3 For detailed information on prioritization defined for overlapping states and gap-filling rules, please consult Julia Simonson, Laura Romeu Gordo, and Nadiya Titova (2011).

4 This is the case for Cohorts 1 and 2. In Cohort 3, most women do not reach the age of 45 in 2012. This has implications for our analysis and will be considered when it comes to interpreting the results.

5 The assumption that all cohorts are at proportional risk of experiencing a transition is justified for Cohorts 1 and 2, but it is not justified for Cohort 3. However, using both an exponential transition rate model and a piecewise constant exponential model will yield almost identical results, which suggests that the results are relatively robust against the model specification.

6 To distinguish between East and West Germany we use information about the geographic area a woman lived in before the German reunification. After reunification, we find that about 3.2 percent of women from Cohort 1, 4.8 percent of women from Cohort 2, and 7.4 percent of women from Cohort 3 experienced East–West intra-German migration in either one direction or the other.

7 The percentages indicate the odds ratios that have been calculated as follows: (exp(1.21)-1)*100%.

8 (exp(-1.03)-1)*100%.

9 Since we are studying different birth cohorts, it is important to control for the fact that women from these cohorts could only be observed up to a specific age. Therefore, we control for cohort and age effects in our analyses. Yet, particularly for the youngest women from Cohort 3, some observations are terminated on the right-hand side of the observation window since, for example, the youngest women from Cohort 3 (born in 1975) reach the maximum age of 37 in 2012. Because the end of the observation window is normally determined independently from the substantive process under study, this type of censoring should not affect the results of the analysis (Blossfeld, Golsch, and Rohwer 2007). To test the robustness of our results, we restrict the total sample to women between ages 15 and 37 years and run the models for this sample. The findings are comparable to the results presented in Table 3 and are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadiya Kelle

Nadiya Kelle holds an MA degree in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests are labor and labor market, gender and family, and social science research methods. Currently, she works at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and is a PhD candidate within the SESS.Euro PhD program at the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS). Her articles have appeared in Advances in Life Course Research and Current Sociology.

Julia Simonson

Julia Simonson holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bremen. She is Head of Research and Deputy Director at the German Centre of Gerontology (DZA) in Berlin. Her research interests are life-course studies, old-age provision, volunteering, and methods of social research. She has published articles in, among other journals, Advances in Life Course Research, International Journal of Developmental Science, and Historical Social Research.

Laura Romeu Gordo

Laura Romeu Gordo completed her PhD in Economics at the Technical University of Berlin and German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). She previously worked for the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nürnberg. Currently, she holds a position at the German Centre of Gerontology (DZA). She has published several articles in academic journals including Applied Economics, Feminist Economics, and Labour Economics.