Rense Nieuwenhuis » employment

Directions of thought for single parents in the EU

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 06:29:01 +0000

I’m very happy to introduce my new publication “Directions of thought for single parents in the EU” in Community, Work & Family Journal. The paper started off as a plenary address at the high-level conference “Europe for Gender Equality? Taking Stock – Taking Action” , organised by Finland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The address, and now the paper, combines insights from my own research as well as that from many others. It is now peer reviewed and available open access, and it is intended to initiate discussion.

The policy note highlights contemporary research on single parents, and reflects on its implications for social policy developments in the European Union. Three directions of thought are developed regarding single parents’ resources, employment and social policies. The aim is to expand the scope of choice among policy alternatives for policy makers. Three main points are addressed:

The rise of shared residence urges us to reconsider the gendered nature of single parenthood, considering how to support separated fathers to be involved in their children’s life.
Employment can come with all kinds of advantages, but earnings are often inadequate for single parents to guarantee a poverty-free existence.
With respect to redistributive social policies, single parents’ economic position can be heavily affected by policies that are not specifically designed for single parents, or even for families with children.

Taken together, these point bring into focus, analogue to gender mainstreaming, the importance of mainstreaming family diversity.

Trends in Women’s Employment and Poverty Rates in OECD Countries

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 12:37:25 +0000

Although employment growth is propagated as being crucial to reduce poverty across EU and OECD countries, the actual impact of employment growth on poverty rates is still unclear. This study presents novel estimates of the association between macro-level trends in women’s employment and trends in poverty, across 15 OECD countries from 1971 to 2013. It does so based on over 2 million household-level observations from the LIS Database, using Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca (KBO) decompositions. The results indicate that an increase of 10% points in women’s employment rate was associated with a reduction of about 1% point of poverty across these countries. In part, this reduction compensated for developments in men’s employment that were associated with higher poverty. However, in the Nordic countries no such poverty association was found, as in these countries women’s employment rates were very high and stable throughout the observation period. In countries that initially showed marked increases in women’s employment, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United States, the initial increases in women’s employment rates were typically followed by a period in which these trends levelled off. Hence, our findings first and foremost suggest that improving gender equality in employment is associated with lower poverty risks. Yet, the results also suggest that the potential of following an employment strategy to (further) reduce poverty in OECD countries has, to a large extent, been depleted.

Single-Parent Family Poverty in 24 OECD Countries: A Focus on Market and Redistribution Strategies

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 19:20:10 +0000

Single-parent families and their high poverty rates remain a genuine concern in OECD countries. Much of the research has focused on “redistribution” through income taxes and transfers as an effective strategy to reduce poverty. In a new LIS Center Research Brief, Laurie C. Maldonado and I adopt this traditional approach, and then push forward a focus on “market” strategies that facilitate single parents’ labor market participation.

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.

Family policies and single parent poverty in 18 OECD countries, 1978–2008

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 11:33:07 +0000

Who benefits more from family policies: single-parent families or two-parent families? Laurie C. Maldonado and I answer this question with respect to poverty reduction, in a new publication in Community, Work & Family. We presented this at the 2014 Work and Family Researchers Network (in New York), and our paper was the runner up to the best junior scholar paper award.

The paper is found, of course, online. If you have difficulties accessing it, please do not hesitate to contact me directly for a copy.

From the abstract:

This study examined towhat extent family policies differently affect poverty among single-parent households and two-parent households. We distinguished between reconciliation policies (tested with parental leave and the proportion of unpaid leave) and financial support policies (tested with family allowances). We used data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, covering 519,825 households in 18 OECD countries from 1978 to 2008, combined with data from the Comparative Family Policy Database. Single parents face higher poverty risks than coupled parents, and single mothers more so than single fathers. We found that employment reduces poverty, particularly for parents in professional occupations and for coupled parents who are dual earners. Longer parental leave, a smaller proportion of unpaid leave, and higher amounts of family allowances were associated with lower poverty among all households with children. Parental leave more effectively facilitated the employment of single mothers, thereby reducing their poverty more than among couples and single fathers. We found some evidence that family allowances reduced poverty most strongly among single fathers. An income decomposition showed that family allowances reduce poverty among two-parent households with up to 3 percentage points, and among single-parent households (mothers and fathers) up to 13 percentage points

Maldonado, L., & Nieuwenhuis, R. (2015). Family policies and single parent poverty in 18 OECD countries, 1978–2008 Community, Work & Family, 18 (4), 395-415 DOI: 10.1080/13668803.2015.1080661

Investing against poverty: The changing balance between public service provision, cash benefits and employment in Europe

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 07:05:25 +0000

I’m very happy to report that Forte, the Swedish science council, has awarded me a research grant. This allows me to work for a couple of years on a project titled: Investing against poverty: The changing balance between public service provision, cash benefits and employment in Europe.

