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Work-family attitudes and career interruptions due to childbirth

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Abstract

This paper examines the impact of attitudes on gender roles, work and the family on the duration of career-interruptions due to childbirth. Using latent class analysis, three different classes of mothers are identified based on their attitudes: home-oriented, adaptive and career-oriented mothers. Controlling for observable individual and family characteristics as well as the institutional and economic environment, it is shown that home-oriented mothers have more children and take longer leaves for each child than adaptive mothers, who themselves take longer leaves than career-oriented mothers. The difference is more marked among mothers who have been working the last quarter before giving birth: while 80 % of the career-oriented mothers return to work after 6 months, only 70 % of home-oriented mothers do so. Pre-motherhood and pre-labor-market attitudes of mothers are used in the determination of classes to avoid reverse causation of motherhood and work experiences on attitudes. These results cast doubts on the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all-policies and make the case for flexible policies that allow for different combinations of wages and maternity-leaves.

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Notes

  1. The book industry has produced some best-selling books in support one camp or the other of the “mommy war” and high-profile female figures are often called upon to weigh in on the debate.

  2. For advanced economies, it is estimated that motherhood leads to a wage reduction in the range of 5–15 % (Albrecht et al. 1999; Anderson et al. 2003; Baum 2002; Gangl and Ziefle 2009; Molina and Montuenga 2009; Phipps et al. 2001; Viitanen 2012; Waldfogel 1998). Amuedo-Dorantes and Kimmel (2005) show that the motherhood wage gap is not present among college-educated mothers in the US Interestingly, there is strong consensus that fatherhood increases the wages of fathers.

  3. According to Simonsen and Skipper (2012) absenteeism following the return to the labor market after childbirth is the main explanation behind the family gap in Denmark.

  4. Beyond the argument that LCA produces meaningful classes, it is argued that its theoretical underpinning allows the use of statistics, such as the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) to determine the optimal number of classes (in factor analysis, convention and ad-hoc guess-work are used to determine the number of factors). Additionally, traditional factor analysis is more suited to continuous variables, as it requires variables to have a similar variation and scale. For instance, Likert-type measures, such as strongly disagree, disagree, agree, and strongly agree, are assumed to be equally-spaced. In general, however, these measures are simply ordinal and do not necessarily capture the same order of magnitude.

  5. Since there are multiple births by mothers, the reported standard errors are robust to clustering by mother.

  6. Bertrand et al. (2010) find that even among highly educated women, having a high-income spouse reduces commitment to the labor market.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rodrigo Araujo, Ana Balcão Reis, Nicholas Kiefer, Drew Linzer, Vladimir Otrachshenko, Bernardo Pimentel, Nuno Sobreira, José Tavares and seminar participants at the Nova School of Business and Economics for useful comments. This paper has improved significantly thanks to the comments of editor Shoshana Grossbard, co-editor, Sonia Oreffice and three anonymous referees. Financial support from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Nova School of Business and Economics, Campus de Campolide, 1099-032, Lisbon, Portugal

    Fazeer Rahim

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Correspondence to Fazeer Rahim.

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Rahim, F. Work-family attitudes and career interruptions due to childbirth. Rev Econ Household 12, 177–205 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9180-2

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