I think not, but these arguments were actually made recently in the Dutch public debate on women’s employment (). Against this background, a website on Social Problems in the Netherlands, called socialevraagstukken.nl and initiated by a variety of established research organisations, invited me to write a piece based on my dissertation. The piece, which is in Dutch, was published today and can be found online. In line with the goals of the website, I tried to stick to the facts – hoping to counter some fact-free-opinions similar to those reproduced above.

The core of my argument is that there (still?) are systematic differences in how Dutch men and women respond to having their first child – with 37% of first time mothers deciding to stop being employment or reducing their hours, compared to 7% of young fathers.

In my dissertation I found that mothers were less likely to be employed than women without children, which I called the motherhood-employment gap. The size of this motherhood-employment gap was found to vary over time and across OECD countries. Institutional explanations of this empirical regularity were tested. In addition, it was examined how women’s earnings affected earnings inequality between households.

My dissertation led to the insights that reconciliation policies stimulate women’s employment by closing the motherhood-employment gap, increase women’s earnings, and reduce inequality among women and between households. Overly long childcare leave decreases women’s employment, and higher educated women benefit more than lower educated women from (paid) leave. Financial support policies to families with children increase the motherhood-employment gap, reduce women’s earnings, and increase inequality among women and between households.

On the other hand, the findings in Chapter 5 suggested that women’s earnings have a strong tendency to decrease inequality between households. Our analyses showed that family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment women contributed a larger share of total household earnings, and earnings inequality among women was relatively low. Indeed, it women’s earnings were found to attenuate inequality between households to a larger extent in countries with extensive reconciliation policies and limited financial support policies. Countries with family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and consequently smaller earnings inequalities within households also contribute to smaller in- equalities between households.

The Chapter thus gave rise to the following proposition:

Family policy arrangements that facilitate smaller earnings inequality within households also reduce inequality between households.

The complete abstract of this Chapter reads:

This Chapter examines to what extent family policies have affected earnings inequality within and between coupled households. In Chapter 5 cross-country variation was found in the degree to which women’s earnings attenuate earnings inequality between households. In this Chapter we explain this variation with reconciliation policies and financial support policies. We used person-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2013) on 572,222 coupled households, covering the period from 1981 to 2005 in 18 OECD countries. These data were combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier, 2010). In countries with extensive reconciliation policies women contributed a larger share of total household earnings, and earnings inequality among women was relatively low. In societies with extensive financial support policies, women contributed a smaller share to total household earnings, and inequality among the earnings of women was relatively high. Women’s earnings were found to attenuate inequality between households to a larger extent in countries with extensive reconciliation policies and limited financial support policies. Countries with family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and consequently smaller earnings inequalities within households also contribute to smaller inequalities between households.

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This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

The conditions for women’s earnings to increase inequality between households are hard to meet.

With women’s increasing participation on the labour market, the question has often been raised how their earnings have affected earnings inequality between households. Early during my sociology training I learned that the inequality between households would be bigger than inequality between individuals. I thought it made sense, as coupled household with two earners can accumulate more resources (e.g. earnings) than a single person (household) can. Add educational homogamy to the mix, and there is a strong reason to expect women’s earnings to increase inequality between households. Hence, I was not surprised when I read Esping-Andersen’s statement that the “conditions required for an equalizing effect [of women’s earnings] are quite steep”.

It is, however, a “common misconception” (Lam, 1997) that a positive correlation between spouses’ earnings is a sufficient condition for women’s earnings to increase inequalities between households. Instead, the contribution of women’s earnings to inequality between households depends on the correlation between spouses’ earnings, the earnings inequality among women (relative to inequality among men), and the share of women’s earnings in total household earnings. It turned out, that the correlation between spouses’ earnings was positive, but not high enough for women’s earnings to increase the inequality between households.

So, that is why this Chapter concludes by stating that the conditions for women’s earnings to increase inequality between households are hard to meet.

The abstract of this Chapter reads:

In this Chapter we show that women’s earnings attenuate inequality between coupled households, even though the earnings of spouses are positively correlated. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2013) on 572,222 coupled households, covering the period from 1981 to 2005 in 18 OECD countries. Three trends are described. Firstly, over time women’s earnings increasingly contributed to total household earnings, thereby increasing equality within households. Secondly, the positive correlation between spouses’ earnings increased over time. Thirdly, earnings inequality among women declined. With a counter-factual decomposition technique on earnings inequality, we show that the combined effect of these trends was that women’s earn- ings increasingly attenuated earnings inequality between households. The trend towards women’s earnings increasingly attenuating the inequality between households was mainly driven by decreasing inequal- ity among women. If inequality among women had not declined as it did in recent decades, inequality between households would have been 25% higher than it actually was in 2005.

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This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

Last week, I was invited to present my dissertation research during the LIS Summer Workshop. My lecture was titled “Family Policies, Women’s Earnings, and Between-Household Inequalities: Using LIS for comparative analyses“. It consisted of three parts.

The first part of my lecture dealt with my argument to combine institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. I differentiate between two types of family policies, and how these affect women’s employment. These two types of family policies are reconciliation policies and financial support policies to families. Reconciliation policies were found to stimulates the employment of specifically mothers, thereby decreasing the employment gap between mothers and women without children. Financial support policies to fmailies with children, on the other hand, were found to increase this motherhood-employment gap.

Secondly, I have answered the question to what extent – and in what direction – women’s increased earnings have affected earnings inequality between households. Put simply: women’s earnings attenuate the earnings inequality between households. Moreover, reconciliation policies were found to stimulate women’s employment in such a way, that her attenuating contribution to household inequality was stronger, while financial support policies suppress this attenuating effect. This means that a family policy-context facilitating women’s employment contributes both to smaller inequalities within households, as well as between households.

The third part of my lecture was technical in nature, and specifically addressed comparative analyses using the LIS database. I presented a ‘netting down’ tool that may assist in comparing net and gross earnings data in the LIS database. Evaluations of the performance of this netting down tool suggest that netting down improves the quality of comparative analyses, but residual bias (between net and gross datasets) remained.

Presenting at the LIS Summer Workshop was an amazing experience, with attendants asking smart and constructive questions. I learned a lot from the experiernce, myself. The slides of my presentation are available upon request (r.nieuwenhuis@utwente.nl).