Maternal Employment: Enabling Factors in Context

Abstract

Maternal employment is still below the overall EU recommended level of 60% in many European countries. Understanding the individual, household and contextual circumstances under which mothers of children of different ages are likely to be employed is crucial to develop strategies capable of increasing maternal employment. This article takes a comparative approach to investigating the characteristics associated with maternal employment in the presence of children aged 0–2, 3–5, 6–9 and 10–12 years. We model the probability of being employed full-time, part-time or being a homemaker using EU-SILC data (2004 to 2007) from Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom – four countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes. The results indicate that individual and household characteristics are more relevant in determining mothers’ employment in countries where the state is less supportive towards maternal employment: Italy and to a lesser extent Germany and the UK – for the period observed.

Keywords

children’s age Europe maternal employment micro–macro interaction work–family reconciliation

Introduction

This article investigates the individual and household characteristics associated with maternal full-time or part-time employment and homemaking in the presence of children of different ages in four countries belonging to different welfare and gender regimes: Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom.

One of the objectives of the European Union – at least up to the 2010 Lisbon Strategy – has been to raise female and maternal employment rates (Bettio et al., 2013). Besides the overarching goal of reducing gender inequality in employment, there are many reasons why maternal employment is a desirable outcome. For one thing, despite their over-representation in unfavourable positions in the job market, such as temporary and part-time employment (Mandel and Shalev, 2009), employed mothers protect themselves and their children from poverty (Barbieri et al., 2012). Indeed, poverty risk is much lower in two-earner families (OECD, 2015). Furthermore, having women and mothers in employment has benefits both at the firm level and at the broader macro-economic level (Smith et al., 2013). Also, employment seems to be beneficial for maternal well-being. In fact, full-time employed mothers display greater life satisfaction than mothers who are employed part-time or not employed (Berger, 2013) and, in general, employed women have greater resources and thus freedom to decide how to direct their lives compared to homemakers (Korpi et al., 2013). Given the advantages of maternal employment, it is not surprising that efforts have been made at the EU level to encourage the labour force participation of mothers by promoting quantitative targets for both female employment and childcare provision (Villa and Smith, 2013).

Despite these efforts to promote maternal employment, the reasons behind low maternal employment rates in some countries are still not fully understood. On the one hand, scholars point towards structural features, such as the availability of childcare services and parental leave, and also flexible work arrangements and part-time jobs, as means to ease work–motherhood incompatibility (Bettio and Plantenga, 2004; Gornick and Meyers, 2003). On the other hand, cultural reasons and lifestyle preferences are called upon to explain individual and cross-national variation in maternal employment (Hakim, 2002; Stam et al., 2014).

This article investigates the individual and household characteristics which are most effective in enabling maternal labour force participation in different contexts. It adds to existing knowledge on the topic in three ways. First, as research has shown that commitment to employment is harder to maintain when children are very young (Lewis et al., 2008; OECD, 2015), the analyses compare mothers with children of different ages (0–2, 3–5, 6–9 and 10–12 years). Second, going beyond the employed/not employed dichotomy, the article simultaneously considers full-time and part-time employment, the latter often being a strategic means of combining work and family in many European countries (Drobnič, 2000). Third, and most importantly, the article investigates the interaction between micro-level characteristics and resources − defined ‘individual enabling traits’ − and the macro-level context, showing how individual-level characteristics are of different importance in different contexts (Korpi et al., 2013). Therefore, this comparative study focuses on four countries belonging to different welfare, gender and care regimes (Bettio et al., 2006; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 2000): Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. To elaborate hypotheses on the micro–macro interaction, at the theoretical level two opposite mechanisms are juxtaposed: the discount mechanism, according to which individual resources matter the most in gender-equal contexts (Blumberg, 1984), and the equalization mechanism, which sees individual resources as more influential in gender-unequal scenarios (Hook, 2006). Gender equality is conceptualized at the macro-level somewhat broadly, by including both the public (e.g. equality in employment, pay and representation) and the private (e.g. division of domestic labour) spheres.

