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Work–family policies and occupational segregation by gender

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Jennifer Hook examines how national work-family policies impact occupational segregation by gender, particularly among mothers

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This video discusses research on how government policies can promote women's and mothers' labor market inclusion while also fostering gender equality. It highlights the complexity of family work policies, such as parental leave, which can vary greatly in terms of duration and usage. Long parental leave may inadvertently reinforce traditional gender roles and lead to negative labor market outcomes for women, including occupational segregation and diminished employability. In contrast, moderate parental leave and high-quality early childhood education (ECEC) have been shown to support women’s employment without exacerbating gender inequality.

The research utilizes data from the European Labor Force Survey spanning 21 countries and finds that moderate parental leave (up to nine months) and well-funded ECEC can promote women's employment and inclusion in the labor market without worsening occupational segregation. The findings indicate that long parental leave, up to three years in some countries, negatively impacts women's labor market outcomes, particularly for non-college educated mothers.

This video concludes with a recommendation for policymakers to focus on moderate parental leave and accessible ECEC to enhance employment opportunities and gender equality. It emphasizes the importance of understanding that policies can generate varied outcomes based on women's educational attainment and parental status, highlighting the need for tailored approaches to family policies for different groups of women.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Work-Family Policies and Gender Equality**: The author discusses the varying impacts of work-family policies, such as parental leave, on women's inclusion in the labor market and gender equality. Different types of parental leave can have conflicting effects; while longer parental leaves may support women's employment, they can also reinforce traditional gender roles and workplace inequalities.

2. **Importance of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)**: The video emphasizes that high-quality ECEC is beneficial for promoting both women's labor market inclusion and gender equality. ECEC externalizes caregiving responsibilities, allowing women, particularly those who are less educated, to participate more fully in the workforce without exacerbating occupational segregation.

3. **Differentiated Impact Based on Education and Parental Status**: The research shows that work-family policies can have different impacts on various groups of women. For example, while ECEC spending may boost employment rates for non-college-educated mothers, it is less impactful for highly educated women who are already integrated into the labor market.

4. **Negative Consequences of Long Parental Leave**: Long parental leave policies (beyond nine months) are found to be exclusionary and tend to exacerbate gender inequality in the workplace. This is true even for women who do not use the leave, highlighting a discriminatory environment created by employers who may avoid hiring women of childbearing age due to perceived risks related to extended leave.

5. **Recommendations for Policy**: The author advocates for moderate-length parental leave (less than 12 months) alongside robust ECEC as strategies that can support women's employment and promote gender equality in labor market outcomes. Long parental leave policies are discouraged, as they tend to segregate occupational roles and negatively affect labor market participation for women.

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This video discusses the implications of various work-family policies on gender equality and inclusion of women, particularly mothers, in the labor market. Here are some key quotes extracted from the video that encapsulate its main points:

1. **Research Motivation**:
- "Most of my research is motivated by this sort of larger question about what can governments do to promote women's and specifically mother's inclusion in the labor market, while simultaneously promoting gender equality."

2. **Work-Family Policy Concepts**:
- "But work family policy can mean a lot of different things."
- "Parental leave could be conceptualized as a short leave primarily for mothers... or it could be a really long parental leave that's typically exclusively used by mothers of... up to three years in length in some countries."

3. **Impact on Gender Equality**:
- "Some of these policies may be good at including women into employment, that could actually have negative implications for gender equality."
- "High quality early education, childhood, and care... externalizes some of women's caregiving responsibilities."

4. **Long Parental Leave**:
- "These really long leaves... reinforce women's responsibility for care."
- "On the sort of demand side, employers might just have an incentive to discriminate when women are taking... three years of leave with the birth of every child."

5. **Policy Outcomes Based on Different Women**:
- "We also think these policies might generate different outcomes for different groups of women... particularly detrimental to highly educated women."
- "Their human capital might depreciate while they're away on these really long leaves."

6. **Bundle of Policies**:
- "Mandel and her colleagues argued for... where policies are more sort of 'generous,' women may be more included in the labor market, but they have worse labor market outcomes."
- "We really argued against seeing work family policy as a bundle."

