Rense Nieuwenhuis » poster

Family Policies and Single Parent Poverty (poster edition)

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 07:02:14 +0000

Single parent families have an increased risk of living in poverty, which is partially associated with their higher risk of not being in employment, or to work fewer hours or in lower prestige occupations. Last week, I reported on our new publication in the Community, Work & Family journal, with Laurie C. Maldonado, on the link between family policies and single parent poverty. We found that paid leave and family allowances reduce the poverty risk of all families with children, and particularly so among single parent families.

We created a poster, to highlight our main findings. It can be downloaded from this website.

Key findings:

Single-parent households are found to be more likely to be poor than two-parent households, and single mothers are more likely to be poor than single fathers.
Employment is associated with lower poverty, particularly in professional occupations and for dual earners.
Parental leave, if paid, reduces poverty most strongly among single mothers, because it facilitates their employment.
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.
Findings based on data from LIS Database, covering 519,825 households in 18 OECD countries from 1978 to 2008, combined with data from the Comparative Family Policy Database.

Poster: Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment in 18 OECD countries, 1975-1999

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:41:43 +0000

A poster version of my article “Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment in 18 OECD countries, 1975-1999” is now available from my website. Please click this link to get the poster (.PDF, 400Kb). The poster is called: “Combining Motherhood and Employment? Where, When, and Why” and summarizes our main findings.

The citation of the published version of our article is:

Nieuwenhuis, R., Need, A., & Van der Kolk, H. (2012). Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’ s Employment in 18 OECD Countries. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74(June), 614-630. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2012.00965.x

The abstract of our article reads:

This study combined demographic and institutional 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 Organisa- tion 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 reconciliation policies and limited family allowances.

Do children keep their mother from working? Winning the ‘Best Poster Award’

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:41:12 +0000

I presented a poster presentation called “Do children keep their mother from working?” at a Ph.D. conference at the Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies, University of Twente. I won the ‘Best Poster Award”!

The jury was pleased with a clear presentation of both the research question, and some selected findings. The poster presented some findings of a paper I’m currently working on, integrating institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. From the question-section of the poster:

Women?s employment rates have increased dramatically. Why?

Institutional arrangements reduced role incompatibility between motherhood and employment.

Demographic change towards lower fertility, lower marital rates, and higher education, made women?s employment more likely.

We answer three questions:

How did levels of role incompatibility vary over time in industrialized countries?

What explains levels of role incompatibility?

Did lower incompatibility of roles contribute to women’s employment?

Since this is very much work in progress, I will not (yet) disseminate any findings, but it is very nice to give a heads up on what I’m currently working on. Below a picture of the poster, but please note that the resolution is intentionally kept low, since this is work in progress.