The ‘enablers’ of maternal employment: micro, macro and their interaction

The micro level: individual and household characteristics

Low maternal employment rates are often accounted for by the fact that mothers have greater childcare, housework and family responsibilities than men and childless women (Gauthier et al., 2004; Lewis et al., 2008). However, not all mothers give up employment altogether, which begs the question of which micro-level characteristics (i.e. both individual and household) ‘enable’ maternal employment.

Education certainly plays a key role. Indeed, in all locations, highly educated mothers are more likely to be employed than their less educated peers (Korpi et al., 2013; OECD, 2015). However, what ‘education’ really stands for is not fully clear. On the one hand, human capital theory puts much emphasis on the relation between educational attainment and employment outcomes as, in general terms, higher education leads to higher wages and better employment conditions (Becker, 1991). On the other hand, the attitudes and preferences linked to higher education (Hakim, 2002) also play a role. Indeed, highly educated women are more likely to have non-traditional attitudes towards gender roles, and due to educational assortative mating they often have an equally highly educated partner with similar attitudes (Blossfeld and Drobnič, 2001; Kanji, 2013), therefore favouring less traditional roles in the household (Bolzendahl and Myers, 2004). Furthermore, education can improve women’s bargaining situation in the household, leading to greater support from their partner (Brynin and Francesconi, 2004) and ultimately easing reconciliation. Beyond individual traits, therefore, the household situation, its resources, the characteristics of both partners and their combination (i.e. the relative position of each partner, not just the absolute level) are decisive for mothers’ employment.

The bargaining perspective emphasizes conflicting interests within the couple, where the woman’s bargaining power – for instance, to persuade the man to behave more supportively within the house – depends not least on her (relative) earning capacity and thus education (Manser and Brown, 1980). In contrast, the ‘Economic Theory of the Family’ emphasizes the (cooperative) maximization of a joint utility function. The gains from within-couple specialization are larger when the male partner’s level of education is higher, in both relative and absolute terms (Becker, 1991). Both theories thus lead to the same expectations, but through different mechanisms: a high level of education increases women’s and mothers’ employment chances, and a (relative) higher level of education of the partner reduces them. However, the gains from specialization have been declining and the bargaining power of women has improved, partly as a result of higher levels of female education (Oppenheimer, 1994). For example, Kanji (2011) finds that mothers are more likely to be employed full-time if they are better educated than their partner. At the same time, highly educated partners are likely to have more understanding of each other’s careers and thus provide more reciprocal support (Brynin and Francesconi, 2004). Expectations about the partner’s level of education are therefore less straightforward than parts of the literature might have suggested and certainly depend on additional controls in models and the context of the analysis (Berghammer, 2014; Konietzka and Kreyenfeld, 2010; Verbakel and De Graaf, 2009).

In the absence of a direct measure of the partner’s supportive attitudes and behaviours, his employment hours are an important piece of the puzzle. A partner working longer hours is less likely to be available at home. Therefore, mothers are left with more responsibility for the house and children (Dotti Sani, 2014; Hook, 2006) and have greater difficulties in reconciling work and family (Hook and Wolfe, 2013).

Mothers’ employment decisions are also likely to be contingent on the economic welfare of the household. Mothers living in high-income households can afford not to contribute wages and, other things being equal, will be more likely to be out of the labour market, while mothers in households where ends do not meet are more likely to seek employment. However, the empirical research on this topic presents mixed results that are highly contingent on the institutional setting. For the UK, Kanji (2011) finds that women are more likely to be continuously in full-time employment at higher rather than lower levels of household income. Colonna and Marcassa (2013) show that, in Italy, the higher the husband’s income the greater the probability that the wife is employed, while the association is negative in Germany and negligible in Spain and France.