7. **Effectiveness of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)**:
- "ECEC... promotes inclusion and gender equality, where these really long parental leaves really are both exclusionary and promote inequality."

8. **Segregation and Employment Outcomes**:
- "When we look at moderate lengths of parental leave and early childhood education and care, there is no welfare state paradox for these outcomes."
- "Long parental leave... is segregating... for all groups of women, including childless women."

9. **Discrimination Mechanism**:
- "It's not about whether you're actually already a mom and you took leave and your human capital depreciated... it's happening to childless women too."

10. **Policy Recommendations**:
- "So if a goal is to maximize women's employment and promote gender equality, our research really supports policy moves towards moderate... less than 12 months."

These quotes highlight the complexity of work-family policies, the nuanced outcomes based on different demographic groups, and the overall recommendations for achieving gender equality in labor market inclusion.

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Most of my research is motivated by this sort

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of larger question about what can governments do

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to promote women's

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and specifically mother's inclusion in the labor market,

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while simultaneously promoting gender equality

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and labor market outcomes like earnings

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or occupational sex segregation.

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One solution is work family policy, right?

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But work family policy can mean a lot of different things.

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Um, just take the example of parental leave, right?

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Parental leave could be conceptualized as a short leave

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of a few months around the birth of a child,

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primarily for mothers.

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It could be, somewhat longer leave available

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as an entitlement for both parents,

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or it could be a really long parental leave that's

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typically exclusively used by mothers of, you know, up

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to three years in length in some countries.

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Um, and while some

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of these policies may be good at including women

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into employment, that could actually have negative

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implications for gender equality, for women

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who are in the labor market.

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Policies that sort of combine work, help women, combine work

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and families in ways that make them sort

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of look more like men at work,

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we think probably can help close that gap.

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And a good example here would be,

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high quality early education, childhood, and care, right?

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This is sort of a work family policy that really sort

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of externalizes some of,

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mother's caregiving responsibilities.

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Um, and then you have another set of policies.

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And here a good example is this really long parental leave I

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mentioned, right?

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That help women combine work and families,

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but in ways that make them look a lot less like

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what men do at work and sort

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of really reinforce women's responsibility for care.

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Um, and there are several mechanisms sort of

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that would be undergirding these relationships, right?

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So there's sort of what we might think of

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as the supply side.

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So sort of women themselves, right?

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So this really long leave women may,

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accumulate less work experience.

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Their human capital might depreciate

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what these really long periods of time out

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of the labor force,

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while they're away on these really long leaves,

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their work commitment might start to wane as they have a lot

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of time away from employment

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and experience in a different role.

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Um, but we can also think about employers, right?

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So on the sort of demand side,

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employers might just have a incentive

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to discriminate when women are taking sort of three years

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of leave with the birth of every child.

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And I think it's important to mention

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that these really long leaves also create sort

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of normative pressures, right?

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So when sort of governments are setting the standard

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for sort of what good moms do, even women who might not want

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to take three years of parental leave,

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after say, investing heavily in in their education

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and their career progress might feel pressured

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to take these sorts of leaves.

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Um, and then I'll also just mention that

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we also think these policies might generate different

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outcomes for different groups of women.

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And here I'm talking about things like

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by their parental status or by their educational attainment.

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So one thread of the literature really focuses on how,

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these policies may be particularly detrimental

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to highly educated women.

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Uh, there's another thread of the literature that focuses on

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how these policies might be potentially damaging

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to really childbearing, childbearing, women sort

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of across that stage of life, right?

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As employers have an incentive to, to discriminate,

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could be an unsettled debate in the literature.

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So in a sort of seminal series of papers, Mandel

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and her colleagues argued for,

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what they labeled a welfare state paradox.

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Um, and here they saw work family policy as sort of a bundle

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where it was a combination of parental leaves,

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childcare, as well as sort

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of large public sectors associated with childcare.

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Um, so sort of viewing this as a bundle, they really argued

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that, where policies are more sort

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of quote unquote generous.

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Um, women may be more included in the labor market,

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but they have worse labor market outcomes in terms

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especially of, segregation and wages.

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So the idea is that these policies would bring in sort

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of large numbers of women,

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but really bring them into,

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female dominated, low paid work.

