The conceptualisation and measurement of benefit coverage is muddled with considerable confusion. In this forum contribution, we propose a new consolidated framework for the analysis of benefit coverage. Three sequential steps in measurement are suggested, involving the calculation of coverage rates, eligibility rates and take-up rates in social protection. Each step of the analysis focuses on particular aspects of programme legislation and implementation, and together the new framework will substantially improve the possibilities of research to inform policymaking. We provide an empirical illustration of our approach based on Swedish data, and highlight how our new consolidated framework for analysing benefit coverage provides a reorientation of the research agenda on benefit coverage.

Read more in our new open access publication!

This discussion paper provides an updated analysis of gendered economic inequality in high- and middle-income countries. A review of the literature demonstrates that such an analysis needs to explicitly recognize that gender, poverty, and (economic) inequality are intrinsically linked. Specifically, the paper addresses two sets of questions:

• First, how do intra-family resource allocation and distribution patterns both reflect and shape gender inequalities in power and well-being, and what factors—including policy-related ones—can mitigate these inequalities?
• Second, how do families as gendered institutions contribute to broader socio-economic inequalities, and what can be done to reduce/reverse these inequalities?

Using data from the LIS Database, this paper shows considerable differences among 42 countries with respect to how likely women were to have their own income. The period from 2000 to 2010/2014 saw increasing rates of own incomes as well as women’s incomes constituting larger shares in total household income. A key finding is that, in countries where many women have an income of their own, relative poverty rates are lower.

The comparative analyses, combined with a review of the literature, suggest that welfare state arrangements that support working women not only improve the overall employment rates of women but also help to prevent particularly women in low-income households from living in dependence and instead to have an income of their own—thus reinforcing the potential for poverty reduction. Moreover, institutional contexts that are generally conducive to women’s employment tend to be effective across family forms.

I was a great pleasure to work with the excellent LIS team on this project, and an honour to prepare this report commissioned by UN Women (the United Nations organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women). This paper was produced for UN Women’s flagship report, “Progress of the World’s Women 2019”.

This project examines how the rise of women’s employment and earnings affected trends in economic inequality among all households, across OECD and European countries since the 1980s. So far, prominent explanations of economic inequality have neglected the potential impact of women’s rising earnings on inequality among households, even though it is one of the most profound developments in economic activity in recent decades.

This project theorizes and analyzes how trends in women’s employment and earnings affected vertical inequality: the extent to which household incomes differ. For economic inequality it matters a great deal whether the rise of women’s employment and earnings was predominantly among singles and single mothers, among women living in couples, or among households with additional earners that already were close to the top (or bottom) of the earnings distribution. In this project, I also study how institutional contexts shape employment and earnings of women across diverse households.

This proposed theory will be rigorously tested using state-of-the-art quantile regression techniques and longitudinal data from EU-SILC and LIS, combined with high quality indicators of institutional context. Empirical studies address four areas of particular interest: (A1.) family diversity including single parents, (A2.) causal inferences, and the impact of the institutional context that is characterized both by (B1.) family policy and (B2.) social security.

The triple bind of single-parent families is available for free/open access download.

What kind of barriers and risks do single parents face? In their new book, The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment and Policies to Improve Well-Being (Policy Press, 2018), editors Rense Nieuwenhuis and Laurie C. Maldonado argue that understanding inadequate resources, employment, and policies matter for understanding single-parent families. They refer to these as the “Triple Bind.” Part One explores resources, including exploring education, wealth gaps, and school settings. Other chapters in this section also explore how single-parenthood is often a transitory phase and the importance of co-parenting. Part Two explored inadequate employment and starts with an important chapter about taking a life course perspective when researching single-parents. The chapters in this section also tackle income transfers, paid parental leave, and other workplace characteristics. Part Three focuses on redistributive policies, including cash benefits, universal vs. targeted polices, daycare, and minimum income. Part Four concludes the book with important discussions around framing single-parents in a “deficit model” way, the importance of gender in the discussion of single-parents, and ideas for future research.

This book is free to download in its entirety online and therefore is made accessible to anyone who may be interested in one or all of the topics contained within! Overall, this book tackles important topics around single-parents around the world and would be useful for an upper level undergraduate course in the Sociology of Family or Family Studies. It would also be the perfect addition to a graduate level course that focus on families.

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 Luxembourg Income Study provides an invaluable source of income-surveys that are made compable across countries and over time. Not all the measurements of income are directly comparable, however. In some datasets the income variables were measured gross of income taxes and social contributions, whereas in other datasets they were measured net of income taxes and social contributions. Researchers seeking to do comparative analyses using the LIS will have to account for this difference between net and gross datasets.

In a new publication, we present netting down procedures, which are statistical tools that help improve the comparability of net and gross datasets in LIS. The paper discusses the issues involved with comparing net and gross income data, as well as the assumptions that are required when applying a netting down procedure. Two netting down procedures are discussed, and their performance in reducing bias is evaluated. The paper was co-authored by Rense Nieuwenhuis (that’s me – Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS), Universiy of Twente), Teresa Munzi (Data Team Manager and Research Associate of LIS) and Janet Gornick (Director of LIS).

The results indicate that directly comparing data on net and gross earnings (as a specific source of income) introduces bias to the analysis. This was not a surprising finding, because it is well known that progressive tax systems result in net earnings to be lower and distributed more equal than gross earnings. Nevertheless, it underlines the importance of carefully comparing net and gross earnings. Applying the netting down procedures allows users to approximate net earnings based on gross earnings and variables on income tax and social contributions. The paper provides the program code for use with SPSS, Stata, R, and SAS. The results of evaluating these netting down procedures suggest that the application of netting down improves comparative analyses across net and gross datasets in the Luxembourg Income Study.

Our new publication is titled “Netting Down Gross Earnings Data in the LIS Database: An Evaluation of Two Procedures”. The paper was published in the LIS Technical Paper Series, and is available online: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/techwps/6.pdf