This week, Laurie Maldonado and myself are very proud to be guests on the podcast, to talk about our book The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families. I don’t often find myself in a radio studio in Washington DC, and it was a great experience. The host Rebecca Vallas was smart, witty and so well prepared. She was very supportive, and I love what she wrote on the Triple Bind:

The U.S. has long demonized single parents – and especially single moms – like nowhere else in the western world. A new global anthology of research on treatment of families and single parents called The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families offers a damning critique not of single moms, but of how the U.S. is hanging them, and their families, out to dry.

You can listen to our interview on Off Kilter (and subscribe to the always excellent podcast!) everywhere good podcasts are served, including:

• Itunes
• Soundcloud

Or simply listen to it here:

Abstract

It is demonstrated that family policies are an important aspect of the institutional context of earnings inequality among coupled households. Although seldom integrated into prominent analyses of economic inequality, women’s earnings are consistently found to reduce relative inequality among households. This means that family policies, as well-known determinants of women’s employment and earnings, are important contextual determinants of economic inequality. Using Luxembourg Income Study data from 18 OECD countries in the period 1981–2008, this study demonstrates that women have higher earnings, and that their earnings reduce inequality among coupled households more in institutional contexts with generous paid leave and public childcare. We found no sizeable association between financial support policies, such as family allowances and tax benefits to families with children, and the degree to which women’s earnings contribute to inequality among coupled households. Family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and earnings are associated with less economic inequality among coupled households.

Nieuwenhuis, R., Need, A. & Van der Kolk, H. (2018). Family policy as an institutional context of economic inequality. Acta Sociologica. Forthcoming, online first: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0001699318760125

Single parents face a triple bind of inadequate resources, employment, and policies, which in combination further complicate their lives.

This book – multi-disciplinary and comparative in design – shows evidence from over 40 countries, along with detailed case studies of Sweden, Iceland, Scotland, and the UK. It covers aspects of well-being that include poverty, good quality jobs, the middle class, wealth, health, children’s development and performance in school, and reflects on social justice.

Leading international scholars challenge our current understanding of what works and draw policy lessons on how to improve the well-being of single parents and their children.

Don’t buy our book!

Well, you can. There is a beautiful hardback version available. But you don’t have to. The open access .PDF of the book is free to download, thanks to generous support of Knowledge Unlatched.

Free download: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=643492
Policy Press website: http://policypress.co.uk/the-triple-bind-of-single-parent-families

The long answer is the length of an academic paper, which I recently published together with Ariana Need and Henk van der Kolk . Of course, concerns have been raised for a longer time that long periods of (childcare) leave might be detrimental for women’s attachment to the labour force, and long leave has even been described as a ‘mechanism of exclusion’ of women from the labour market (Pettit and Hook, 2009).

Comparative research on the effects of long periods of leave, however, has been taking a variety of strategies – not all of them optimal. So, based on a literature overview and our own empirical research, we formulated four recommendations for studying the impact of long childcare leave on women’s employment:

• The relationship between duration of leave and employment of women is curvilinear: whereas long leave may reduce women’s employment, we should not overlook that short period can be beneficial (and vice versa).
• Childcare leave is expected to affect only mothers, not women without children.
• Testing the long-leave hypothesis requires the use of country-comparative data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time. Among other benefits, this reduces the sensitivity of the analyses to influential cases.
• The long-leave hypothesis is best tested against person-level data.

We conclude that our findings suggest that longer periods of leave can be detrimental to maternal employment. While short periods of leave can be useful, or even necessary, to maintain women’s attachment to the labour market after becoming a mother, very long interruptions of employment indeed seem to be a “mechanism of exclusion” (Pettit and Hook, 2009). There are, of course, alternative to long periods of leave, that include stimulating the availability of affordable and high-quality childcare, and stimulating the availability and uptake of paternity leave (Eydal et al., 2015)

References

Eydal, G.B., Gíslason, I., Rostgaard, T., Brandth, B., Duvander, A.-Z. and Johanna, L.-T. (2015), Trends in parental leave in the Nordic countries: has the forward march of gender equality halted?, Community, Work & Family, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 167-181, doi: 10.1080/13668803.2014.1002754.