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Um, and that was especially damaging

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for highly educated women.

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So then in a, a book I wrote with Becky Petit,

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back in 2009, we argued against sort

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of seeing work family policy as a bundle, really the idea

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that I just sort of laid out that you might expect

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high quality early child education

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and care to do something very different than these really

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long parental leaves.

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Um, so we really argued against seeing this as a bundle

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and instead really thinking about each policy along

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to axes, right?

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So does it include or exclude women from the labor market?

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And then for those women who are in the labor market,

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does it promote gender equality or gender inequality?

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Um, and most work in this area really focuses on these two

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policies of parental leave

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and early childhood education and care.

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We argued that ECEC, it promotes inclusion

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and gender equality, where these really long parental leaves

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really are both exclusionary and promote inequality.

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Um, the empirical findings in this literature are

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really interesting.

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Um, I've describe, and I've described them

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before as almost like a choose your own adventure.

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Um, in that any finding you want to support what you want

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to say, you can find something that says that,

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these policies solve inequality,

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that they make inequality worse.

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And then you can find studies

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that say they have absolutely no

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Effect on women's employment

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or their labor market outcomes, right?

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So it's all there.

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Um, so when we moved to occupational sex segregation,

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which is the focus of, of paper today,

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the evidence base is even more limited occupational

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segregation of sort of the least studied outcome,

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in this work.

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And it's the least studied because of data limitations.

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So, a lot

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of this comparative work uses the Luxembourg income study,

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which is a wonderful resource

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and has amazingly high quality,

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information on earnings, right?

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Because it's in household income survey, that means

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that it's information about labor market

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outcomes isn't as great.

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So most of these studies that have tried

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to look at occupational segregation are primarily using

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what we call one digit occupation code,

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which means we're really talking about these very large

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broad occupational categories like professional,

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which obviously isn't very detailed, right?

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Because there's a lot of different things you could do,

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in the category professional

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and occupational segregation is less studied,

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but it's really important

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because it's one of the main components

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of the gender wage gap, right?

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The gender wage gap is driven by men

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and women being paid differently in the same jobs.

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But a lot of the gap is because men

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and women are largely working in different jobs.

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Um, so the goal of this paper was really sort of

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to test the relationship

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between these specific work family policies

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and occupational sex segregation in what we think is one

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of the most robust research designs

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that we've been able to do so far.

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To address this question, we use,

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repeated cross-sectional labor market surveys,

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from the European Labor Force survey.

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So this gives us data on 21 European countries.

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Um, we span the time period from 1996 to 2016.

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So we end up having data on two

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and a half million employed men

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and women ages 20 to 44,

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from two from 21 countries.

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And that's 235 country years, right?

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Because we're observing,

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countries pretty much every year.

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So we're harnessing both variation between countries as well

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as within countries over time, right?

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Because we're observing them from 99 to 2016

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as their policies change, right?

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Um, so in addition

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to this micro level data from the European Labor Force

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surveys, we're also collected original collection

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of macro level data on our policies.

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We measure early childhood education

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and care spending, parental leave length,

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public sector size.

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And then we also, include controls

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for things we would expect might affect both policy as well

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as segregation, like gender norms in each country year.

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Uh, women's part-time, employment rates,

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women's share of employment.

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Um, the really fun part of this data set,

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is the three digit occupational codes, right?

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I mentioned how limiting these sort

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of 10 broad occupational categories is,

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and that we've really been limited to

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that when we use Luxembourg income study data.

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But by moving this question over

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to the EU labor force surveys, we were able

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to get these three digit occupation codes,

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which actually gives us over 100 detailed occupations.

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Um, and for an example of how important that is,

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in our median case, the one digit code

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for professional was 58% women.

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When we looked with a three digit occupation code within

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that category of professional, it ranged from 7%.

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Um, women is software developers, application developers

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to 85%, nursing and midwifery professionals, right?

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So that one digit category conceals

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a huge range of variation

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and that range span at least 45 percentage points in every

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single one digit code except

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for the very male dominated like agriculture

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and forestry, right?

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So it's a really important sort of part

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of this study was being able to use this new data set

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to really examine this question.

