Mothers in the Labor Market 3030997790, 9783030997793

Citation preview

José Alberto Molina   Editor

Mothers in the Labor Market

Mothers in the Labor Market

José Alberto Molina Editor

Mothers in the Labor Market

Editor José Alberto Molina Faculty of Economics and Business Studies University of Zaragoza Zaragoza, Spain

ISBN 978-3-030-99779-3 ISBN 978-3-030-99780-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99780-9

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Raquel, my dear wife, with love, an exceptional mother highly dedicated to both the family and the labor market.

Introduction

This book includes ten exceptional chapters covering evidence on different behaviors of mothers in the labor markets around the globe (the USA, Latin America, Europe, and Asia). It describes the social and economic issues that involve and affect mothers in labor markets, providing insights into the quantitative effects of motherhood on the decline in mothers’ earnings, and how things differ for mothers with lower incomes and lower levels of education. The book sheds light on how this effect varies across countries and/or cultural regions, what is the impact of socioeconomic policies on mothers’ labor supply, and how it varies in different family contexts. Topics such as labor participation and hours of work, paid work and home production, flexibility and work from home, self-employment and entrepreneurship, fertility and maternity leave, wage penalty and career interruption, labor supply and childcare, gender norms and cultural issues, intra-household wage inequality, are all addressed, and more. The book is designed to be of interest to economists, social scientists, policy makers and HR managers, and all those interested in the subject. In the first chapter, Daniel S. Hamermesh analyzes how divorce and separation of mothers from their partners affects the ways that mothers use their time and especially the amount of attention that their children receive. Hamermesh draws inferences about women’s well-being and its effects on child development. Using data from the USA, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, the author shows that mothers without a current partner spend less time in home production activities, with some of the decline accounted for by less time spent on childcare. Such women feel slightly more rushed for time than do partnered mothers, and they are substantially less satisfied with their lives. Results suggest that children of un-partnered mothers not only receive less parental time than others but that the attention they do obtain is from mothers who feel more stressed for time and are less satisfied with their lives. The fact that newly single and newly married mothers use their time and have the same feelings as mothers who have been single, or who have been married, for several years suggests that women become quickly inured to their new situations and lives and alter their behavior accordingly. The findings imply a need for even more attention to be paid to the difficulties children face in single-parent households. vii

viii

Introduction

The second chapter, from Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel, takes a careful look at activity-level subjective well-being assessments by men and women, in order to assess the roles that parenthood, marital status, and employment play in the experienced lives of mothers and fathers of children under age 18. The authors use five categories of time (employment, nonpaid work, childcare, TVwatching, and leisure) to analyze the covariates of subjective well-being scores in the USA, focusing on differences across gender, marital status, and employment status, including wives’ employment status for married fathers, while controlling for certain other characteristics of the respondent, his or her household, and the diary day, and characteristics of the activity itself, such as who else was present, whether it occurred at home, the time of day it began, and its duration. The authors use a simple regression approach, finding that mothers are more tired than fathers in each of their aggregated time-use activities, and report higher stress levels when engaged in paid work, nonpaid work, childcare, and leisure activities. However, mothers report greater happiness than fathers when engaged in paid work and leisure. Single non-employed mothers are particularly unhappy, stressed, and tired, even after controlling for other characteristics, including education level and household income. Fathers’ subjective well-being also varies by marital status: single fathers are less happy and attribute less meaning or importance to nonpaid work than do married men, and are more stressed while watching TV, but less tired in other forms of leisure than married fathers. The third chapter is dedicated to analyzing how changes in the intra-household division of childcare exogenously induced by COVID-19 have influenced children’s emotional well-being and learning processes, focusing on children’s time with fathers. Lucia Mangiavacchi and Luca Piccoli perform descriptive analyses and fixed-effect regressions using real-time survey data developed for the purpose and collected in the middle of the stronger COVID-19 lockdown phase in Italy, in April 2020. Results suggest that changes in the intra-household distribution of housework and childcare tasks can be largely explained by the exogenous increase in the available time for those parents who had to stop work during the lockdown. Taking advantage of this exogenous variation, the authors evaluate mothers’ perceptions of the effects the lockdown had on children’s emotional well-being and learning processes, and examine the extent to which the shift in childcare roles toward fathers had an influence on the children. Results confirm that quality childcare is characterized by the presence of important complementarities in the time spent by mothers and fathers. The increase in fathers’ contributions to educational time with children does not affect mothers’ perceptions of educational outcomes (as well as other indicators of child well-being), suggesting that the comparative advantage in educational tasks traditionally attributed to mothers is no longer perceived as important by mothers participating in the survey. The authors further note that the increase in playtime with fathers has a positive impact on children’s emotional wellbeing and educational progress. Results provide empirical evidence in support of policies aimed at increasing fathers’ involvement in childcare activities, such as increased mandatory paternity leave and more flexible work arrangements.