Structural constraints and the importance of micro-level characteristics

Context matters for the employment of mothers. For example, the availability of public childcare can facilitate reconciliation between work and care responsibilities (Brilli et al., 2013; Gornick and Meyers, 2003), as well as strong inter-generational relationships and support (Aassve et al., 2012). While the importance of the macro context and individual enabling characteristics are singularly well documented, the interaction between the two levels is much less clear. Two opposing relationships between the two levels have been suggested: the discount and the equalization mechanisms. On the one hand, Blumberg (1984) argues that to reach a gender-equal outcome, for example in employment or earnings, women’s individual characteristics are more consequential in countries with high levels of gender equality. High gender inequality at the macro-level would instead undermine the effect of women’s endowments because the opportunity structure and the ideology in these settings work against them (Blumberg and Coleman, 1989). For example, according to the discount mechanism, women’s employment will be less effective in bargaining a more equal division of domestic chores in the household in a context where female employment is under-valued. On the other hand, the ‘equalization’ mechanism suggests that individual characteristics are more important in countries that have high gender inequality. In unequal contexts, individual and household characteristics should make the difference because they represent an extra that only few subjects have and that, therefore, can make the difference. In high-equality countries, institutional features equalize more than individual characteristics because ‘the bar is set higher’ for everyone (Hook, 2006: 643). For instance, in a country where gender equality is high and female employment is the norm, men will contribute more to domestic work, independently of individual characteristics, than in countries where equality is low.

The empirical evidence supporting both these mechanisms is inconclusive. For example, Fuwa (2004) provides support for the discount mechanism by showing that women’s education is more important in obtaining a gender-equal allocation of time spent on domestic chores in countries with overall higher levels of gender equality. By contrast, Mandel (2012) and Korpi et al. (2013) find support for the equalization mechanism by showing that individual skills are less beneficial to women in countries where gender equality is valued.

The national context

Gender equality differs considerably among the four countries considered in this study. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, 2010), Italy is among the European countries with the lowest levels of gender equality, followed by Germany, which is also below the EU average, at least until 2010, while the score for the UK is slightly above average. Norway is not a member of the European Union and therefore is not listed in the EIGE, but it is the first country worldwide for another indicator of gender equality: the Gender Empowerment Measure (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2007–2008).

Each of the four countries is characterized by structural and cultural components that contribute to its overall level of gender equality. In Italy, which is representative of the Mediterranean countries, mothers and women in general are in large part out of the labour market, with less than 50% of the female working-age population in employment during past two decades (Eurostat, 2016). The highly segmented labour market (Barbieri, 2009) and the limited availability of part-time work (Del Boca and Sauer, 2009) play a decisive role in making it difficult to combine work and family life. In fact, public childcare is extensively available for children over the age of three years, but for younger children it is scant (Brilli et al., 2013) and therefore often needs to be replaced by informal childcare (Bettio and Plantenga, 2004). Moreover, average working hours tend to be long (International Labour Organization (ILO), 2010), paternity leave is virtually non-existent,¹ and parental leave is taken mostly by mothers, with the result that fathers are barely available around the house. Germany is traditionally classified as a conservative welfare regime with rather generous leave provisions, where the (modified) male main breadwinner model is still relatively strong (Berger, 2013). From a cultural point of view too, support for working mothers with small children has been low for quite a long time in Germany (Drobnič, 2000), and the levels of fathers’ uptake of paternal leave and help in the household are still low (Hook and Wolfe, 2013). Nevertheless, efforts to challenge the so-called ‘male breadwinner family model’ were made with a parental leave benefit reform in 2006 and this seems to have spurred important achievements in certain domains of gender equality (Spiess and Wrohlich, 2008). As an example, female labour force participation rates in Germany have been on the rise since 2007, while they have remained stable in Italy and Norway, and have only marginally increased in the UK (Eurostat, 2016). However, recent evidence shows that the increasing generosity of leave entitlements in Germany led to a decline in mothers’ work commitment (Gangl and Ziefle, 2015). The United Kingdom, belonging to the liberal welfare regime, is characterized by relatively low levels of childcare and leave provisions (Hook and Wolfe, 2013; Missoc, 2015). Reconciliation between work and family is addressed through flexible working arrangements (Davaki, 2010) that lead to the prevalence of the ‘one-and-a-half-earner’ model (Lewis et al., 2008), which – similar to Germany – sees mothers mainly engaged in part-time jobs. While this allows a better reconciliation of work and family responsibilities, the prevalence of mothers in part-time rather than full-time jobs implies negative consequences for their earnings and careers (Kanji, 2011). In Norway, childcare is public and widely available, even for small children (Gornick and Meyers, 2003; OECD, 2015). Moreover, fathers’ participation in childcare is encouraged through limitations on working hours and paternal leave schemes (Hook and Wolfe, 2013). With over 70% of women in the labour market, the dual-earner model is predominant and mothers are extensively in employment (OECD, 2015).