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So then methodologically, we use these, sort

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of this time varying data across countries from all

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of these individuals with the macro level data.

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And we used a three level linear regression where we have

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our two and a half million individuals

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nested within 235 sort of country years.

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Within 21 countries, governments can provide

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moderate length of parental leave.

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Um, and moderate length we measured

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as a sort of nine months and less.

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Um, and well-funded early childhood care

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and education with no bad outcomes, right?

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So when we look at moderate lengths of parental leave

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and early childhood education

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and care, there is no welfare state

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paradox for these outcomes.

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Um, in our previous study, we found

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that these policies actually increased mother's employment.

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And in this study we find that they do

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so right without exacerbating occupational segregation.

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And we have some more detailed findings around

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that given women's educational level and parental status.

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So in our previous work on employment, we found that

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ECE spending increased employment among mothers

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with young children who don't have a college degree, right?

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And then in this study we add that it does

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so without making segregation any worse,

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not any better, but not any worse.

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Um, so for these non-college educated women,

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ECEC really promotes inclusion without sacrificing equality.

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We kind of find the, a bit of the, not quite opposite,

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but a contrasting finding with college educated women.

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Um, so ECE spending was not associated

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with increased employment for mothers of young kids

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with college degrees largely

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'cause they're already employed, right?

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Um, they're highly educated women,

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but they are more occupationally integrated with men.

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And we find that that applies

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to college educated childless women too.

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So college educated women in general are more occupationally

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integrated with men where ECE spending is higher, right?

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So sort of evidence to support this idea that ECEC

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promotes inclusion and gender equality at the same time.

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Um, and we turn to sort of the more detailed findings for,

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moderate, lengths of paid leave.

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Um, we really are finding no associations

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with occupational segregation, which again,

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I think is good news for gender equality, right?

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Because we know that these moderate leaves promote

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employment especially for college educated moms.

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And they're doing so without exacerbating segregation.

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Um, now we move to the, other main,

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policy and we really find very,

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very different effects, right?

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So long parental leave, which we measure

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as over nine months, right?

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And going all the way up to three years in some

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countries is segregating.

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Um, our previous work shows that it decreases employment

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for college educated mothers.

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And in this study we're really adding that.

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We find that it's segregating for all groups of women,

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including childless women,

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but most acutely actually for non-college educated moms.

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Um, so we really find that it's exclusionary,

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it exacerbates gender equality.

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And what's really interesting is it does so regardless

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of women's parental status

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or their actual use of leave, which

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theoretically would suggest a

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discrimination mechanism, right?

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Because it's not about whether you're actually already a mom

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and you took leave and your human capital depreciated

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and your work commitment waned

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and you have less work experience

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because it's happening to childless women too.

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I'll briefly mention that We also have a new paper under

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review, which gets to that last outcome

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that we're probably interested, which is earnings.

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Um, and so we use a similar framework,

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but we go back to the Luxembourg income study

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because that's where you wanna go for earnings data,

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not the EU labor force surveys.

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Um, and our findings are actually really similar, right?

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And that we find no negative consequences of ECEC

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or moderate leave really for any group of women.

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But we really find that these long

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leaves have a negative effect on mother's earnings as well

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as the earnings of childless college educated women.

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And in that paper we're actually able

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to look at these mechanisms one by one

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because we have sort of data on work hours

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and work experience and all

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of these things we go through and we test them.

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And all of those mechanisms that I talked about

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actually don't explain the relationship

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between long parental leave and women's depressed earnings.

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Suggesting, again, more support for this idea that

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when you make parental leave, really long

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employers have an incentive

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to discriminate not only against mothers

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but of child, women of childbearing age more broadly.

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Um, and this is consistent

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with some really great qualitative work in the Hungarian

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context by GLA

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and Foer who look at employment discrimination in Hungary

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and find that yes, employers sort

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of in hiring managers admit to discriminating against women

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of childbearing age

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because of sort of this entitlement to three years of leave.

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In terms of future research,

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I think a really interesting avenue is that,

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there's a lot of work in the area right now about how sort

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of these changes

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and what sort of labeled the gender gender revolution

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unfold, right?

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And so these relationships that we see between policies

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and outcomes, you know, is not universal, right?

