Equalizing or not? Public childcare and women’s labour market participation

IF 2.7 1区社会学 Q2 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Journal of European Social Policy Pub Date : 2023-06-23 DOI:10.1177/09589287231183169

Stefani Scherer, E. Pavolini

{"title":"Equalizing or not? Public childcare and women’s labour market participation","authors":"Stefani Scherer, E. Pavolini","doi":"10.1177/09589287231183169","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Within the scientific literature and debate on social investment, public childcare provision plays a pivotal role. At the same time, critics have argued that social investment is often unable to reduce social inequalities and, to the contrary, tends to reproduce them (the so-called ‘Matthew effect’). The article focuses on a specific facet of social investment policies: their capacity to support mothers’ employment and its effect on social inequality, by investigating empirically to what extent an expansion of public childcare can help to increase women’s labour market participation and how this eventual support is homogenously distributed among different mothers’ profiles. To give a convincing answer to such a question requires careful attention to methodology, in order to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions. Whereas existing research has predominately focused on cross-national variation and has often been static in nature, the present study assesses the effects of public childcare expansion on women’s labour market participation and employment by examining region-specific within-variation over time of public childcare coverage. The study relies on data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) that were integrated with an original collection of regional-level information on public childcare. It finds a positive association between increases in public childcare coverage and mothers’ labour market participation. Furthermore, it shows that public childcare helps to fight social inequalities among households with young children. Low-educated mothers are the ones who profit most from an increase in public childcare, and positive employment effects are most pronounced at lower levels of childcare coverage. Therefore, this contribution highlights the importance of public childcare policies as an equalizer in society, especially in contexts in which an intervention is most needed, because expanding childcare fosters mothers’ labour market participation","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":"33 1","pages":"436 - 450"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of European Social Policy","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287231183169","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 2

Abstract

Within the scientific literature and debate on social investment, public childcare provision plays a pivotal role. At the same time, critics have argued that social investment is often unable to reduce social inequalities and, to the contrary, tends to reproduce them (the so-called ‘Matthew effect’). The article focuses on a specific facet of social investment policies: their capacity to support mothers’ employment and its effect on social inequality, by investigating empirically to what extent an expansion of public childcare can help to increase women’s labour market participation and how this eventual support is homogenously distributed among different mothers’ profiles. To give a convincing answer to such a question requires careful attention to methodology, in order to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions. Whereas existing research has predominately focused on cross-national variation and has often been static in nature, the present study assesses the effects of public childcare expansion on women’s labour market participation and employment by examining region-specific within-variation over time of public childcare coverage. The study relies on data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) that were integrated with an original collection of regional-level information on public childcare. It finds a positive association between increases in public childcare coverage and mothers’ labour market participation. Furthermore, it shows that public childcare helps to fight social inequalities among households with young children. Low-educated mothers are the ones who profit most from an increase in public childcare, and positive employment effects are most pronounced at lower levels of childcare coverage. Therefore, this contribution highlights the importance of public childcare policies as an equalizer in society, especially in contexts in which an intervention is most needed, because expanding childcare fosters mothers’ labour market participation

查看原文本刊更多论文

平衡还是不平衡?公共托儿和妇女参与劳动力市场

在科学文献和关于社会投资的辩论中，公共托儿服务发挥着关键作用。与此同时，批评者认为，社会投资往往无法减少社会不平等，相反，往往会重现社会不平等(所谓的“马太效应”)。本文着重于社会投资政策的一个具体方面:它们支持母亲就业的能力及其对社会不平等的影响，通过实证调查扩大公共托儿服务在多大程度上有助于提高妇女的劳动力市场参与度，以及这种最终支持如何均匀地分布在不同母亲的背景中。要对这样的问题给出一个令人信服的答案，就需要在方法论上多加注意，以免得出错误的结论。虽然现有的研究主要集中在跨国差异上，而且往往是静态的，但本研究通过检查公共托儿覆盖范围随时间的区域内变化，评估了公共托儿扩大对妇女劳动力市场参与和就业的影响。该研究依赖于欧洲社会调查(2002-2018)的数据，这些数据与有关公共托儿服务的区域一级信息的原始收集相结合。研究发现，公共托儿覆盖面的增加与母亲的劳动力市场参与度呈正相关。此外，它还表明，公共托儿有助于消除有幼儿的家庭之间的社会不平等。受教育程度低的母亲从公共托儿服务的增加中获益最多，在托儿服务覆盖率较低的地方，积极的就业效应最为明显。因此，这一贡献突出了公共托儿政策作为社会均衡器的重要性，特别是在最需要干预的情况下，因为扩大托儿服务可以促进母亲参与劳动力市场

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Journal of European Social Policy Multiple-

CiteScore

5.80

自引率

6.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： The Journal of European Social Policy publishes articles on all aspects of social policy in Europe. Papers should make a contribution to understanding and knowledge in the field, and we particularly welcome scholarly papers which integrate innovative theoretical insights and rigorous empirical analysis, as well as those which use or develop new methodological approaches. The Journal is interdisciplinary in scope and both social policy and Europe are conceptualized broadly. Articles may address multi-level policy making in the European Union and elsewhere; provide cross-national comparative studies; and include comparisons with areas outside Europe.