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Individual and Institutional Constraints: An Analysis of Parental Leave Use and Duration in Spain

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the extent to which individual characteristics, the workplace situation, and regional policies influence the use and duration of parental leave in Spain. The research is based on a sample of 125,165 individuals, and 6,959 parental leaves covered in the “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MCVL-2006). The MCVL consists of administrative register data, which include information from three different sources: The social security system, municipal and income tax Registers. We adopt a simultaneous equations approach to analyze the determinants of the use (logistic regression) and duration (event history analysis) of parental leave, which allows us to control for endogeneity and censored observations. Our results suggest that the Spanish parental leave scheme increases gender and social inequalities, insofar as it reinforces gender role specialization, and only encourages the reconciliation of work and family life among workers with a good position in the labor market (educated employees with a high and stable work status).

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Notes

  1. The social security system only provides information about the number of individuals who were not at work due to parental leave in December of each year. Therefore, this estimate should not be interpreted as a rate, but the percentage of mothers and fathers that were in parental leave during the specified month. Other researches also confirm the small use of parental leave in Spain (Escobedo, 2008).

  2. Spain is administratively divided into 17 autonomous communities or regions which hold broad legislative and executive autonomy in specific areas of social policy that allow them, for instance, to design additional measures of social protection to national labor law.

  3. The average monthly gross wage in Spain was 1,353 Euros for women and 1,837 Euros for men in 2006, according to the “Encuesta de Estructura Salarial” (“Spanish Wage Structure Survey”).

  4. According to Durán (2007), 95% of Spanish workers contribute to the social security system. Only a small proportion of workers (mostly liberal professionals and civil servants) choose others systems of social protection. As a consequence, our dataset is representative of the great majority of parents eligible for parental leave.

  5. 6,140 individuals made up this number of career breaks. 85% of them took only one parental leave, 12.5% took two and 1.6% took three or more. As a result, there are individuals who have contributed more than one career break to the sample.

  6. In Model 3, which deals with men, we have fixed the value of the standard deviation at the same value as that estimated in the model for both sexes (Model 2), due to the fact that the reduced number of available observations does not allow its estimation.

  7. The MCVL underestimates educational attainment (García-Pérez 2008, p. 9) since individuals provide this information directly to the municipal registers, and they usually update it when there is a change in their home address. Consequently, the effect of educational attainment could be even larger.

  8. Similar results are shown if we omit the variable “level of education” from the model, which presumably is very much related to income level (these results are not shown).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Work and Immigration of the Spanish Government (project FIPROS 2009/20) and the Catalan Women’s Institute (project U-84/08) for financing this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Work, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Campus Arrosadía s/n, 31006, Pamplona, Spain

    Irene Lapuerta

  2. Department of Political and Social Sciences, ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramón Trias Fargas, 25-27, 08005, Barcelona, Spain

    Pau Baizán

  3. Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramón Trias Fargas, 25-27, 08005, Barcelona, Spain

    María José González

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  1. Irene Lapuerta
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  2. Pau Baizán
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  3. María José González
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Correspondence to Irene Lapuerta.

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Table 3 Descriptive statistics for the independent variables
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Lapuerta, I., Baizán, P. & González, M.J. Individual and Institutional Constraints: An Analysis of Parental Leave Use and Duration in Spain. Popul Res Policy Rev 30, 185–210 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-010-9185-y

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