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Um, these relationships may change over time.

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Um, they may vary outside of, you know,

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these rich western countries that we typically study.

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Um, and I think that's a really fruitful area of research

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to think about how the relationship between

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policies outcomes maybe have,

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may have been different say in the, you know,

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early 1990s when

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mothers continuous labor force participation was sort

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of just becoming more normative as opposed to say, you know,

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2024 where it's pretty entrenched, right?

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So thinking about how these relationships may have changed

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over time, I think would be a really fruitful, avenue

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for future research.

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But, you know, in terms of wrapping up,

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I think there is just mounting evidence that ECEC

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and moderate leave are a net gain for women

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and for all groups of women

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and don't have any negative outcomes.

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Governments can provide moderate leave, I think in ECEC

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and feel confident that they're both employment supporting

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and support equality,

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but these long leaves really just cleave the labor market

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outcomes of women from men.

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So if a goal is to maximize women's employment

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and promote gender equality, you know,

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our research really supports policy moves towards moderate

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sort of this less than 12 months.

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But that's not an exact science, right?

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These are estimates of well paid leave,

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I would add from other research

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as an individual entitlement reserved for both parents

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coupled with affordable, available, you know,

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high quality care, right?

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And that's really sort of proxied in our study by this,

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spending measure.

Exploring Work-Family Policies: Impacts on Women's Labor Inclusion and Gender Equality

00:00:00 - Most of my research is motivated by this sort of larger question about what can governments do to promote women's and specifically mother's inclusion in the labor market, while simultaneously promoting gender equality and labor market outcomes like earnings or occupational sex segregation. One solution is work family policy, right? But work family policy can mean a lot of different things. just take the example of parental leave, right? Parental leave could be conceptualized as a short leave

00:00:34 - primarily for mothers. It could be, somewhat longer leave available as an entitlement for both parents, or it could be a really long parental leave that's typically exclusively used by mothers of, you know, up to three years in length in some countries. and while some of these policies may be good at including women into employment, that could actually have negative implications for gender equality, for women who are in the labor market.

00:01:08 - and families in ways that make them sort of look more like men at work, we think probably can help close that gap. And a good example here would be, high quality early education, childhood, and care, right? This is sort of a work family policy that really sort of externalizes some of, mother's caregiving responsibilities. and then you have another set of policies. And here a good example is this really long parental leave I

The Impact of Long Parental Leave on Women's Labor Market Dynamics

00:01:36 - That help women combine work and families, but in ways that make them look a lot less like what men do at work and sort of really reinforce women's responsibility for care. and there are several mechanisms sort of that would be undergirding these relationships, right? So there's sort of what we might think of as the supply side. So sort of women themselves, right? So this really long leave women may, accumulate less work experience. Their human capital might depreciate

00:02:09 - of the labor force, while they're away on these really long leaves, their work commitment might start to wane as they have a lot of time away from employment and experience in a different role. but we can also think about employers, right? So on the sort of demand side, employers might just have a incentive to discriminate when women are taking sort of three years of leave with the birth of every child. And I think it's important to mention that these really long leaves also create sort

00:02:39 - So when sort of governments are setting the standard for sort of what good moms do, even women who might not want to take three years of parental leave, after say, investing heavily in in their education and their career progress might feel pressured to take these sorts of leaves. and then I'll also just mention that we also think these policies might generate different outcomes for different groups of women. And here I'm talking about things like by their parental status or by their educational attainment.

Impact of Work-Family Policies on Highly Educated Women

00:03:14 - these policies may be particularly detrimental to highly educated women. there's another thread of the literature that focuses on how these policies might be potentially damaging to really childbearing, childbearing, women sort of across that stage of life, right? As employers have an incentive to, to discriminate, could be an unsettled debate in the literature. So in a sort of seminal series of papers, Mandel and her colleagues argued for,

00:03:44 - and here they saw work family policy as sort of a bundle where it was a combination of parental leaves, childcare, as well as sort of large public sectors associated with childcare. so sort of viewing this as a bundle, they really argued that, where policies are more sort of quote unquote generous. women may be more included in the labor market, but they have worse labor market outcomes in terms