Introduction

ix

In the next chapter, José I. Giménez-Nadal, José Alberto Molina, and Almudena Sevilla explore the relationship between temporal flexibility and the motherhood wage gap of full-time working parents in the USA, using a sample of full-time workers with children from the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003– 2019. The most common explanation for mothers earning less than non-mothers is that the loss of individual skills, as well as the depreciation of experience, is associated with the period spent out of work resulting from childbearing and childcare. Explanations for the existence of the motherhood wage penalty include the fatigue experienced by a woman who cares for her children at home, leading to less effort being dedicated to her job activity. Greater effort dedicated to home activities decreases as the child grows older and increases as a higher level of education is required at work. Another important factor is that women show a preference for jobs that allow them to combine household schedules with their work schedule, in exchange for a lower wage. Additional explanations are related to discrimination, which may explain why firms assume that all women will interrupt their working career at some point, although they may not subsequently have children, in such a way that firms tend to place them in jobs that have a lesser human capital requirement. These positions require less training, and consequently pay lower wages. Our analysis reveals that occupations with higher wages are also those with comparatively greater temporal flexibility, which has an inverted Ushaped relationship with wage rates, and also with the motherhood wage gap, with a maximum reached at the level of 55 percent of temporal flexibility. The authors find that occupations such as computer and mathematical science, and the life, physical, and social sciences, are among the top occupations in terms of temporal flexibility, while health support, health practitioner, and technical positions do less well in terms of temporal flexibility. Additionally, the authors observe that temporal flexibility has a U-shaped relationship with the number of interruptions, and an inverted U-shaped relationship with the time working until an interruption, with the maximum time working before an interruption being reached at the level of 33 percent of temporal flexibility. In the following chapter, Crystal Wong finds that the labor supply decision of mothers with more traditional values responds more strongly to childbearing. The results are obtained by examining the Chinese preference for sons, and that education can potentially alter traditional beliefs that are deeply rooted in social norms. This is consistent with many studies, showing little evidence of parental gender bias in most of the developed world, which may be related to the higher educational attainment of women and the ensuing job opportunities open to them. In the case of Hong Kong, the 2SLS estimates are substantially larger than the OLS estimates in magnitude, suggesting that the labor supply of women with a preference for sons would respond more strongly to having more children. The chapter from Lorena Popescu and Chiara Pronzato is devoted to analyzing grandparents’ care provisions for the following countries: Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden. First, the authors study the determinants of supply and demand for grandchildren’s care; then, they estimate the impact of potential help from

x

Introduction

grandparents on mothers’ and fathers’ work, and investigate whether the impact of this help is heterogeneous across different contexts. The authors observe that the availability of grandparents to care for children has a positive effect and depends on a number of personal variables, such as age, education, health, work, and being in a couple. Having more adult children with more grandchildren makes help less likely, as does a greater distance between homes. Although this empirical evidence indicates a strong impact of this help, encouraging or even substituting this childcare for formal childcare leads to a series of problems. First, the opportunities for access would be unequal among families: if maintaining a good relationship with one’s elderly parents can be a merit, the facts that they are in good health and geographically close are more coincidental. Second, using grandparents as a primary form of childcare would only be effective in a one-child society, with only children, because helping more adult children can be difficult. This is not desirable in a society that needs to recover in terms of fertility. Iga Magda and Katarzyna Lipowska used data from the 2019 EU Labour Force Survey and the LFS ad hoc module on work organization and working time flexibility to study the linkages between various dimensions of flexibility in working time arrangements, gender, and parenthood in 25 European countries. The authors found that women are no more likely than men to have flexible work hours but are less likely than men to be asked by their employers to change their work schedules at short notice. Overall, gender is shown to be a less important factor associated with temporal flexibility, while education and workplace characteristics are much more important factors. The results indicate that working time flexibility is most likely to be offered to – and asked of – tertiary educated workers with permanent contracts, especially if they are working as supervisors at smaller firms. The authors also find that parenthood matters, that is, both mothers and fathers are shown to be more likely than their childless colleagues to have access to flexible working time. However, fathers’ workplaces are found to be more likely than the mothers’ workplaces to ask for temporal flexibility from employees. Additionally, occupations dominated by female workers offer less, not more, flexibility, despite the popular belief that women tend to choose certain occupations in order to have greater access to time flexibility. Moreover, working in a female-dominated occupation increases the probability of access to flexible work arrangements for men, but decreases it for women. At the same time, women who work in female-dominated occupations are less exposed to demands from employers that they work flexible hours. The evidence reveals important differences in access to working time flexibility – and its gender dimensions – among different regimes in European countries; employers in Central and Eastern European countries are less likely to offer flexible working hours, especially to women, and with no additional flexibility being offered to parents. Employers in the Continental and Nordic countries are more likely to offer flexible work arrangements, and with no gender gap. The study looks at employed women and men only, so does not capture those individuals who may have withdrawn from the labor force due to a lack of flexibility, or due to burdensome employer demands. Post-birth career breaks and their impact on mothers’ labor market outcomes have received considerable attention in the literature. However, the existing evidence

