IZA DP No. 3193

Time Allocation between Work and Family over the Life-Cycle: A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, and the United States

Dominique Anxo Ariane Pailhé Lennart Flood Anne Solaz Letizia Mencarini Maria Letizia Tanturri

DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES DISCUSSION PAPER November 2007

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor Time Allocation between Work and Family over the Life-Cycle: A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the United States

Dominique Anxo Vaxjo University

Lennart Flood Göteborg University and IZA

Letizia Mencarini University of Florence

Ariane Pailhé INED, Paris

Anne Solaz INED, Paris

Maria Letizia Tanturri University of Pavia

Discussion Paper No. 3193 November 2007

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ABSTRACT

Time Allocation between Work and Family over the Life-Cycle: A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the United States*

This article analyses the extent to which changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender division of labour. It identifies and analyses cross-country disparities between France, Italy, Sweden and United States, using most recent data available from the Time Use National Surveys. We focus on gender differences in the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure over the life-cycle. In order to map the life- cycle, we distinguish between nine key cross-country comparable life stages according to age and family structure such as exiting parental home, union formation, parenthood, and retiring from work. By using appropriate regression techniques (Tobit with selection, Tobit and OLS), we show large discrepancies in the gender division of labour at the different life stages. This gender gap exists in all countries at any stage of the life course, but is usually smaller at the two ends of the age distribution, and larger with parenthood. Beyond social norms, the impact of parenthood on time allocation varies across countries, being smaller in those where work-family balance policies are more effective and traditionally well- established.

JEL Classification: D13, J22, O17

Keywords: time use, gender, life-cycle, paid and unpaid work

Corresponding author:

Lennart Flood Department of Economics School of Business, Economics and Law Göteborg University Box 640 S-405 30 Göteborg Sweden E-mail: [email protected]

* The financial support received by the French Ministry of Research is gratefully acknowledged. We thank all the members of the ACI “Temps de vie” for their helpful comments and Olivier Thévenon for giving us access to the more recent comparative contextual data.

1. Introduction

In many Western countries, the burden of housework and care remains mainly on women’s shoulders, in spite of their increasing participation in the labour market. Hochschild (1989) coined the term of “stalled revolution” to describe this situation where a higher women's employment rate is not followed by men’s increasing responsibility for domestic chores and care. Although this situation is practically universal, the extent of gender differences in the division of labour varies across countries, according to the welfare regime, family and employment policies and the tax and benefit system, as well as, of course, social norms. Gender disparities in time allocation also vary remarkably along the life course. Several cross- country comparative studies have shown that men's and women's employment profiles over the life course exhibit pronounced national differences, (e.g. Anxo et al. 2007, Apps and Rees, 2005). Strong gender differences in time use across countries are also related to the timing of key-events over the life-cycle. One is leaving the parental home (occurring later in Southern European countries), affecting not only union formation and childrearing of young adults, but also the living arrangements of older parents remaining in the so-called “empty nest”, more often at a relatively young age in Northern European countries. One of the most important transitions in the life course is the entry into parenthood. The experience of parenthood often implies a crystallization of gender roles, with an increase in female time devoted to housework and childcare, as well as a decrease in leisure time (Lunderg, Rose, 2005). Their active presence both at home and in the labour market for working produces the so-called dual burden. As it is well known, combining paid employment and parenthood is more difficult for mothers than fathers, and often the strategies adopted are completely different. Men typically increase the time they devote to paid work whilst women decrease their working time or even exit the labour market (Blossfeld and Drobnic, 2001; Anxo et al. 2007). Indeed, having children can seriously jeopardize women’s job opportunities and careers (Mincer and Polachek, 1974). This situation can in itself drive some women to reduce the number of children they have or even induce them to forego parenthood altogether (Matthew 1999, Scisci and Vinci 2002). It is not difficult to observe that the Western countries with very low fertility rates are those with a less equal gender regime compared with countries where fertility rates are relatively higher (with a strong divide between the Southern and Northern Europe, for instance). The gender gap in time allocation may be dependent upon the institutional and societal context, in particular the characteristics of the parental leave systems, the availability and cost of childcare services, the provision of care when older people become partially or fully dependent, and more globally on employment regimes and the design of tax and family policies (Lewis, 1992). For instance, gender differences in time use can be narrowed by policies aimed at reducing the costs of balancing work and family, while they can be reinforced by the design of tax and benefit systems discouraging female labour force participation. Likewise, prevalent social norms may affect gender differences across countries. For instance, in a more traditional environment, women and men, according to the hypothesis of “incompatibility of roles”, may perceive the problem of balancing paid work and family differently (Lehrer and Nerlove, 1986). According to prevalent social norms, working activity can be seen for men as an instrument to exercise their role as providers whereas for women, as an instrument to exercise their role as family carer.Time spent for paid work outside the family can therefore conflict with that spent for the family, at home.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which the societal and institutional contexts influence the gender division of labour over the life cycle. In particular, we focus on gender differences in the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure, simulating various stages across the life course. Three European Countries –namely Italy, France and Sweden–

