Pia S. Schober

Maternal employment and gender role attitudes: dissonance among British men and women in the transition to parenthood

This study examines how changes in gender role attitudes of couples after childbirth relate to women’s paid work and the type of childcare used. Identifying attitude-practice dissonances matters because how they get resolved influences mothers’ future employment. Previous research examined changes in women’s attitudes and employment, or spouses’ adaptations to each others’ attitudes. This is extended by considering how women and men in couples simultaneously adapt to parenthood in terms of attitude and behavioural changes and by exploring indirect effects of economic constraints. Structural equation models and regression analysis based on the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2007) are applied. The results suggest that less traditional attitudes among women and men are more likely in couples where women’s postnatal labour market participation and the use of formal childcare contradict their traditional prenatal attitudes. Women’s prenatal earnings have an indirect effect on attitude change of both partners through incentives for maternal employment.

Parental Leave and Domestic Work of Mothers and Fathers: A Longitudinal Study of Two Reforms in West Germany

Following two parental leave reforms in West Germany, this research explores how child care and housework time changed among couples who have just had a child. The reform in 1992 extended the low paid or unpaid parental leave period, whereas the 2007 reform introduced income-dependent compensation and two ‘daddy months’. This study contributes to the literature by examining different mechanisms on how these reforms were associated with domestic work time in couples. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1990–2010), the analysis applies ordinary least square (OLS) regressions and difference-in-difference estimations. The findings point to a significant reduction in paternal child care time eighteen to thirty months after childbirth among couples with children born after the 1992 reform. The 2007 reform was associated with increased child care time of fathers in the first year and eighteen to thirty months after the birth. Changes in maternal child care and both partners’ housework were not statistically significant. Alterations in maternal and paternal labour market participation, wages and leave taking accounted for most of the observed variations in paternal child care except for eighteen to thirteen months after the 2007 reform. This unexplained variance may point to a normative policy effect.

Gender Equality and Outsourcing of Domestic Work, Childbearing, and Relationship Stability Among British Couples

This study investigates whether gender inequality in the division of housework and child care may be an obstacle to childbearing and relationship stability among different groups of British couples. Furthermore, it explores whether outsourcing of domestic labor ameliorates any negative effects of domestic work inequality. The empirical investigation uses event-history analysis based on 14 waves (1992-2005) of the British Household Panel Study. The author finds that the association between domestic work arrangements and family outcomes vary by the presence of children, women’s employment, and gender role attitudes. Gender inequality in domestic work reduces relationship stability among egalitarian childless women and among all mothers. For first and second births as outcomes, the association is weaker and depends on the level of inequality and women’s employment status, respectively. Domestic outsourcing is not significant for these family outcomes with the exception of formal child care, which is positively associated with the risk of a second birth.

Local Day Care Quality and Maternal Employment: Evidence From East and West Germany

By investigating how locally available early childhood education and care quality relates to maternal employment choices, this study extended the literature which has mostly focused on the importance of day-care availability or costs. We provided differentiated analyses by the youngest child’s age and for West and East Germany to examine moderating influences of varying day-care supply and work-care cultures. The empirical analysis linked the Socio-Economic Panel and the ‘Families in Germany‘-Study for 2010 and 2011 (N=3,301 mothers) with regional structural quality data. We used regression models of employment status and work hours changes, respectively. In East Germany, mothers with a child aged under three years who lived in districts with smaller day-care groups were more likely to be employed and to extend their work hours. In West Germany, the negative association of child-teacher-ratios with maternal employment was marginally significant. For mothers with older children, day-care quality was unrelated to employment.

Are Couples with Young Children More Likely to Split Up When the Mother is the Main or an Equal Earner

This study examines how a mother being the main or an equal earner impacts the relationship stability of heterosexual couple parents, using the UK’s Millennium Cohort Survey. Various theories alternatively predict that such couples experience a higher or lower risk of divorce than male-breadwinner couples. Alternatively the characteristics of these couples may predispose them to relatively higher or lower relationship stability than male-breadwinner couples. Using piecewise constant exponential event history models, we test these propositions between key stages in a child’s life: baby, toddler, school entry and age seven. In some periods, a mother being the main or an equal earner is associated with a lower risk of relationship breakdown than for male-breadwinner couples, and more so within cohabiting than married couples. However, there is a strong tendency for couples to shift over time from mothers being main or equal earners to a male-breadwinner arrangement.

Day-care availability, maternal employment and satisfaction of parents: Evidence from cultural and policy variations in Germany

This study investigates how the availability and expansion of childcare services for children aged under 3 years relate to the subjective wellbeing of German mothers and fathers. It extends previous studies by examining in more detail the relationship between day-care availability and use, maternal employment and parental subjective wellbeing during early childhood in a country with expanding childcare services and varying work–care cultures. The empirical analysis links annual day-care attendance rates at the county-level to individual-level data of the Socio-Economic Panel Study for 2007–2012 and the ‘Families in Germany’ Study for 2010–2012. We apply fixed-effects panel models to samples of 2002 couples and 376 lone mothers. We find some evidence of a positive effect of the day-care expansion only on satisfaction with family life for lone mothers and for full-time employed partnered mothers. Transitions to full-time employment are associated with reductions in subjective wellbeing irrespective of local day-care availability among partnered mothers in West Germany but not in East Germany. These results suggest that varying work–care cultures between East and West Germany are more important moderators of the relationship between maternal employment and satisfaction than short-term regional expansions of childcare services.

