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.

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.

——
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.

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