For analytical purposes, given the characteristics discussed, Italy is defined as a low-equality context, Norway as a high-equality context, and Germany and the UK as being between the two. Obviously, these contexts are not immutable, and, as mentioned, especially Germany has recently witnessed relevant changes, which occurred, however, after the brief observation period covered by our empirical study.

Expectations

Maternal employment usually increases as children grow. However, the age of children is likely to play a variable role according to the country (OECD, 2015). It is reasonable to assume that the child’s age is less important in Norway, and also in Italy, than in the other two countries (H1). The reason is that Norwegian mothers withdraw from the labour market less and return to work when their children are still young. By contrast, Italian working mothers either withdraw altogether or not at all. In fact, the labour market attachment of Italian women is considered somewhat high (Del Boca and Sauer, 2009), which is usually attributed to a more selected population of employed women, given the overall lower participation rate.

Education is likely to be the strongest ‘enabler’ of maternal employment, yet the reasons why this is the case are manifold. These include: women’s attitudes and work orientations (which is not measured directly and therefore proxied through education); their possibly increased bargaining power within the household; limited gains from specialization of tasks within the couple; and, finally, higher wages leading to higher opportunity costs of not working. Thus, highly educated mothers should more often be employed and particularly full-time employed (H2). If the ‘discount’ scenario were true, education would be more decisive for participation in the high gender-equality country, Norway (H2-a). By contrast, should the ‘equalization’ mechanism prevail, education will be more important in high gender-inequality countries (H2-b), therefore in Italy and less so in Germany and the UK. In Germany, educational difference might only be important for the decision to opt for full-time work.

Expectations regarding the roles of the characteristics of the partner and the household are not clear-cut. Overall, higher household income and long partner working hours − net of women’s education − should reduce the likelihood of mothers being in full-time employment (H3). Nonetheless, household characteristics might matter less in the ‘defamilialized’ country, Norway, where individuals receive greater income support from the state and therefore their labour market participation should be less contingent on household circumstances (H3-a).

Childcare is likely to be a prerequisite for a mother to work. The analyses provide a description² of the role that different childcare arrangements – formal or informal – have in different countries. Especially in the absence of publicly subsidized market care, childcare provided informally is an important way of allowing mothers to work (Jappens and Van Bavel, 2012; OECD, 2015). Therefore, an exclusive use of informal care should be more common in the southern European gender-unequal context than in the other countries.

Methodology

Data and variables

The data are derived from four cross-sectional waves of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2004–2007), and deliberately before the start of the current economic crisis that started in 2008–2009.³ Several waves are pooled together to maximize the number of observations. The data for Germany and the United Kingdom cover the years 2005, 2006 and 2007. All four years are present for Italy while Norwegian data are available for 2004, 2005 and 2007. The EU-SILC has the valuable feature of collecting information at the individual and the household level⁴ for various countries. Hence, it allows studying the interplay of different levels of analysis. Our sample includes mothers⁵ who have at least one child in the 0–12 age group and who are living with a partner.⁶ A deliberately high age threshold (19–60 years) is set, as higher education has been found to lead to postponement of childbearing (Klesment et al., 2014).