Nieuwenhuis, R., Need, A., & Van Der Kolk, H. (2017). Is there such a thing as too long childcare leave? International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 37(1/2), 2–15. http://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-07-2015-0074

Pettit, B. and Hook, J.L. (2009), Gendered Tradeoffs. Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries, Russel Sage Foundation, New York, NY.

The book, however, leaves the topic of gendered inequality largely unaddressed. Indeed, Milanovic discusses why an exclusive focus on horizontal inequality (inequality between groups, including gendered inequality) is undesirable, because it may lead to unproductive identity politics in relation to specific horizontal inequalities, and because it does not address the root cause of inequality. Yet, while relevant, these arguments do not convince that a greater emphasis on gendered inequalities would not have been informative regarding the measurement and explanations of global inequality. Below, I list three reasons why including a focus on gender can improve our understanding of trends in global inequality.

First, the analyses presented in ‘Global Inequality’ seem to implicitly assume that all income is shared equally within the household. Indeed, incomes are equivalised to account for differences in household size and composition, but then it is assumed that there is no inequality within households in the degree to which women and men have equal access to, and control over, how to spend the household income. Admittedly, there is not so much empirical research that does account for such differences (Cantillon, 2013), but a literature on this topics seems to be emerging and indicating that women typically have less access to, and control over, household income (Bennett, 2013). Not accounting for this likely leads to understating levels of global inequality among individuals.

Secondly, the level of economic inequality between women and men is intrinsically linked to levels of inequality among households (Lam, 1997). Milanovic discussed how homogamy drives up inequality among households. This is true indeed, but the resulting correlation between partners’ earnings is typically quite low. In a recently published study, Nieuwenhuis Need, and Van der Kolk (2017), focusing on OECD countries from 1973 to 2013, showed how women’s rising earnings were indeed associated with a somewhat higher correlation between spouses’ incomes. But the same trend was also associated with a substantial decrease in inequality among women (living in coupled houseohlds). So, while inequality in household income increased due to the rising correlation between spouses’ income, it was reduced more by the decline of inequality in women’s incomes. Thus, the net effect has been that women’s rising incomes were a driving force reducing inequality among households – at least in rich democracies in recent decades.

Thirdly, levels of gender (in)equality vary substantially across countries and over time – even when just limiting our focus to economic inequality. Trends towards gender equality have been observed to stagnate in various countries (including the Nordic countries, where women’s employment rates have been comparatively high for a long period already) or even reverse like in the United States (Boushey, 2008). If inequality is rising in these countries, as shown by Milanovic, this could be related to stagnating gender inequality. At the same time, in other countries there is much more potential for further reducing household inequality by means of promoting gender equality. Furthermore, women’s (rising) incomes have contributed substantially to countries’ average income levels. On the one hand this means that countries in which trends towards gender equality are stagnating may see less growth in average income levels. On the other hand, it means that countries with high levels of gender inequality (in terms of economic participation) have the opportunity to foster growth in average incomes by stimulating women’s (equal) participation on the labour market. To the extent that these countries are poorer, such as China and India, promoting economic gender equality will thus also help these countries to catch up with the average income levels in richer countries – thus reducing global inequality.

Whether and to what extent trends in gender equality will affect future trends in global inequality remains an empirical question. But, together these arguments demonstrate that gender (in)equality is a driving force of inequality both within nations and between nations. Now, these points of critique are easily reaised, but very difficult to empirically substantiate (or refute). I don’t think Milanovic has the data to do so, and neither do I have them. In fact, I don’t think such data exists for a substantially long period of time. Yet, I think these comments are important to keep in mind when interpreting the evidence on long-term trends in global inequality, and when thinking about questions that beg answering in future research.

References

Bennett, F. (2013). Researching Within-Household Distribution: Overview, Developments, Debates, and Methodological Challenges. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75(3), 582–597. http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12020

Boushey, H. (2008). “Opting out?” The effect of children on women's employment in the United States. Feminist Economics, 14(1), 1–36. http://doi.org/10.1080/13545700701716672

Cantillon, S. (2013). Measuring differences in living standards within households. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 598 – 610. (online)

Lam D (1997) Demographic variables and income inequality. In: Rosenzweig M and Stark O (eds) Handbook of Population and Family Economics. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier, pp.1015–1059.

