This open access handbook provides a multilevel view on family policies, combining insights on family policy outcomes at different levels of policymaking: supra-national organizations, national states, sub-national or regional levels, and finally smaller organizations and employers. At each of these levels, a multidisciplinary group of expert scholars assess policies and their implementation, such as child income support, childcare services, parental leave, and leave to provide care to frail and elderly family members. The chapters evaluate their impact in improving children’s development and equal opportunities, promoting gender equality, regulating fertility, productivity and economic inequality, and take an intersectional perspective related to gender, class, and family diversity. The editors conclude by presenting a new research agenda based on five major challenges pertaining to the levels of policy implementation (in particular globalization and decentralization), austerity and marketization, inequality, changing family relations, and welfare states adapting to women’s empowered roles.

Colleagues had some very nice things to say about the book:

“This engaging collection gathers theoretical and empirical insights from leading family policy experts. The authors – representing diverse countries, disciplines, and methods – bring to life the volume’s innovative conceptual framework, which is organized around policy institutions, both public and private.  The volume closes with a call for new lines of research that should inform family policy scholars for years to come.” — Janet Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

“Featuring exciting contributors from a range of often-siloed scholarly disciplines, countries and cultures, this Handbook offers nuanced insights into how interacting societal inequality factors influence family policy enactment to reinforce or improve inequality outcomes across gender, class, and nations. It is ambitious, broad-reaching, and succeeds in providing a strategic view within and across nations to inspire thoughtful evidence-based policy implications to improve societies in the future.” — Ellen Ernst Kossek, Basil S. Turner Professor of Management, Purdue University, USA?

“This multilevel and cross-nationally comparative perspective puts family policy at the organizational, community, national, and supranational levels into provocative context. With contributions from leading lights such as Mary Daly, Pearl Dykstra, Jennifer Hook, and Jane Jenson, this collection provides a landmark for the future of the field.” (Jason Beckfield, Harvard University, USA)

Family policies are those public policies that directly affect families with children. Given the fact that definitions of what constitutes a family are constantly changing, and with changing goals of governments, the nature of family policies has been changing since their early inception (in their modern form) at the time of industrialization. Family policies are understood as having a variety of goals, including 1) poverty reduction and income maintenance, 2) direct compensation for the financial cost of raising children, 3) fostering employment, 4) improving gender equity, 5) support for early childhood development, and 6) raising birth rates (see Thévenon 2011 in Origin and Variety of Family Policies).

The available research on family policies is vast, and naturally difficult decisions had to be made to end up with the selection of studies presented here. Important works and topics had to be left out, although many of the topics that are not explicitly discussed emerge in one form or another in our selection of research. Although our selection seeks to cover a broad range of perspectives, we have focused on 1) empirical research, often (but not exclusively) quantitative in nature, 2) research on outcomes of family policies, 3) research on family policy outcomes that include employment, wages, poverty, and fertility, and 4) in addition to some classics, some recent works that point to current frontiers in family policy research.

The references are organized in six major categories, which necessarily show some overlap. We begin with several General subsections that cover the Origin and Variety of Family Policies, selected Classics, concepts, Research Overviews, discussions on Gender in Welfare State Regimes, and recent perspectives on family policies such as social investment. Next, we detail studies that examined various forms of family Policies as their object of study, covering parental leave, childcare, and cash support for families, including child support and alimonies. Third, we selected studies on Outcomes pertaining to employment, unpaid work, occupations and earnings, poverty, and fertility. Fourth, we highlight several Debates that are ongoing in the literature, including on the Matthew Effect and on using aggregated data to study the link between fertility and (women’s) employment. Fifth, we highlight several research Frontiers: areas of more recently developed topics that include the role of fathers, family policies outside the EU or OECD, company-level (rather than public) family policies, and the use of experimental approaches. We conclude by listing a range of Data Sources that are relevant for the continued study of family policies and their outcomes.

The chapter is available online

We invite scholars to submit papers that examine the interplay of both policies that provide services (‘care’) and policies that provide financial support (‘cash’). Details are below:

Welfare states are in constant transition, with policy makers seeking solutions to address old and new social risks, while facing budget constraints. A useful distinction can be made between policies supporting well-being by providing ‘care’ in the form of public services, and policies providing ‘cash’ in the form of transfers. This distinction and changing balance between care and cash policies raises important new questions. To what extent may cash and care policies promote virtuous circles in welfare state reform? Are care policies adequately designed to compensate for reduced cash transfers? To what extent do cash and care policies depend on each other for maximum effectiveness and efficiency?