The purpose of this research proposal is to assess the capacity of the European social investment strategy to alleviate poverty in Sweden and other European countries. This social investment strategy, which is currently dominant in European social policy making, assumes that poverty is best combatted by public services preparing individuals for economic independence through employment, rather than through government expenditure on monetary transfers repairing poverty. Assessing this strategy is important for two reasons. First, inequality and poverty are rising across Europe, including in Sweden where inequality rose by about 25% since 1980. Second, for social investment to succeed, it is pertinent that the services improve employment, that this employment is sufficiently paid and secure to protect against poverty, and that the degree to which services reduce poverty by stimulating employment actually outweighs the possible increase of poverty associated with cutbacks in social protection. Whether this is actually the case, is as of yet unknown.

This research proposal will focus on two policy domains of immediate importance for the social investment strategy: labour market policy and family policy. For these types of policies, the following questions will be answered: To what extent: (a.) has the shift from cash benefits to public services increased employment, (b.) has employment reduced poverty, and (c.) was anti-poverty effects of employment offset by reductions in cash benefits?

Association, Aggregation, and Paradoxes: On the Positive Correlation Between Fertility and Women’s Employment

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:00:03 +0000

Can we use cross-country, macro-level correlations between fertility rates and women’s employment rates to study the extent to which women combine work and family? I tend to think this is not very fruitful. Today, the journal Demographic Research published my note on a recent macro-level article.

In my note, titled Association, Aggregation, and Paradoxes: On the Positive Correlation Between Fertility and Women’s Employment, I respond to a recent article by Brehm and Engelhardt. Their article revisits the cross-country correlation between total fertility rates (TFR) and female labour force participation rates (FLFP). The interesting thing about this correlation is that it turned from from negative to positive after 1985. My disagreement with their (otherwise excellent) article is that the pre-1985 negative correlation is taken as support for the hypothesis that for women having young children and being employed are (partially) incompatible, implying that the correlation turning positive contradicts that hypothesis regarding the later period.

My note provides three comments on why this cross-country correlation is not informative to critically test hypotheses on the degree to which women combine motherhood and employment:

The macro-level correlation across countries turned positive due to decreasing fertility in southern European countries, but this was hardly associated with more female labour force participation. This is not in line with the notion that within countries higher fertility was associated with more employment.
There is a whole literature on aggregation paradoxes, that dictate that correlations on different levels of aggregation can have opposite signs. So, a positive correlation at the aggregate country-level is not informative regarding a correlation at the individual level
In my own study in Journal of Marriage and Family I used individual-level data to find that mothers were still (substantially) less likely to be employed than women without children. Moreover, in various countries the individual-level association between motherhood and employment did not change at all in the period that the country-level correlation turned positive.

The original article by Brehm & Engelhardt and my response are available online from the Demographic Research website. Those who follow my research will recognise some arguments that were developed in my dissertation (Family Policy Outcomes).

On a final note, the editorial team of Demographic Research has been incredibly efficient in processing this note, and seem very committed to facilitate academic debate in their journal. The whole process (from submitting to publishing) took just a couple of days, and given that the original paper was published only a week ago, this makes for a timely discussion.

Proposition 2: It is too simple to only think of childcare leave as a mechanism of inclusion of women in the labour market, as it can also be a mechanism of exclusion.

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 11:00:22 +0000

It is too simple to only think of childcare leave as a mechanism of inclusion of women in the labour market, as it can also be a mechanism of exclusion.