1 and the United States are selected for cross-country comparison. These countries represent different institutional contexts and diverge significantly in terms of welfare state regime, employment and working time systems, family policy and social norms. We distinguish nine key life-cycle stages according to age and family structure, reflecting major life events and life phases for a large majority of individuals, such the transition out of the parental home, union formation, parenthood, and transitions to retirement and old age This approach makes it possible to identify and map the cross-country variations in the gender time allocation across the life cycle and to relate these variations to the prevalent welfare state regime, employment system, as well as to social norms. The article is organised as follows. In section 2 the institutional framework of the four selected countries is presented. The main features of the most recent national Time Use Surveys and our methodological approach are described in section 3 and 4. We then analyse the extent to which the changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender allocation of paid work, housework and leisure of men and women in the four selected countries by using appropriate regression techniques (Generalised Tobit, standard Tobit and OLS).

2. Different institutional contexts

The four countries selected belong to different welfare state regimes, and have different labour market regulations, family support policies and policies to reconcile paid employment and family obligations. Often presented as the ideal type of the so-called Nordic social democratic regime, the Swedish welfare state emphasizes the principle of egalitarianism, de-commodification2 and individualisation3 (Esping-Andersen, 1999). The Swedish model is based on a strong political commitment to the goal of full employment and to egalitarian ideals (Anxo and Niklasson, 2006). The Swedish societal system is based on a high incidence of dual earner households, egalitarian wage structures, including low gender wage inequality, extensive and generous family policy, strong welfare support systems both for childcare and parental leave4 (tables 1 and 2). Individualised taxation systems in a context of high average and marginal tax rates reinforce the dual breadwinner model. As far as working time is concerned, some gender differences persist, with a relatively high share of women working in the public sector and working part-time. But in contrast to other European countries with high part-time employment rates, like the UK or the Netherlands, many women in Sweden work long part-time and receive income compensation for working reduced hours. In Sweden, the development of part-time work among women, which started in the early 1970s, is indicative: in 1981 47% of Swedish women worked part-time, compared to 33% in 2005. Part-time work in Sweden must be considered more as an historical transition from married women’s inactivity towards a strategy, largely initiated by labour market and political institutions, to strengthen women’s labour market commitments. The parental leave system allows for income compensated temporary reduction of working time, thereby reinforcing women’s status as a significant breadwinner even when they are temporarily not participating on a full time basis in the labour market. The overall political context characterized by gender mainstreaming, high female involvement in the political process and instances (government bodies, parliament, and labour market organisations) creates a favourable institutional set up conducive to a more balanced gender division of labour and responsibilities over the life course. France occupies an often contradictory position in the classification of Western welfare systems, partly because of the variegated nature of its family policy. As stressed by Caldwell and