The general questions pertain to a wide range of policy areas. For instance, in labor market policy, the question can be raised whether active labor market programs (Bonoli, 2013) support employment adequately in order to compensate for reduced cash transfers in areas of unemployment and social assistance. In family policies, maternal employment are found to be higher in relation to work-family reconciliation policies such as childcare, but lower in relation to financial support policies as child benefits (Nieuwenhuis, Need, & Van Der Kolk, 2012). Yet, to reduce child poverty, both work-family (care) policies and financial transfers such as child benefits are thought essential and complementary (Maldonado & Nieuwenhuis, 2015). Policies can be distinguished that ensure care for the elderly through professional social services, and cash-for-care payments paying children to provide care for their elderly parents (Schmid, Brandt, & Haberkern, 2011). Publically funded education may have more equal outcomes when students can receive student grants to cover living expenses. Health and mortality are found not only to be affected by healthcare services, but also by minimum income benefits (Nelson & Fritzell, 2014). The effectiveness of public healthcare services may further depend on the presence of sickness benefits to allow patients to recover before having to go back to work.


This stream invites empirical papers that explicitly analyze the intersection of cash and care in welfare states, in any area of social policy. Contributions that examine policy developments, including the shift from cash to care, are welcome as well as contributions examining various types of policy outcomes.

Full details of all conference streams can be found at: http://espanetlisbon2017.eu/streams/

Deadline: March 15, 2017

The call for papers and full description of the stream can be found online.

From the stream description:

Who benefits most from family policies?

Family policies have received ample attention in the (comparative) study of welfare state outcomes. The attention now seems to turn to the question whether these family policy outcomes are homogenous across the population, or varies across people with different social backgrounds. Examples of such studies show that uptake of public childcare is biased against lower educated parents (Ghysels & Van Lancker, 2011), and that both paid leave and family allowances reduce poverty more strongly among single-parent families compared to two-parent families (Maldonado & Nieuwenhuis, 2015).

This stream seeks to bring together theory-driven, empirical studies on the question who benefits most from family policies. We welcome comparative papers as well as case studies, preferably using quantitative approaches to these questions.

Examples of possible contributions include, but are not limited to:

• Fathers or mothers: with fathers taking up leave becoming (somewhat) more common in various countries, the time seems right to address the question whether and how it affects their careers differently than is the case for mothers, how it impacts on household financial resources, and which kind of fathers actually make use of these leave schemes.
• Children from high or low SES parents. Does early childhood education and care level the playing field, or does it exacerbate existing differences in children’s outcomes? What are the redistributive effects of ECEC policies?
• The ‘institutional design of family policy’: Does universal coverage lead to universal use or take up? What kind of policy design yields the most equal outcomes? How do complementarities between policies come in to play to achieve more equal outcomes?
  The whole of society: in addition to papers examining specific sub-groups, we also invite papers addressing outcomes at the societal level, such as economic growth, inequality, and trends in poverty.
• Other options include differences in family policy outcomes across families with different levels of education, changing family structures, migrant histories, children with special needs etc.

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

1. Motherhood is still associated with lower employment rates among women.
2. Family policies matter: paid leave facilitates the employment of mothers, but family allowances stimulate the traditional breadwinner model.
3. Work-Family reconciliation policies are most important to stimulate the employment of women with traditional gender role attitudes.
4. Women’s Employment matters: Their earnings reduce income inequality among coupled households
5. Women’s Employment matters: Their earnings reduce single mother poverty

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.

People don’t just act out of interest; they also need opportunities.

This third proposition refers to one of the key theoretical contributions of my dissertation, tested in Chapter 4. A lot of research on (family) policy outcomes only focus on the characteristics of policy. In my case, my hypotheses in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of my dissertation were derived from the assumption that policies provide opportunities.

In Chapter 4 of my dissertation I argue that opportunities for employment will only be effective for those (women) with an interest in employment. In other words, the outcomes of opportunities are dependent on the interests of the actors.

From this I derived the hypothesis that reconciliation policies are more effective among higher educated women. This hypothesis was supported by the empirical analyses. The hypothesis that financial support policies were more effective among lower educated women, however, had to be rejected, although it was shown that financial support policies suppress the employment of mothers of all educational levels.

The summary of the Chapter reads:

In Chapter 2 we found that the size of the motherhood-employment gap was reduced by reconciliation policies and increased by financial support policies for families. In this Chapter, we answered the question of to what extent the outcomes of reconciliation policies and financial support policies differ between more and less educated mothers. Thus, we challenged the theoretical assumption held in Chapters 2 and 3 that all mothers are equally affected by family policies. Our data were obtained from the ‘Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File’, combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier & Bortnik, 2001). The data covered 17 OECD countries, the period from 1980 to 1999, and 116,874 observations on individual women living in partnered households. The data were analysed using multilevel logistic regression. We found that paid leave – a reconciliation policy – reduces the motherhood-employment gap more strongly among more educated women than among the less educated.

——
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.

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.

]]> http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/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/feed/ 1 http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/proposition-1/ http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/proposition-1/#comments Wed, 01 Jan 2014 11:00:10 +0000 http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/?p=2593 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.

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