A categorical dependent variable is used to investigate which individual and household characteristics are associated with mothers’ labour market participation. The variable has three mutually exclusive outcomes: full-time employment, part-time employment and full-time homemaking. The last category only includes mothers who report undertaking exclusively domestic tasks and care responsibilities.⁷ In all cases, the self-reported main status or activity is used rather than reported working hours. The distinction between full-time and part-time is important, as a part-time job can in itself be a strategy for reconciling maternal work and family needs (Drobnič, 2000; Lewis et al., 2008). Our first predictor is the mother’s level of education (low as reference category, medium and high).⁸ A variable based on the relative levels of education of the partners is built to capture the mother’s potential ‘bargaining power’, distinguishing between whether she is more educated than her partner, both have equal levels of education or whether she has a lower level of education (reference category). Importantly, both these relative effects and the mother’s absolute level of education are included in the models. Also, the partner’s weekly working hours and income measured as quartiles within the country’s male income distribution are accounted for. Including relative rather than absolute income is an appropriate strategy when comparing countries that may have wage ladders of different lengths (Mandel, 2012). Last, descriptive evidence of the type of childcare used during a typical week − formal, informal or both − by mothers employed both full-time and part-time is provided.

To investigate whether the ‘enabling effects’ vary according to the age of the children, interactions with the age of the youngest child (0–2 reference category, 3–5, 6–9, 10–12 years) are estimated. Different age groups are considered as these require different types and intensity of care, and as formal childcare arrangements vary by the child’s age in most countries.⁹ The models additionally control for the mother’s age and its square, for her marital status (married as reference category versus not legally married, given the differences in the work participation of married and unmarried women (Seltzer, 2000)), for the partner’s age, and for the number of children and year of observation. Summary statistics for the variables used in the models are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Summary statistics (means and proportions) by country.

	Germany	Italy	Norway	UK	Total	Min	Max
Full-time	.108	.395	.642	.297	.352	0	1
Part-time	.518	.207	.279	.414	.313	0	1
Homemaker	.374	.398	.08	.289	.335	0	1
Age, years	37.7	37.7	36.8	36.6	37.4	19	60
Age of partner, years	40.4	41	39.4	39.2	40.4	19	80
Married	.937	.942	.72	.824	.894	0	1
Low education	.058	.377	.06	.094	.225	0	1
Medium education	.573	.483	.504	.537	.513	0	1
High education	.369	.14	.435	.37	.262	0	1
Mother less education	.267	.17	.15	.166	.187	0	1
Equal education	.595	.599	.618	.624	.604	0	1
Mother more education	.138	.231	.232	.211	.208	0	1
Partner’s income
<25	.249	.25	.249	.248	.25	0	1
25–50	.252	.252	.25	.253	.252	0	1
51–75	.251	.248	.25	.253	.25	0	1
over 75	.248	.25	.25	.246	.249	0	1
Partner’s employment hours	39.5	39.7	39.0	41.4	39.8	0	99
Age of the youngest child, years
0–2	.265	.278	.307	.357	.291	0	1
3–5	.246	.244	.232	.222	.24	0	1
6–9	.299	.276	.27	.242	.275	0	1
10–12	.191	.201	.192	.178	.194	0	1
Number of children
One	.292	.365	.216	.291	.319	0	1
Two	.508	.48	.48	.48	.486	0	1
Three or more	.2	.154	.304	.229	.195	0	1
Year of the survey
2004	0	.265	.356	0	.181	0	1
2005	.323	.254	.349	.349	.295	0	1
2006	.346	.246	0	.335	.248	0	1
2007	.331	.235	.295	.315	.276	0	1
N	5743	13,719	3576	4020	27,058

Mothers aged 19 to 60 years.