2 Strategies of decommodification are aimed at making people more independant of markets by insulating the satisfaction of wants and needs from the nexus of market transactions. 3 Individualization has been a key part of the Swedish universal welfare state: the individual, and not the family, has for many years been the unit not only of taxation but also of social benefits and social rights. 4 Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest general gender gap worldwide, and has the second highest GEM- Gender Empowerment Measure Index (UN, 2006). 2 Schindlmayr (2003: 255) “France remains a problem for the model builders”. Under the Esping- Andersen (1999) classification, France belongs to the conservative welfare state, characterised by policies geared at preserving existing statuses and traditional family forms, and where the provision of welfare is still a mainly family responsibility. Feminist researchers, focusing on the impact of social policies on female employment, classify France and Sweden in the same category, as countries where social policies help women to remain in the labour force (Neyer, 2003; Gornick, Meyers and Ross, 1997). The employment rate of French adult women started to rise from the mid- 1950s onwards, but there is still a pronounced ‘cohort effect’ whereby younger generations of mothers have more continuous employment profiles across their working lives than their predecessors. This life course employment pattern for French mothers is supported by the high coverage rate and lower cost of public childcare, but, in contrast to Sweden, provisions are less extensive, in particular for young pre-school children (table 2). However, unemployment has been high in France since the 1980s, and unemployment rates for women consistently exceed those of men (even among the younger cohorts). Thus, while the gender gap in employment rates continues to decline it remains more difficult for women to establish and pursue a continuous employment profile over the life course; motherhood is still associated with withdrawal from the labour market for some groups of women, in particular low-skill women (Anxo et al, 2007; Pailhé and Solaz, 2006).

Table 1: Employment indicators Sweden France United Italy States Female employment rate 71.5 56.7 65.4 42.7 Employment rate Women with child <3 72.9 66.2 56.6 54.4 Part time employment rate Women with child <6 41 23 29 29 Male employment rate 25-54 86.1 87 86.3 86.6 Female employment rate 25-54 80.8 72.9 71.8 57.9 Male employment rate 55-64 71.6 44.5 66 44.2 Female employment rate 55-64 67.4 36.8 54.3 19.8 Mean age at withdrawal from labour force. Men 63.1 58.4 62.2(a) 60.9

Mean age at withdrawal from labour force. Women 62.4 59.4 62.2(a) 61 (a) Average 1995-2000 Sources: OECD Employment database; OECD Society at glance (2005); OECD Employment Outlook (2006)

Italy shares common elements with the conservative welfare states, but with a stronger family bias, with limited public support and a greater reliance on family relations to provide social support. A high level of rigidity characterizes the Italian labour market, with strong protection for those in permanent employment, and very little protection for those in temporary employment. These rules severely restrict opportunities for labour-market entrants, a feature that has been claimed to be the main reason for the high unemployment rates among women and young people (Del Boca et al., 2005). Young people leave the parental home late, owing to both cultural factors and structural constraints, such as high unemployment, low entry salary, lack of state support and barriers to entering the housing market (Barbagli et al., 2003). Women play a crucial role as carers both for the young and for the old members of the family, barely supported by their partners and by public services. The employment rate among mothers with children under the age of 3 is only 54 percent, one of the lowest in Europe (table 1). Due to working time rigidity, married women are often forced to choose between not working or working full time (Del Boca et al., 2003). In fact, flexible

3 working hours and part-time work are rare: less than 30% of mothers with children under 6 work part-time (table 1). Balancing childrearing and market work is also made more difficult by the limited supply of public childcare for children under 3 years old, both in terms of availability (only 6% of children attend a public crèche) and of the number of hours supplied on a day-to-day basis (table 2). Conversely, maternity leave duration is quite long compared with the other countries (21 weeks), and paid at 80% of previous earnings (table 2). As gender roles are still shaped in a traditional way, paternity leave has never been enacted, but since 2000 both fathers and can take parental leave for a total period of 36 weeks, at 30% of previous earnings (law of 8 March 2000). A further month is given if the father takes at least three months of paternal leave. In 2004, the take-up rates of eligible mothers was 75% and 7% for eligible fathers (Anxo et al. 2007).

