Fathers’ Job Flexibility and Mothers’ Return to Employment
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- Gender inequality in many societies is driven by the unequal distribution of paid work between men and women, in particular after the birth of a child. The majority of research on women’s return to the labour market post childbearing, however, has exclusively examined the characteristics of the women themselves. We argue that labour market decisions are taken with regard to the situation of the couple, and the characteristics of the male partner also need to be taken into account.
Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and employing discrete event-history analysis, we examine how quickly women return to the labour market and their subsequent hours of employment using two indicators of the male partner’s employment flexibility as central predictors. We find that after experiencing the transition to parenthood, a father’s employment situation influences a mother’s employment behaviour, specifically, that lower working hours and higher levels of flexibility in a father’s employment schedule facilitates a mother’s return to the labour market.
We propose that more employment flexibility allows him to share childcare responsibilities, which give her the opportunity to be employed. This association, however, is found to be mediated by household income, reflecting the traditional gender division of paid work and family responsibilities in Germany.
*Paper of this name that the presentation is based on is co-authored with Katharina Lutz, University of Bremen, SOCIUM Research centre on inequality and social policy
Dr Sandra Buchler is a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests include gender ideologies, cohabitation, inequalities in education and labour market transitions.
Her current research focuses include how parenthood influences attitudes toward gender roles, gender segregation in the labour market and the association between marital status and happiness.
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