Multinomial logistic regression models¹⁰ are used to estimate the probability of being employed full-time, part-time, or being a full-time homemaker by country. As the multinomial coefficients are not immediately interpretable, the predicted probabilities of the three outcomes are reported. The probabilities are obtained by conditioning on the predictors of interest while keeping the others constant at the overall mean. Because of space limitations the predicted probabilities with confidence intervals are graphically displayed while the coefficients for the multinomial models are reported in Tables A1 to A5 in the online supplementary material.

Results

Mothers’ employment and age of the children

Figure 1 shows the predicted probabilities of mothers being engaged in full-time employment, part-time employment and homemaking in the four countries by the age of the youngest child, holding all the other variables included in the models at their means. The distribution and timing of full-time, part-time and homemaking varies widely among the countries.

Figure 1.

Predicted probabilities of being employed full-time, part-time and of homemaking by age of the youngest child and country. Mothers aged 19–60 years.

In Germany, mothers mostly specialize in homemaking or engage in part-time work during the years of the study. When the children are very small (0–2 years), maternal homemaking is the most common outcome (pr=0.68), followed at a distance by part-time employment (pr=0.29). Homemaking decreases and part-time work increases among mothers of older children. Indeed, the probabilities of German mothers being employed part-time are 0.60, 0.64 and 0.66 if their children are aged 3–5, 6–9 and 10–12 years, respectively. Working full-time is quite uncommon for all age groups, with the highest probability being 0.14 for mothers of children in the 10–12 age bracket.

The graph for Italy shows a dualization of the labour market participation of Italian mothers: mothers are almost as likely to be homemakers as employed full-time, with a minor prevalence of the latter, as the average probability across age groups is 0.40 versus 0.38, independently of the age of the youngest child. Part-time work is not nearly as common, with an average probability around 0.22, again regardless of the youngest child’s age.

Mothers in Norway are extremely likely to be employed, with a probability of 0.97 in the 10–12 years age group. Averaging across groups, full-time work (0.66) is more common than part-time work (0.28) and homemaking is rare (0.06) almost regardless of the age of the youngest child.

The picture for the United Kingdom is rather mixed. The overall probability of being employed is lower than in Norway, but higher than in the other countries. As in Germany, it strongly depends on the age of the youngest child. Part-time employment is fairly stable across the child age groups (0.43 on average), but full-time work increases at the cost of homemaking when children are older (from 0.18 when children are aged 0–2 years to 0.46 for 10–12 years), presumably because childcare becomes less of an issue.

The description above highlights important cross-national differences in the extent to which the age of the youngest child is associated with maternal employment, providing preliminary support for H1. Indeed, in Italy and Norway, there are very limited differences in mothers’ employment probabilities by the age of the youngest child. In Germany, by contrast, the age of the youngest child matters for part-time employment, and it matters more for full-time employment in the UK.

Enabling effects and their variation between countries

Mothers’ characteristics: the importance of education

Education is a key to employment. Figure 2 shows the extent to which education enables mothers to participate in the labour force by reporting the predicted probabilities of being employed full-time and part-time in each of the four countries by the mother’s level of education and by the age of the youngest child. The predicted probabilities of being a full-time homemaker are not reported: they can easily be deduced from the graphs as the three probabilities add up to one. As expected, education increases the likelihood of being employed in all four countries, although there are some important cross-national distinctions between full-time and part-time employment. In Germany, education only matters for employment decisions as children grow, especially for full-time employment. For example, in the observed years, for mothers whose youngest child is 10–12 years old, the probability of being employed full-time is about 0.05 for mothers with low education and 0.25 for mothers with high education. Education matters even more for part-time employment, as poorly educated mothers are less likely to be employed when their children are between 0 and 2 and between 3 and 5 than when the children are older. Part-time work is extremely common even among highly educated mothers in Germany, while in the other countries highly educated mothers are more likely to be in full-time employment, suggesting that large parts of the cross-national differences in employment rates are due to a combination of different labour markets and different levels of female education. A completely different pattern emerges in Italy, where education has little effect on part-time employment, which is rather rare. Nonetheless, high levels of education come with dramatically higher chances of being employed full-time, driving the probability from 0.25 for the low educated to around 0.70 for the highly educated. Education also positively affects full-time employment in Norway, though to a lesser extent, while higher levels of education slightly decrease the chances of being employed part-time. As for the UK, the ‘enabling effect’ of maternal education for full-time employment is strongly related to the age of the youngest child: while education has no effect for mothers of children aged 0–2 years, the association is greater for mothers of older children. Furthermore, as in Germany, in the UK education particularly increases the probability of part-time employment for mothers of younger children, but it reduces the likelihood for those with older children, probably because they enter full-time employment.