With this proposition I respond to various studies addressing the question whether there is such a thing as too long childcare leave. Moreover, I address how it is possible that I found (in Chapter 2 of my dissertation) that leave increases mothers’ employment, whereas other authors (most prominently Pettit and Hook, in their Gendered Tradeoffs Book) found that leave reduces mothers’ employment. I not only hypothesize a curvilinear effect of leave with short periods of leave improving women’s employment and (overly) long periods of leave reducing women’s employment, but also suggest several methodological improvements.

I tested the hypotheses using the Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18 countries, combined with country- level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database. The abstract reads:

In Chapter 2 we found that longer childcare leave facilitates women’s employment by reducing the size of the motherhood-employment gap. In this Chapter we follow up on this finding and test whether women’s employment is facilitated in societies with short-term childcare leave but negatively affected in societies with very long periods of child- care leave. We start by stating that this ‘long-leave question’ has not yet been satisfactorily answered. We argued that to correctly answer the long-leave question (1.) the relationship between duration of leave and employment of women should be explicitly hypothesised as being curvilinear and (2.) childcare leave should be expected to affect only mothers, not women without children. Based on this we formulated the long-leave hypothesis: In countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, but in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is larger than in countries with short periods of leave. In addition, we argued that to test the long-leave hypothesis one should use data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time, and one should evaluate for the presence of influential data. This can be done using the ‘Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File’ on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18 countries, combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier & Bortnik, 2001). We found that in countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, while in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is bigger than in countries with short periods of leave.

The findings, thus, indeed show that long periods of leave exclude women from the labour market, but it was also shown that relatively short periods of childcare leave include women into the labour market. So, leave works as intended, but it can be overdone.

——
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.

Proposition 1: Although both are family policies, reconciliation policies facilitate women’s employment while financial support policies suppress women’s employment

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 11:00:10 +0000

It is a Dutch tradition that a PhD dissertation contains a leaflet with propositions. I have 10 such propositions, and during the countdown towards my very own PhD defense, on January 10th, I am presenting one each day.

Proposition 1: Although both are family policies, reconciliation policies facilitate women’s employment while financial support policies suppress women’s employment.

The first proposition corresponds to the second Chapter in my dissertation, and provides the first test of a crucial argument in my work: reconciliation policies have markedly different effects on women’s employment than financial support policies to families with children. Indeed, I did find in this Chapter that reconciliation policies close / reduce the size of the motherhood-employment gap, while financial support policies increase the size of the motherhood-employment gap.

This study was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and recently gained some exposure on Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality blog. The abstract of the study reads:

This study combined demographic and insti- tutional explanations of women’s employment, describing and explaining the degree to which mothers in industrialized societies are less likely to be employed than women without children. A large number of cross-sectional surveys were pooled, covering 18 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries, 192,484 observations, and 305 country-years between 1975 and 1999. These data were merged with measures of institutional context and analyzed with multilevel logistic regression. The results indicate that, over time, women were increasingly likely to combine motherhood and employment in many, but not all, countries. Both mothers and women with- out children were more likely to be employed in societies with a large service sector and low unemployment. The employment of women without children was generally unaffected by family policies. Mothers were more likely to be employed in societies with extensive reconcilia- tion policies and limited family allowances.

——
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.

Is Employment an Occupational Hazard for Fertility?

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:18:42 +0000

A colleague and friend of mine, Katia Begall, successfully defended her PhD dissertation: Occupational Hazard? The Relationship between Working Conditions and Fertility. It’s is a great study, several chapters of which already were published in high impact journals.

From the press release:

Good qualifications, a career with good prospects, a full-time job in a mainly male environment and irregular hours are all factors that cause women to postpone having their first child. These are some of the findings from research carried out by Katia Begall in four separate studies into the relationship between working conditions and fertility. She discovered that highly qualified women working in sectors that employ relatively few women are much more likely to postpone having their first child. Women working in sectors with a relatively large female workforce, such as healthcare and education, are less likely to postpone the birth of their first child. Begall has come up with two explanations: ‘Having children appears to be “catching” in sectors employing mainly women. What’s more, it is easier to have children in these sectors as employees often qualify for paid parental leave.’ The partner’s qualifications and type of work appear to have little impact on the timing of the first child. ‘The woman’s job is the deciding factor, although we did note a delay among highly qualified men, which we put down to the fact that many of them are in relationships with highly qualified women.’

The press release is to be found here, and the complete dissertation can be found online as well.