Table 2: Family policy indicators Sweden France United States Italy

Total expenses for child care (% GDP) 1.45 1.6 0.65 0.65 Childcare expenses (per child, US PPP) 5300 4000 1800 2761 Childcare attendance (1-2 years old) 65 39 16 6 rate Pre-school attendance rate 82 99 53 71 establishment (3-6 years old) Paternity leave (weeks) 11 2 0 0 Maternity leave duration (first birth) 15 16 12 21 Paid parental leave duration (weeks) 52 156 0 36 Level of financial support, parental leave 80% of previous Low flat rate - 30% of previous earnings allowance earnings for 6 months (child <3) Sources: OECD Family and educational database; and OECD (2002);

The United-States is often classified as the archetype of the so-called ‘liberal' or residual welfare state regime. This regime is characterized by a low degree of social protection with an emphasis on poverty alleviation mainly based on means-tested benefits, as well as limited involvement of the State in the provision of services. The minimal safety net against poverty favours also the existence of a low-wage low-skill labour market. The United-States has a strong institutionalised working-culture and the market and the family play a dominant role in providing welfare. The low level of public-funded social protection is offset by market-based means of risk diversification through private insurance. The US does not, however, have a unified welfare system. The Federal government has had a limited role in social welfare provision; many important functions are administered at state level, including public assistance, social care and various health schemes. The high flexibility of the US labour market, in particular low employment protection and external flexibility, diminishes long-term unemployment risks and creates greater opportunities for the young to enter the labour market. In contrast to Sweden and France, US family policy is weak and policies favouring a balance between market work and family obligations are limited. Family policy predominantly favours the provision of private services through tax deductions for childcare for example (Orloff, 2006). A national parental leave entitlement was introduced in 1993 but it is unpaid5 and the take-up rate among mothers is only 36% (Waldfogel, 2001). The US ranks twelfth in the gender empowerment measure index according to indicators such as the number of seats in parliament held by women, the estimated ratio of female to male earned

5 The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) states that eligible workers may take a maximum of 12 weeks of annual parental leave with subsequent employment guaranty, but the leave is unpaid. 4 income (Sweden ranks second, and Italy 24th; see UN, 2006). The U.S. average female-male earnings ratio has shown considerable progress since the 1970s and the wage gap is close to the level of Nordic countries (Datta Gupta, Oaxaca and Smith, 2001).

3. Time-Use Surveys

Time Use Surveys represent a unique and precious source of information on daily activities. They use the time diary technique, whereby individuals report their time use during the previous 24 hours, providing extremely detailed information on the activities performed during that day. The diary days are randomly distributed across days of the week for both men and women. The diary data are based on a grid of 10 minute-intervals of time, with a description of the main activity carried out by the respondent, the second (or concurrent) activity, their location and the presence of other persons. Besides the diary, all the data sets contain rich sets of information on the background and socio-economic situation of individuals and households. The French data is a representative sample of the French population and the survey was conducted by the French Bureau of Statistics (INSEE, 2000) from February 1998 to February 1999. The sample (individuals between 18-80 years old) includes over 12,000 individuals (see table A1 in the appendix). In Italy, the Time Use Survey was carried out by National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, 2005) in 2002-2003, on a sample of over 55,000 individuals (more than 41,000 aged between 18 and 80; see table A1 in the appendix). The daily diary was filled for all the members of the household aged 3 years or over. The Swedish Time Use Survey was conducted by Statistics Sweden (2002) between October 2000 and October 2001, on a sample of more than 7,000 individuals (see table A1 in the appendix). Compared to the other data sets, three main exceptions are worth noting: the survey draws a sample of individuals from a national register and includes only a sub-sample of spouses, and time use information is gathered for a weekday and a weekend day. Also, only people aged 20 and more were asked to complete the questionnaire. In United States, the Time Use Survey was conducted by the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS, 2006) in 2003 and 2004. Additional variables from the Current Population Survey are available. Only one person from 15 to 80 years old was interviewed in each household, with a sample of more than 33,000 individuals age 18-80 (see table A1 in the appendix). Contrary to the other countries studied here, the interviews were conducted by phone.