00:04:17 - So the idea is that these policies would bring in sort of large numbers of women, but really bring them into, female dominated, low paid work. and that was especially damaging for highly educated women. So then in a, a book I wrote with Becky Petit, back in 2009, we argued against sort of seeing work family policy as a bundle, really the idea

Evaluating Work-Family Policies: Inclusion vs. Inequality

00:04:47 - high quality early child education and care to do something very different than these really long parental leaves. so we really argued against seeing this as a bundle and instead really thinking about each policy along to axes, right? So does it include or exclude women from the labor market? And then for those women who are in the labor market, does it promote gender equality or gender inequality? and most work in this area really focuses on these two

00:05:19 - and early childhood education and care. We argued that ECEC, it promotes inclusion and gender equality, where these really long parental leaves really are both exclusionary and promote inequality. the empirical findings in this literature are really interesting. I've describe, and I've described them before as almost like a choose your own adventure. in that any finding you want to support what you want to say, you can find something that says that,

00:05:52 - that they make inequality worse. And then you can find studies that say they have absolutely no Effect on women's employment or their labor market outcomes, right? So it's all there. so when we moved to occupational sex segregation, which is the focus of, of paper today, the evidence base is even more limited occupational segregation of sort of the least studied outcome, in this work. And it's the least studied because of data limitations.

Analyzing Occupational Segregation Through Luxembourg Income Study

00:06:22 - of this comparative work uses the Luxembourg income study, which is a wonderful resource and has amazingly high quality, information on earnings, right? Because it's in household income survey, that means that it's information about labor market outcomes isn't as great. So most of these studies that have tried to look at occupational segregation are primarily using what we call one digit occupation code, which means we're really talking about these very large

00:06:57 - which obviously isn't very detailed, right? Because there's a lot of different things you could do, in the category professional and occupational segregation is less studied, but it's really important because it's one of the main components of the gender wage gap, right? The gender wage gap is driven by men and women being paid differently in the same jobs. But a lot of the gap is because men and women are largely working in different jobs. so the goal of this paper was really sort of

00:07:24 - between these specific work family policies and occupational sex segregation in what we think is one of the most robust research designs that we've been able to do so far. To address this question, we use, repeated cross-sectional labor market surveys, from the European Labor Force survey. So this gives us data on 21 European countries. we span the time period from 1996 to 2016. So we end up having data on two

Analyzing Labor Market Policies Across Europe

00:07:58 - and women ages 20 to 44, from two from 21 countries. And that's 235 country years, right? Because we're observing, countries pretty much every year. So we're harnessing both variation between countries as well as within countries over time, right? Because we're observing them from 99 to 2016 as their policies change, right? so in addition to this micro level data from the European Labor Force

00:08:29 - of macro level data on our policies. We measure early childhood education and care spending, parental leave length, public sector size. And then we also, include controls for things we would expect might affect both policy as well as segregation, like gender norms in each country year. women's part-time, employment rates, women's share of employment. the really fun part of this data set,

00:09:00 - I mentioned how limiting these sort of 10 broad occupational categories is, and that we've really been limited to that when we use Luxembourg income study data. But by moving this question over to the EU labor force surveys, we were able to get these three digit occupation codes, which actually gives us over 100 detailed occupations. and for an example of how important that is, in our median case, the one digit code

Occupational Gender Variation and Data Analysis

00:09:33 - When we looked with a three digit occupation code within that category of professional, it ranged from 7%. women is software developers, application developers to 85%, nursing and midwifery professionals, right? So that one digit category conceals a huge range of variation and that range span at least 45 percentage points in every single one digit code except

00:10:03 - and forestry, right? So it's a really important sort of part of this study was being able to use this new data set to really examine this question. So then methodologically, we use these, sort of this time varying data across countries from all of these individuals with the macro level data. And we used a three level linear regression where we have our two and a half million individuals nested within 235 sort of country years.

