Fathers' employment in a father-friendly welfare state: does fatherhood affect men's working hours?

Abstract

An important aim of Norwegian work–family policies is to enhance the family role of fathers. Time-use surveys show a slight increase in fathers’ family work, but we still know little about the relationship between men's family circumstances and working hours. On the one hand, policy measures encourage the greater involvement of fathers in family life. On the other hand, men are the main providers in most couples and employment and breadwinning are still important components of men's fathering identity. In this paper, we examine the relationship between fatherhood and working time, with a particular focus on the possible effects of the number and ages of children. Utilizing the Norwegian Labour Force Survey 2005, we find that men's contractual working hours are not significantly affected by their parental status, but men do curtail their actual working hours when they have young children, and particularly if there is only one child in the household. However, men with school-aged children actually work longer hours than non-fathers and men with young children.

Un objectif important des politiques de conciliation entre vie professionnelle et vie familiale est de renforcer le rôle du père au sein de la famille. Des eunquêtes sur l'emploi du temps indiquent une légère augmentation du travail des pères dans la famille, mais nous ne savons encore que peu de choses sur la relation entre la situation familiale des hommes et le temps de travail. D'une part, les mesures politiques favorisent un engagement plus important des pères dans la vie familiale. D'autre part, les hommes apportent le salaire principal dans la plupart des ménages et le fait d'avoir un emploi et de nourrir les siens constitue encore un élément important de l'identité paternelle. A l'heure actuelle, nous étudions la relation entre la paternité et le temps de travail, en nous concentrant particulièrement sur les effets éventuels du nombre et de l’âge des enfants. En nous appuyant sur l'Enquête sur la main-d'oeuvre de 2005 en Norvège, nous constatons que le temps de travail contractuel des hommes n'est pas significativement affecté par leur status parental, mais les hommes ayant des enfants en bas âge réduisent leur temps de travail effectif, en particulier si le ménage n'a qu'un enfant. Cependant, les hommes qui ont des enfants en âge d'aller à l’école travaillent en réalité plus longtemps que ceux qui n'ont pas d'enfant ou qui ont des enfants en bas âge.

Keywords:

• fathering
• fathers
• Norway
• working time
• ‘work–life balance’

Mots-clès:

• rôle paternel
• pères
• Norvège
• temps de travail
• conciliation travail–vie familiale

Acknowledgements

The paper is based on a project entitled ‘The New Working Life: New Working Time Patterns among Fathers and Mothers and Married Parents’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and Statistics Norway. Earlier versions have been presented at a Nordic workshop at Klækken in Norway in October 2007, and at the 29th Annual Conference on Time Use Research in Washington, DC, also in October 2007. We have benefitted considerably from comments received from participants at these conferences and from the comments of reviewers. In addition, we wish to thank our colleagues Erik Nymoen, Randi Kjeldstad, and Marit R⊘nsen for useful comments on previous versions. Erik Nymoen has also been helpful in preparing the data-set.

Notes

1. Among other things, they excluded people who were absent from work during the survey week because of parental leave or some other type of leave and they utilized data from the fourth quarter of the year only.

2. This applies to 94% of the fathers and 90% of the men without children in the household.

3. Six per cent of the men in the selected sample have more than one job (5.8% of the fathers and 6.5% of the non-fathers).

4. We have also included age as a squared term to explore whether age has a non-linear effect, but we found no significant effect. Since the variable ‘occupation’ is partly based on people's educational level, the effect of ‘education’ may be captured by the variable ‘occupation’.

5. Parents may utilize the leave in concentrated blocks of time or spread it over a longer period by taking only some days off per week. Ideally, we would prefer to exclude all fathers on full-time or part-time leave from the following analysis, but our data provide the reasons for absence only for those who were not at work the whole survey week.