Milanovic, B. (2016). Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Harvard University Press. (Publisher’s website)

Nieuwenhuis, R., van der Kolk, H., & Need, A. (2017). Women's earnings and household inequality in OECD countries, 1973–2013. Acta Sociologica, 60(1), 3–20. http://doi.org/10.1177/0001699316654528

Manfred te Grotenhuis is currently visiting the Swedish Institute of Social Research (SOFI), where he presented our joint work on Weighted Effect Coding. The recoding of his presentation is available on Manfred’s YouTube channel, and embedded below:

The relevant papers are available here (open access):

• When size matters: advantages of weighted effect coding in observational studies
• A novel method for modelling interaction between categorical variables

More information, as well as software for SPSS and STATA are available from the project website.

ps. Stay updated for an exciting update to the ‘wec’ R package!

This is why I love the open source community so much. Not only can users extend the use of influence.ME, and all other R packages, to do things that the package authors/maintainers did not implement. Or to check procedures. Or fix mistakes. Moreover, in line with the positive attitude towards sharing in the open access community, the improved code was shared back so that other users can benefit.

So, thanks to the help of the community, I am happy to announce an update to influence.ME, with two improvements:

• influence.ME now better handles binomial models
• influence.ME now supports functions inside the model call;for instance:
  model.a <- lmer(math ~ structure + scale(SES) + (1 | school.ID), data=school23)

influence.ME is an extension package for the R statistical software. It provides tools for detecting influential data in multilevel regression models (also known as mixed effects models). It was introduced in the R Journal (Nieuwenhuis, Te Grotenhuis & Pelzer, 2012). influence.ME can be downloaded from with the R software.

Nieuwenhuis, R., Grotenhuis, te, H. F., & Pelzer, B. J. (2012). Influence. ME: tools for detecting influential data in mixed effects models. R Journal, 4(2), 38–47.

The reasoning by Jaehrling et al. is quite similar to that in a pair of papers I published last year with Laurie C. Maldonado. In Community, Work & Family we showed how paid leave facilitates the employment of particularly single parents. Yet, despite their employment, single-parent families faced higher poverty risks compared to two-parent families. In the Belgian Review of Social Security we argued that the increased emphasis in policies ‘preparing’ individuals for economic independence through activation may come at the expense of redistributive policies ‘repairing’ adverse economic outcomes such as poverty. We raised the concern that it remains to be seen whether employment is a sufficient strategy against poverty, particularly for single parents.

Jaehrling et al. seem to empirically confirm our concern, discussing the decreased adequacy of social assistance, among other redistributive policies. Moreover, they add several very interesting explanations to how it is possible that single-parents’ employment growth did not reduce their poverty risks. I conclude by mentioning three:

• Selection: It could be that single parents represent an increasingly disadvantaged group in terms of employment and poverty. This would be the case, for instance, of single parenthood would become increasingly concentrated among the lower educated, who have less earnings potential to stay out of poverty by means of employment. However, this explanation found little support. It was found that in Sweden an increasing percentage of single-parents has multiple young children in the household.
• Precarious Employment: With single parent families being overrepresented among jobs with little stability, fixed-term contracts, and lower wages, they find more difficulties in making ends meet based on employment alone.
• Competition with dual-earner families: while single parents families, mostly headed by mothers, were front-runners in terms of maternal / women’s employment, this is no longer the case. With the overall trends towards higher female labour force participation rates, this means that single-parent families increasingly have to compete with dual-earner families. With their double incomes, these dual earners drive up the median incomes, and therefore the income-levels that are regarded necessary to stay out of (relative) poverty. Income levels that are increasingly difficult to reach for single earners.

References

Jaehrling, K., Kalina, T., & Mesaros, L. (2015). A Paradox of Activation Strategies: Why Increasing Labour Market Participation among Single Mothers Failed to Bring Down Poverty Rates. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 22(1), 86–110.

Maldonado, L. C., & Nieuwenhuis, R. (2015). Family policies and single parent poverty in 18 OECD countries, 1978–2008. Community, Work and Family, 18(4), 395–415.

Nieuwenhuis, R., & Maldonado, L. C. (2015). Prepare Versus Repair? Combining Parental Leave and Family Allowances for Social Investment Against Single-Parent Poverty. Belgian Review of Social Security, (1), 1–10.