Figure 2.

Predicted probabilities with 95% confidence bounds of full-time and part-time employment by level of education and age of the youngest child. Mothers aged 19–60 years.

Thus, the data support the importance of education in stratifying mothers’ employment (H2).¹¹ More interestingly, there is clear evidence that the equalization mechanism prevails, as education is overall much more important in Italy – the high-inequality country – than elsewhere. In Germany and the UK, education also stratifies access to full-time employment, but only when the youngest child reaches school age. In the high-equality context – Norway – education matters the least. Hypothesis H2-b is thus confirmed and H2-a is not.

As discussed, the relative resource distribution within the couple might also account for employment outcomes. Nonetheless, the results indicate that the mother’s relative level of education has little or no effect on her employment situation, net of her absolute level of education in all the countries, running counter to the bargaining argument. The results are displayed in Figure A2 in the online supplementary material.

Partner’s income and time availability

Beyond the conflictual ‘bargaining scenario’, resource pooling and the division of tasks among partners have been identified as important features of family life. Hence, a partner with high income, working long hours should come with less market engagement of the mother. Some limited confirmation of this is found. Figure 3 reports the predicted probabilities of the mother being in employment by income quartile of the partner; the results regarding working time are reported in Figure A3 in the online supplementary material. Homemaking is slightly more common among mothers with a high-income partner and one that dedicates most of his time to paid employment. Negative effects on full-time employment are slightly more visible, providing some support for the idea of specialization among partners (H3). However, the effects are somewhat limited, not necessarily linear, and vary with the age of the youngest child. Therefore, H3-a − that the partner effect would be particularly limited in the Nordic, defamilialized country − cannot be confirmed. The effects are almost completely absent in Italy and Norway and somewhat more pronounced in Germany and the UK. Regarding full-time employment, the probability of being employed full-time notably decreases at higher levels of partner income among women with older children (6–9 and 10–12 years) in these two countries. Regarding part-time employment, there are even situations where employment chances increase with the partner’s income, indicating that part-time work might be a way of reconciling career and family beyond economic necessity.

Figure 3.

Predicted probabilities with 95% confidence bounds of full-time and part-time employment by income of the partner and age of the youngest child. Mothers aged 19–60 years.

Outsourcing: formal and informal childcare

The availability of childcare facilities is often cited as one of the structural pre-requisites for women to remain employed after becoming mothers. As said, the importance of childcare availability for employment decisions cannot be tested, but some descriptive results on childcare use¹² among employed mothers and, more interestingly, on the differences between the use of formal and informal care between countries can be provided. The results show that among employed German and Norwegian mothers, exclusive use of formal childcare is the most common when children are young. Exclusive informal childcare is the most common care solution among working mothers in Italy and the UK. Moreover, in both countries, employed mothers are more likely to resort to a combination of the two types of childcare, while only a minority uses formal childcare exclusively. In general, informal childcare is certainly of importance for full-time working mothers in Italy and the UK. It plays a substantive role in Germany too – mostly for part-time employed mothers and especially for mothers of young children – while it is of only modest importance in Norway. For details on the distribution of childcare by country, the age of the youngest child and maternal employment status, see Table A6 in the online supplementary material.

Summary and conclusion

This article has taken a comparative approach to investigate the individual and household characteristics that enable mothers to be employed full-time, employed part-time, or be homemakers in four European countries using EU-SILC data up to 2007. Compared to previous studies on maternal employment, the article has advanced a more nuanced understanding of the micro-level elements associated with mothers’ employment in different contexts.

