- Please do not quote without permission - The educational gradient and the gender differential of parental employment in Norway, France, Belgium, Austria, West-Germany, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Georgia. Karel Neels & Zita Theunynck1, Sociology Department, University of Antwerp, Paper presented at the European Population Conference 2012, Stockholm, Sweden. Abstract Maternal employment is the outcome of a cost-benefit calculation involving a variety of factors. In line with Coale’s preconditions for behavioural innovation, we group these factors under the heading ‘readiness’ (maternal employment is economically advantageous), ‘willingness’ (maternal employment is acceptable at both the societal and individual level) and ‘ability’ (welfare state provisions that support maternal employment are available and accessible). Using data from the Generations and Gender Surveys, this paper documents the educational gradient and the gender differential of parental employment in Norway, France, Belgium, Austria, West-Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Georgia. The results indicate that the level of maternal employment is elevated in Norway, with a limited educational gradient. In Belgium and France and even more so in Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, the educational gradient of labour force participation is very pronounced, particularly among mothers. Austria and West-Germany show low levels of maternal employment, regardless of education. The between-country differences in maternal employment are subsequently set off against differential attitudes concerning parental employment and differential uptake of family policies in the countries considered. 1 Introduction Since the end of the 1960s the increase of female educational attainment entailed an increase in the female earning potential, leading an increasing share of women making their entry on the labour market (Becker 1981). This evolution was further supported by a rising demand for female employees in the public sector (Buchholz, Hofäcker et al. 2009). Structural changes in the position of women in education and the labour market, were accompanied by changes in value orientation where emancipation and autonomy became increasingly accentuated, especially by young people (Lesthaeghe and Van de Kaa 1986; Surkyn and Lesthaeghe 2004). As a result, the rising female employment not only reflects the increasing female earning potential, but also the expression of people’s growing urge towards autonomy and self-realisation. Today a job is more and more evaluated on the basis of intrinsic job qualities, such as responsibility, achievement, recognition, etc. (van de Kaa 2004; Lesthaeghe 2010). The increase of female labour force participation has both affected the timing of parenthood and the opportunity costs associated with family formation (Becker 1981). Here we need to make a distinction between postponement of parenthood at young ages and recuperation of fertility at older ages. Women address the work-family conflict by adopting long term reconciliation strategies. Especially highly educated women are expected to postpone parenthood at young age. After graduation this group is more likely to enter long term career tracks, where earnings increase 1 K.Neels (), Z.Theunynck. Centre for Longitudinal and Life-course Studies, University of Antwerp, Sint Jacobstraat 2, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]. The educational gradient and gender differential of parental employment in Europe 2 according to age and experience. Recuperation takes place at older ages, when these highly educated women are sufficiently established in the labour market. As job opportunities are determined by economic conditions – in particular for young people entering the labour market – periods of adverse economic conditions are assumed to produce even more pronounced delays in parenthood (Vikat 2004; Neels and De Wachter 2010) The postponement of fertility contributed substantially to the decline of the period total fertility rate under the replacement level and the low fertility levels observed in many countries in North-western European countries in the 1970s, followed by Southern European countries followed and also Central and Eastern European countries after 1990. The countries exhibiting high female labour force participation were the first to be affected by a declining total fertility rate. The shift towards greater gender equity in individual-oriented institutions such as education and the labour market was not counterbalanced, however, by a similar trend in family-oriented institutions, (McDonald 2000). While the evolution of gender equity progressed rapidly in education and the labour market, the progression was much slower in family-oriented institutions, leading to an increasing incompatibility for women between their roles as employee and mother and contributing to the negative correlation between female labour force participation and fertility rates (Brewster and Rindfuss 2000). However, the negative correlation initially noted between women’s employment rate and fertility, weakened and even turned positive in the 2000s (Thévenon 2008). Family-friendly policies, introduced in several European countries, have played a central role in this shift. The intensity of the work-family conflict, but also the size of the opportunity costs, are strongly connected to the institutional context, namely the extent to which the combination of work and family are supported by family-policies (Oppenheimer 1994; Liefbroer and Corijn 1999). Although governments in Europe have to some extent revised or extended their family policies as a reaction to the population trends that have emerged since the 1970s, large differences in family policy persist across countries. Fux attributes these differences to divergent historical trajectories which preceded the growth of the European welfare states and remain tangible today (Fux 2008; Thévenon 2008). Also Esping-Andersen’s typology illustrates how the growth of the welfare states in the post-war period cannot be seen as a uniform response to the structural inequalities and the risks appearing to individuals. Rather they have to be understood as very different solutions to fundamental societal developments (Fux 2008). The Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries are exceptional, since they experienced a fundamental transition after the fall of state communism in 1990. Nonetheless, also in these countries past influences play an important role in today’s state organisation and cultural climate. The Scandinavian countries, but France and Belgium as well, have from the 1970s onwards invested strongly in the defamilialisation of care (e.g. investments in the provision of child care) and the combination of work and family (e.g. investing in paid and job-protected parental leave and flexible workplace practices)(Esping-Andersen 1999). In the continental countries the male breadwinner model dominated, with a focus on keeping women at home to take care of the children by providing long maternity leave, but little full time day care (Hank and Kreyenfeld 2000). The liberal countries (Great-Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have placed great confidence in market mechanisms, as a result their labour market is flexible, but child care is scarce and expensive (Fux 2008). The CEE were –during communism –characterized by extensive state support for combining work and family. After the transition to market economies, however, serious cuts were made in family policy. Today there exist, except extensive maternity leave systems, little support for working parents (Tang and Cousins 2005; HCSO 2010). Macro-level studies – frequently reflecting aggregated indicators regarding expenditures or availability of arrangements – have frequently ignored the temporal and spatial context of family policies and the differential uptake of these policies (Petit and Hook 2005; Neyer and Andersson 2008). The availability of provisions does not necessarily imply that everybody is covered by or effectively makes use of them. Therefore different authors have stressed the importance of studying the uptake of policy measures when evaluating the impact of policies on fertility outcomes (Gauthier 2008; Neyer and Andersson 2008). Evidence for Flanders suggests that there is an important socio- Neels & Theunynck 3 economic gradient in the way work and family are combined and that this gradient is associated with the differential use and/or access to childcare provisions and parental leave systems (Ghysels and Van Lancker 2009; Cantillon, Ghysels et al. 2010; De Wachter and Neels 2011). Lower educated women more frequently end up in inactivity or unemployment after the transition to parenthood than higher educated women(Neels and Theunynck 2011). The retreat of lower educated women from the labour market coincides with low take-up of pre-school childcare arrangements and parental leave. The strong educational homogamy within partnerships and marriages furthermore results in the accumulation of poverty risks within families at the weak end of the income distribution (Joshi, Macran et al. 1996; Ghysels and Van Lancker 2009). In this paper we address the labour force participation of men and women after parenthood from an international comparative perspective, using data from the Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS), conducted between 2004 and 2010 in Norway, France, Belgium, Austria, West-Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Georgia (Simard and Franklin 2005).