The Research Brief is available for download on the website of the LIS Research Center.

Our key findings include:

• Poverty rates of single-parent families based on market in- come are high in most countries.
• Redistribution is an effective strategy to reduce poverty among single-parent families.
• Single-parent employment rates are high.
• Single-parent employment rates are higher in countries with policies that facilitate parental employment.
• Employment significantly reduces the poverty rate among single-parent families.
• The Working Poor: even with employment, many single- parent families are poor.
• Many countries have child-related transfers that significantly reduce poverty among single-parent families.

Bottomline: Our findings suggest that, to reduce poverty among single-parent families, policy solutions should aim to both bolster their market income and to increase the effectiveness of redistribution.

Much of this has been detailed by scholars such as Philip Cohen, who wrote “I have come to see Rosin’s tendency toward exaggeration and misrepresentation as fundamental to its narrative and crippling to its credibility.” (Cohen, 2013, p. 1160). Cohen concludes that “Rosin’s conception of gender inequality is wrong: women are not in, nor are they rapidly approaching, a dominant position in the gender order. Instead, incremental progress in most areas has brought them closer to equality, but that destination remains far out of reach, and progress has slowed or stalled.” (ibid, p. 1177).

In the conclusion of the ‘End of Men’, the Dutch seem to be incorporated in the ‘Homogenous, social welfare-minder Nordic countries‘ (p. 268). First, Rosin described Swedish fathers, 80% of whom now take some form of parental leave. After that, she quotes research on Dutch boys, who ‘maybe […] will lead the way and transport us all into a new era of sweeter teenage romance‘ (p. 268). Combined, the argument seems to imply, the Swedish and Dutch examples showcase how the ‘Nordic countries’ are ahead in gender equality and gender role attitudes.

Well, let’s take a closer look at that argument. First of all, the Netherlands simply are not part of the Nordic countries. Secondly, equating the uptake of parental leave by Swedish men to ideas about teenage romance among Dutch boys, is a good illustration of the haphazard comparisons that are made throughout the book. Thirdly, the Netherlands and Sweden are not ‘homogeneous’ (nor are the Nordic countries of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark). This was obscured by the haphazard presentation of ‘evidence': if we only look at systematic comparisons between (in this case) Sweden and the Netherlands, it becomes apparent that the uptake of parental leave by Dutch fathers is nowhere near the reported 80% of Swedish fathers.

To illustrate this latter argument, let’s have a look at men’s and women’s labour force participation in the Netherlands, before and after becoming a first-time parent. This table was obtained from the Dutch Statistical Office (source, in Dutch). Before parenthood, labour force participation seems quite gender egalitarian in the Netherlands (not taking into account part-time employment): 4% of to-be fathers were not employed, compared to 13% of to-be mothers. However, when the first child was born, 7% of the young fathers stopped employment of reduced his hours, compared to 37% of the young mothers. That is more than 5 times as much. In sum, this means that almost 9 out of 10 young fathers stayed in the labour force or even increased his working hours, compared to only half of the young mothers. So, the ‘end of men’ does not seem near (nigh?) in the Netherlands, which is further illustrated by the Dutch minister of social affairs who suggested to increase paternity leave from 2 days (!!) to 5 days: these plans were severely criticised in the public debate.

With respect to Sweden: fathers’ uptake is relatively high there (80%, according to Rosin), but that is to a large extent due to how parental leave is regulated in Sweden. Each parent receives 240 days of paid leave. Parents need to use these days before their child reaches the age of 8, but can transfer these days to each other. This means that one parent can use much more leave than the other parent. Only 60 days are non-transferable, meaning that if either parent does not personally use them they are lost. This parental leave arrangement boosts fathers’ take-up of leave, but guess which parent takes up most leave? A study using Swedish register data showed that 77% of total parental leave days were used by, indeed, the mothers.

So, irrespective of the misrepresentation (or my misreading) of the Netherlands as being a Nordic country, or homogeneous, neither the Dutch nor the Swedes provide convincing evidence of the end of men.

References

Philip Cohen (2013). The “End of Men” Is Not True: What Is Not and What Might Be on the Road Toward Gender Equality BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, 1159-1184

Rosin, H. (2013). The End of Men. And the Rise of Women (Paperback Edition). Penguin Books.