In the present study, we concentrate on three groups of activities: 1) Time devoted to market work. It includes all the activities related to work: time spent in main job, and in secondary job, as well as in other work activities in a broader sense, such as rest periods, coffee and lunch breaks or transport during work activities. However, we do not include commuting, which cannot be considered as working-time in a proper sense; 2) Time devoted to unpaid work, including the full range of domestic chores and care activities. The domestic tasks include cooking, dishwashing, laundry washing, drying and cleaning, cleanup and maintenance within the house, cleanup, repair and other maintenance outside the house including yard work, purchasing and bookkeeping and household management. Care encompasses childcare, care of other family members as well as pet care; 3) Leisure time. This includes socializing, relaxing, sport, walks, cultural activities, religious and spiritual activities, volunteer activities, conversations, meals outside the

5 house. Leisure time is not the complement of paid and unpaid work since physiological needs (sleeping, personal care, etc) are not included6.

4. Methodological approach and sample characteristics

To map the time allocation profile of men and women at different points in the life course we restrict the sample populations to adult aged 18-80 years old7 and use a variant of the family cycle approach developed by Glick in the late 1940s (Glick, 1947) Our methodological choice consisted of selecting a range of household categories coinciding with widely experienced transitions and phases in the life course. These typologies can be depicted as results of some steps in an individual biography: transition out of the parental home (young single living in the parental home) and the constitution of an independent household (young singles without children), union formation (cohabiting couples without children), parenthood (differentiating couples according to the mean age of children), midlife empty nest period (middle-aged couples without cohabiting children) and lastly the older phase and exit from the labour market (couples and singles above 59 years old). See the box below for the details of the nine typologies of household life-phases that we focus on in our analysis.

Box 1: Stylised household life-course typologies

Single and childless young people 1. Single persons (under 36 years), without children living with their parents 2. Single persons (under 36 years), without children living on their own

Childless couples 3. Younger couples ( aged under 46 years), without children

Couple households with resident children The mean age of the children is used to indicate the nature of parental responsibilities across the life course, from the intense nature of pre-school childcare through to the different needs and demands of children as they grow up and become more independent. 4. Couple with youngest children (mean age of children is under 6 years) 5. Couple with young children (mean age of children 6-15 years) 6. Couple with teenage children (mean age of children 16-25 years)

Older couples or singles without children living at home 7. Midlife 'empty nest' couples without resident children, (woman aged 45-59 years) 8. Older ‘retired’ couples without resident children (both spouses aged 60 years or older) 9. Older ‘retired’ singles without resident children aged 60 years or older

Although our approach is not longitudinal and is based on cross-sectional time use surveys, it can serve as a heuristic device to identify cross-country differences in the patterns of labour market integration and the gender division of unpaid work and leisure over the life course and to assess the influence of the societal context on the prevailing gender division of labour. However, one needs to

6 There is endless debate on the definition of leisure; some consider that physiological time may be a leisure time. Physiological time is not included in leisure time, because introducing sleeping masks a lot of minor differences. Moreover, we considered that physiological time such as washing oneself are incompressible. 7 Except for Sweden, where it is between 20 and 80. 6 be cautious with the interpretation of the results and bear in mind the usual drawbacks associated with cross-section analysis, in particular the difficulties of disentangling age, cohort and period effects. Furthermore, the family cycle suffers from some limitations that should be stressed. This approach implies a “natural sequence” of predetermined stages in the family’s progression from to widowhood, yet this sequencing of life stages is becoming more diversified in contemporary societies. We make no assumptions about sequencing or duration on the different life stage situations we have selected for analysis; rather in our typology we have sought to include some of the most prevalent transitions and life phases for comparative analysis. This typology does not include all the possible household situations and it leaves out important and growing categories such as, for example, lone parents or prime age and mid-life singles. However, our typology covers between 80% (Italy) and 88% (Sweden) of all household categories found in each society at a given point in time (set Table 3 and Table A1 in the Appendix).