As expected, mothers of older children are more likely to be employed than those of younger children, but the countries studied differ substantively in the extent to which full-time or part-time employment depends on the child’s age. Indeed, age matters relatively little for mothers in Italy and Norway, confirming hypothesis H1, while in Germany and the UK full-time employment becomes more common as the youngest child grows older.

Education is confirmed as a strong enabling trait (H2), especially for full-time employment. However, education is much more decisive for participation in low and, to some extent, medium-equality countries, thus clearly supporting the ‘equalization’ (H2-b) rather than the ‘discount’ (H2-a) scenario. Furthermore, the presence of young children does not offset the positive effect of education in Italy, while it does so in Germany and the UK. Part-time work is more strongly affected by education in the UK and in Germany, especially when there are young children. These results point towards a specialization within couples in Germany and the UK, even among the highly educated, at least as long as the children are young.

Employment decisions are partly also driven by economic necessity. Overall, full-time employment for mothers is lowest when the partner’s income is high, thus confirming H3. Nonetheless, the strength of the effect largely depends on the age of the youngest child and the country of residence. The partner’s income is a stronger predictor in Germany than in Italy, Norway and, less so, the UK. The partner’s working hours are of negligible importance. Overall, the results do not support H3-a, according to which the household level would be less relevant to the outcome in Norway.

Last, in contrast to common expectations, informal care is not found to be determinant for mothers’ employment, particularly in Italy, the ‘familiaristic’ country. Informal care and its combination with formal care is also an important contribution to work–motherhood organization in the UK and Germany, albeit somewhat less.

In conclusion, the results confirm, once again, that despite being in decline (Lewis, 2001) the ‘male breadwinner – female homemaker model’ is still diffuse during the years of this study and specialization in tasks among couples is particularly strong when children are young, yet with notable country differences. The article has added important new aspects to this old knowledge. The first is that if European countries had more equal levels of female education, existing country differences in women’s employment would certainly be less pronounced. The second point is that these ‘individual enabling’ characteristics, like education, count much more in gender-unequal countries such as Italy, but to a lesser extent in Germany and the UK. Therefore, similar to previous research (Korpi et al., 2013), the results confirm the ‘equalizing scenario’ and certainly discard the ‘discount mechanism’ in this context. On the one hand, this is a sign of hope for countries like Italy, where in times of empty treasuries an extension of family and reconciliation policies is unlikely: individual characteristics like education can to some extent compensate for a lack of policy support. The other side of the coin is that in the absence of public intervention, poorly educated mothers and their families are left behind. The implications of this are worrying, given that women’s employment makes a difference by keeping families out of economically precarious situations, especially when children are young (Barbieri and Bozzon, 2016). Therefore, while an investment in individual resources (i.e. an increase in numbers of highly educated persons) is certainly an important step, to reduce the inequality of chances also for future generations and to set the bar higher for everyone, an investment in equity and public support is inevitable. The well-documented benefits of more equal and cohesive societies should largely justify the effort (OECD, 2011).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading, useful comments and valuable suggestions. This article is based on data from Eurostat, EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The responsibility for all the conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the authors.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding from the European Research Council under the European ERC Grant Agreement no. StG-263183 (FamIne: Families of Inequalities): PI: Stefani Scherer.

Notes

Giulia M Dotti Sani is Post-doc Fellow at the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Turin). Her main research areas are sociology of the family, social stratification, gender and household inequalities in an international perspective. She is specialized in the management and analyses of large household longitudinal and cross-sectional datasets and has several years of teaching experience in quantitative methods at Masters and PhD level. Her works appear in international peer reviewed journals such as the European Sociological Review, Sex Roles and the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Stefani Scherer is Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. Her research interests centre on social inequality and stratification processes in an international comparative perspective, labour market dynamics, family related inequalities and the analysis of life courses.

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