Introduction

xi

comes mostly from Western Europe and the USA, where career breaks tend to be short. In contrast, Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, where postbirth career interruptions by mothers are typically much longer, have rarely been studied. In the first part of Chap. 8, Alena Biˇcáková and Klára Kalíšková place CEE countries in the EU context by providing key empirical facts related to the most important factors in the labor market outcomes of mothers. Besides substantial differences between CEE countries and the rest of the EU, there is also a high degree of heterogeneity within the CEE countries themselves, which is explored next. In the second part of Chap. 8, the main family leave and formal childcare policies and reforms that have occurred in CEE countries since the end of communism furnish a comprehensive survey of the existing evidence of the impact on maternal employment. While research into these policies is scarce, several important studies have recently been published in high-impact journals. The authors are the first to provide an overview of these causal studies from CEE countries, offering an insightful extension to the existing knowledge from Western Europe and the USA. In Latin America, as in other developing regions, gender gaps in the labor market are still large. In Chap. 9, Inés Berniell, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, María Edo, Mariana Marchionni, and María Florencia Pinto assess the role of motherhood in these gaps, bringing together new and existing evidence to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive panorama for the region. New descriptive evidence comes from a novel database (GenLAC) that provides comparable data for 18 countries in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) regarding gender differences across many domains while also enabling intra-household comparisons. The authors document significant gender gaps in labor force participation (LFP), hours worked, and wages, which remain about the same when considering women and men with similar characteristics. The authors also show that the presence of children in the household seems to explain a substantial portion of these gender gaps. Results are similar to those found for developed regions, although the dimensions differ. The main drivers behind motherhood effects in the region are gender norms, childcare availability, and family policies, and the most recent evidence analyzing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on female labor market performance leads to the conclusion that this shock contributed to widen the labor gender gaps through channels closely related to the disproportionate share of childcare activities performed by women in Latin American households. The authors show that motherhood significantly impacts the labor market performance of women in the region; motherhood reduces female labor supply and leads to occupational choices of women that are more flexible in terms of time schedules, although they represent worse options in terms of career prospects and access to quality social protection. Finally, in Chap. 10, Hippolyte d’Albis, Karina Doorley, and Elena Stancanelli aim to gather evidence on the largely unexplored relationship between an empty nest, defined as the situation in which children leave the parental home, and mothers’ employment and marriage stability outcomes. The medical literature highlights

xii

Introduction

an empty nest syndrome, which may especially affect mothers when their adult children leave home, and the study expands on the sparse social sciences literature regarding the impact of an empty nest on parents’ marriage stability. Mothers’ employment and marital stability are difficult to predict, a priori, when children leave home, because the time when adult children leave the parental nest is often close to parents’ retirement from the labor market, so the factors that may codetermine mothers’ labor market and marriage outcomes, and the adult children’s decision to leave home, must be disentangled. The chapter examines the minimum legal retirement age, as well as retirement reforms that were announced and implemented within a short time frame, thus taking the targets by surprise. The authors use the longitudinal structure of the French Labour Force Surveys of 1990– 2002 to estimate fixed effects and random effects models, in which only mothers with children still living at home in the previous year are selected. There is a large and positive statistical association of an empty nest with mothers’ retirement from the labor market, with estimates of mothers’ retirement probability being in the range of 3 to 9 percentage points higher when the nest is empty. Moreover, there is global evidence that an empty nest is associated with lower marriage probability and higher divorce probability of older mothers. However, when taken in combination with retirement from work, an empty nest may be positively associated with the marriage chances of some mothers. All in all, the authors suggest that, when there are children still living at home, mothers postpone retirement, but when those children leave, marital stability is at stake.