00:10:38 - moderate length of parental leave. and moderate length we measured as a sort of nine months and less. and well-funded early childhood care and education with no bad outcomes, right? So when we look at moderate lengths of parental leave and early childhood education and care, there is no welfare state paradox for these outcomes. in our previous study, we found

Impact of Early Childhood Education on Employment and Gender Equality

00:11:07 - And in this study we find that they do so right without exacerbating occupational segregation. And we have some more detailed findings around that given women's educational level and parental status. So in our previous work on employment, we found that ECE spending increased employment among mothers with young children who don't have a college degree, right? And then in this study we add that it does so without making segregation any worse,

00:11:37 - so for these non-college educated women, ECEC really promotes inclusion without sacrificing equality. We kind of find the, a bit of the, not quite opposite, but a contrasting finding with college educated women. so ECE spending was not associated with increased employment for mothers of young kids with college degrees largely 'cause they're already employed, right? they're highly educated women, but they are more occupationally integrated with men.

00:12:08 - to college educated childless women too. So college educated women in general are more occupationally integrated with men where ECE spending is higher, right? So sort of evidence to support this idea that ECEC promotes inclusion and gender equality at the same time. and we turn to sort of the more detailed findings for, moderate, lengths of paid leave. we really are finding no associations with occupational segregation, which again,

The Impact of Parental Leave on Gender Equality and Employment

00:12:41 - Because we know that these moderate leaves promote employment especially for college educated moms. And they're doing so without exacerbating segregation. now we move to the, other main, policy and we really find very, very different effects, right? So long parental leave, which we measure as over nine months, right? And going all the way up to three years in some countries is segregating.

00:13:13 - for college educated mothers. And in this study we're really adding that. We find that it's segregating for all groups of women, including childless women, but most acutely actually for non-college educated moms. so we really find that it's exclusionary, it exacerbates gender equality. And what's really interesting is it does so regardless of women's parental status or their actual use of leave, which

00:13:41 - discrimination mechanism, right? Because it's not about whether you're actually already a mom and you took leave and your human capital depreciated and your work commitment waned and you have less work experience because it's happening to childless women too. I'll briefly mention that We also have a new paper under review, which gets to that last outcome that we're probably interested, which is earnings. and so we use a similar framework, but we go back to the Luxembourg income study

The Impact of Parental Leave on Women's Earnings and Discrimination

00:14:13 - not the EU labor force surveys. and our findings are actually really similar, right? And that we find no negative consequences of ECEC or moderate leave really for any group of women. But we really find that these long leaves have a negative effect on mother's earnings as well as the earnings of childless college educated women. And in that paper we're actually able to look at these mechanisms one by one because we have sort of data on work hours

00:14:43 - of these things we go through and we test them. And all of those mechanisms that I talked about actually don't explain the relationship between long parental leave and women's depressed earnings. Suggesting, again, more support for this idea that when you make parental leave, really long employers have an incentive to discriminate not only against mothers but of child, women of childbearing age more broadly. and this is consistent with some really great qualitative work in the Hungarian context by GLA

00:15:15 - and find that yes, employers sort of in hiring managers admit to discriminating against women of childbearing age because of sort of this entitlement to three years of leave. In terms of future research, I think a really interesting avenue is that, there's a lot of work in the area right now about how sort of these changes and what sort of labeled the gender gender revolution unfold, right? And so these relationships that we see between policies

Dynamic Policy Relationships and Gender Equality

00:15:50 - these relationships may change over time. they may vary outside of, you know, these rich western countries that we typically study. and I think that's a really fruitful area of research to think about how the relationship between policies outcomes maybe have, may have been different say in the, you know, early 1990s when mothers continuous labor force participation was sort of just becoming more normative as opposed to say, you know,

00:16:22 - So thinking about how these relationships may have changed over time, I think would be a really fruitful, avenue for future research. But, you know, in terms of wrapping up, I think there is just mounting evidence that ECEC and moderate leave are a net gain for women and for all groups of women and don't have any negative outcomes. Governments can provide moderate leave, I think in ECEC and feel confident that they're both employment supporting

00:16:54 - but these long leaves really just cleave the labor market outcomes of women from men. So if a goal is to maximize women's employment and promote gender equality, you know, our research really supports policy moves towards moderate sort of this less than 12 months. But that's not an exact science, right? These are estimates of well paid leave, I would add from other research as an individual entitlement reserved for both parents coupled with affordable, available, you know,