Table 3: Country samples by household types in the life-cycle (weighted proportion) Individual 18-80 years old FRANCE ITALY SWEDEN* US Single <36 with parents 9.0 16.8 1.7 8.8 Single <36 on their own 4.3 2.2 9.4 5.4 Couple <46 no children 6.9 4.7 9.3 8.3 Couple children 0-5 7.6 8.1 15.2 9.5 Couple children 6-15 15.8 12.2 8.9 14.3 Couple children 16-25 11.1 13.1 5.2 7.7 Empty nest 45-59 7.4 3.7 15.5 9.2 Couple 60 + 13.8 12.0 15.1 11.9 Single 60 + 6.1 6.9 7.8 7.2 Total excluded 18.2 20.3 11.7 17.8 single-parent families 5.8 5.3 4.4 5.9 single 36-59 4.6 3.8 7.3 8.1 other excluded 7.8 11.2 - 3.9 Total 12,442 41,440 7,272 33,077 *from 20 to 80 years old Sources: Own calculations based on the national time use surveys

We are therefore aware that the life-cycle stages considered are not (and cannot be) exhaustive, and they do not necessarily occur in the expected order. As the individual life trajectories become more and more heterogeneous, the predictive value of average time-use profiles weakens. Moreover, families with children are not differentiated according to the number of children, but only with respect to the children’s mean age. Nevertheless, the description of these simple time-use profiles can be a very useful basis for comparative studies, both across time and across countries. In a comparative perspective it is also interesting to assess whether being in a specific life- cycle stage has the same effect on time use for men and women, all other things being equal. We therefore estimate three different equations with, as dependent variables, time in paid work, time in unpaid work, and time in leisure. The variables of interest are our household typologies and control variables include educational attainment, income or economic situation, regional and urban areas, characteristics of the home (ownership, number of rooms, presence of a garden), access to domestic services (housekeepers, baby sitter or a carer for older people), other specific characteristics by country (such as ethnicity for US or citizenship for France) and day of the week of the interview as control. For market work, in order to correct for potential selection bias and to discriminate between the impact of covariates on participation in market work that day and working hours given participation, we use a Generalised Tobit (see Heckman,1978 and the technical appendix for details). For housework we use a standard Tobit to take account of the fact that some individuals do not report housework. Since in the Generalised and standard Tobit, the estimated coefficients have

7 no natural interpretation, we report marginal effects evaluated at sample means. For leisure, a usual OLS is used since all individuals in our four samples report that they spent time on leisure.

5. Employment profiles across the life-cycle

First, we examine the pattern of employment over the life-cycle. We adopt a relatively broad definition of employment since we count as employed, people currently working or temporarily absent from work8. For men, employment profiles over the life-cycle are quite similar across countries (see figure 1) and follow an inverse U-curve. Men progressively enter the labour force in their youth and reach a very high level when being fathers. Young men living with their parents have a lower employment rate compared with those living on their own, reflecting the transition from the educational system to the labour market. Leaving the parental home often coincides with entry into the labour market and financial independence. This effect is particularly strong in France and Sweden, lower in Italy and US since respectively 60% and 70% of males living with their parents are already working. Concerning the following steps, i.e. forming a couple and having children, fathers work a little more than childless cohabiting or married men, especially in France, but also in Sweden and the US. Family responsibilities may exert a push effect to find a job, and/or couples may wait until the man has a job before having a child. This is not the case in Italy where the highest male employment rate is already reached when they form a childless couple. This effect could also be ascribed to an age effect, since, as mentioned previously, the transition out of th