Contents

1

Moms’ Time—Married or Not .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel S. Hamermesh

1

2

How Do U.S. Moms and Dads Feel About Work and Family? . . . . . . . . Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel

29

3

Maternal Employment, Fathers’ Childcare Time and Children’s Wellbeing .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucia Mangiavacchi and Luca Piccoli

4

Temporal Flexibility, Breaks at Work, and the Motherhood Wage Gap.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . José Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal, José Alberto Molina, and Almudena Sevilla

61

83

5

Family Structure and Labor Supply of Mothers with Son Preference: Evidence from Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Crystal Wong

6

Grandparents’ Care and Mothers’ Work in Europe. Taking Different Points of View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Lorena Popescu and Chiara Pronzato

7

Flexibility of Working Time Arrangements and Female Labor Market Outcome.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Iga Magda and Katarzyna Lipowska

8

Career-Breaks and Maternal Employment in CEE Countries . . . . . . . . 159 Alena Biˇcáková and Klára Kalíšková

xiii

xiv

9

Contents

Motherhood and Female Labor Market Outcomes in Latin America .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Inés Berniell, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, María Edo, Mariana Marchionni, and María Florencia Pinto

10 Older Mothers’ Employment and Marriage Stability When the Nest Is Empty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Hippolyte d’Albis, Karina Doorley, and Elena Stancanelli

Chapter 1

Moms’ Time—Married or Not Daniel S. Hamermesh

1.1 Introduction and the Problem Nearly one-third of American mothers with children under age eighteen at home do not have a partner living with them. An immense amount of research has considered how single motherhood or divorce affects the mothers’ offspring (e.g., Ermisch & Francesconi, 2001; Björklund & Sundström, 2006; Amato et al., 2015). Some studies (Corak, 2001; Lang & Zagorsky, 2001) examine exogenous shocks to family structure (death of a parent, typically the father) and find mixed impacts on children’s outcomes as adults in response to this fortunately rare cause of changes in children’s household status. A substantial amount of research has examined how mothers spend their non-market time (and how it differs from fathers’ non-market time), including Hallberg and Klevmarken (2003) and Genadek and Hill (2017); and some have analyzed how this differs by mothers’ marital status (Kimmel & Connelly, 2007). Still other studies have analyzed the relationship between mothers’ happiness and their marital status (Stack & Eshleman, 1998; Lee & Ono, 2012; Hank & Wagner, 2013; Perini & Sironi, 2016); and one study (Ifcher & Zarghamee,

I thank the University of Minnesota Population Center IPUMS for the ATUS-X extracts, the Centre Maurice Halbwachs for the French data, the Centre for Time Use Research for the U.K., Dutch and Spanish data, IStat for the Italian data, and the IZA for the German data. Katie Genadek, Iga Magda, José Alberto Molina, David Ribar, and a referee provided very useful comments, and Len Goff gave very helpful research assistance. D. S. Hamermesh () University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA IZA, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Molina (ed.), Mothers in the Labor Market, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99780-9_1

1

2

D. S. Hamermesh

2014) looked at trends in differences in happiness between single and partnered mothers. While much research has examined pairs among the issues involving marital status, time allocation and mothers’ feelings, none has examined all three issues together. Nor has any studied how differences in the allocation of time by marital status alter mothers’ happiness. Also, no research has considered how mothers’ use of time affects their feelings of time being scarce and how these feelings relate to the presence or absence of a partner in the household. In this study I combine analyses of all three of these issues, doing so chiefly using data from the United States. Because there is no reason to assume that the behavior suggested by American findings is representative of behavior anywhere else, I also examine many of the questions using data from six European countries: France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. The goal is thus to integrate research on issues of time use, marital status, how children are treated in households that differ by mother’s marital status, and how these affect mothers’ feelings about time scarcity and their satisfaction with life. With these goals in mind, Sect. 1.2 describes patterns of marital status among American women and details demographic differences among women who differ by marital status. Section 1.3 describes the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data, including patterns of time use among mothers who recently married and those whose husband recently left the household. Section 1.4 studies how and whether time use differs among these groups, whose demographic characteristics also differ, and it examines whether this American behavior is observed elsewhere by comparing women of differing marital status with children in the household in samples of time diaries from wealthy European countries. Section 1.5 examines differences by marital status in time spent in childcare, focusing on the different types of activities that mothers do with their children and on how these differ by children’s ages and mothers’ educational attainment. In Sect. 1.6 I examine how unmarried mothers differ in the people with whom they spend their time compared to married mothers, while Sect. 1.7 studies how feelings—about being pressed for time or about their life satisfaction—differ between these two groups. Finally, because marital status may be related to women’s underlying unobservable characteristics, Sect. 1.8 uses longitudinal American data to examine how mothers’ mental health changes with changes in marital status.

1.2 The Demographics of American Mothers Throughout this study I divide American women into four groups: Married with spouse present; never married; divorced; and other (which includes those who are widowed, married but whose spouse is absent, and those who are married but

1 Moms’ Time—Married or Not

3

2.5 2

No. of Kids

1.5

Divorced

1

Married Never married

0.5

40-44

Kids