Day Care Trends for Children under Three Years in Germany

To facilitate the combination of employment and family care for parents in Germany, the provision of state-subsidised Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services for children aged under three years has expanded massively since 2005 (Spiess 2011). In combination with a new parental leave policy since 2007, this policy change suggests that Germany has been diverging from its previous trajectory as a conservative welfare state, in which family and labour market policies predominantly promoted a traditional or modified male breadwinner family model. This policy process has been subject to tensions and the individual policies have been shaped by party positions as well as intra-party conflicts (Leitner, 2010). In contrast to many other European countries, the economic crisis in 2008 has not undermined these policy developments. In this chapter, I provide an overview of developments in ECEC policy and associated trends in maternal employment and take-up of ECEC services. I extend the literature by complementing these with new analyses of trends in informal care for children under three and of temporal and regional variations in the structure and employment conditions of the ECEC workforce in Germany. This aims to improve our understanding of the extent to which care for young children is being shifted from parents — mainly mothers — or informal caregivers to formal providers and whether this may challenge the long established ideal of maternal care for young children in West Germany.

Gender equality in paid and unpaid work: priorities for UK policy intervention

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarise policy interventions and realistic strategies for achieving greater gender equality in paid and unpaid work, which were identified during a conference on “Gender equality in paid and unpaid work” held on 8 December 2009 at the Church House Conference Centre, London, UK.Design/methodology/approach – The conference included four plenary talks and group discussions. The paper is based on the presentations and group discussions.Findings – Government policies need to be holistic in the sense that labour market inequalities are often interlinked with inequalities in the home. The current economic recession can be seen as an opportunity to renegotiate work and life arrangements.Originality/value – The papers presented at the conference included original qualitative and quantitative research by researchers from several social science disciplines. The participants in the group discussions were academics, policy makers, pressure groups, practitioners and third‐sec...

Convergence or Divergence? Educational Discrepancies in Work-Care Arrangements of Mothers with Young Children in Germany:

This study examines how educational differences in work-care patterns among mothers with young children in Germany changed between 1997 and 2013. Since the mid-2000s, Germany has undergone a paradigm shift in parental leave and childcare policies. Our comparative analysis of East and West Germany provides new evidence on whether the long-standing gender regime differences interact with recent developments of social class inequalities in the changing family policy context. The analyses include pooled binary and multinomial logistic regressions based on 17,764 observations of 8604 children below the age of three years from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). The findings point to growing educational divergence in work-care arrangements in East and West Germany: employment and day-care use increased more strongly among families with medium and highly educated mothers compared to those with low education. This has critical implications for the latter’s economic security. The decline in the use of informal childcare options was, however, fairly homogenous.

Early Childhood Education and Care Quality in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) – the K2ID-SOEP Study

Since 2000, Germany is experiencing an expansion of early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions for children younger than three as well as increasing availability of full-day care for children aged three or older. More and more children attend ECEC centres for increasingly longer hours. Thus, ECEC centres are becoming an increasingly important environment for children and their parents. Given this background, an increasing number of economists are working on issues related to ECEC – with respect to either parental labour force participation or child outcomes. The K2ID-SOEP data sets are of particular interest to these researchers – and to all other social scientists investigating the impact of early childhood education and care across a variety of domains.The Socio-Economic-Panel Study (SOEP), as the largest and longest running multidisciplinary household panel in Germany (Wagner et al. 2007), started collecting information on ECEC centre attendance since its first wave in 1984. Irregularly, the SOEP collects information on the costs for ECEC care and the provider type. To learn more about the institutional context of ECEC, the aim of a larger research and data project funded by the Jacobs Foundation was to collect information from ECEC centres that are attended by children in the SOEP. Moreover this information of an institution survey was combined with the individual data of the SOEP. 1 This approach, which takes individual data as a starting point, differs from other data sets that collect comparable information in ECEC centres, such as the National Education Panel Study (NEPS), NEPS-starting cohort 2 (e. g. Blossfeld et al. 2011), which started with a sample of ECEC centres and planned to followed all children in the centres. The main aim of our K2ID-SOEP study (short: K2ID-SOEP) was to collect information on the quality of ECEC centres of all SOEP children in such centres. ECEC quality is a key feature that affects child development and other parental outcomes, such as parental employment and parental wellbeing (see e. g., Schober et al. 2016; Anders 2013). The K2ID-SOEP study was realized between 2013 and 2015. K2ID is an acronym for ‘Kinder und Kitas In Deutschland’ (‘Children and Childcare Centres in Germany). The K2ID-SOEP study encompasses two surveys, a Parent Survey and an Institution Survey.