Does Family Policy Influence Women’s Employment?: Reviewing the Evidence in the Field
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917736438 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929917736438
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(1) 65 –80
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917736438
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Does Family Policy Influence
Women’s Employment?:
Reviewing the Evidence in
the Field
Emanuele Ferragina
Abstract
During the past two decades, the debate over the relation between family policy and women’s
employment in high-income countries has grown in prominence. Nevertheless, the evidence
proposed in different disciplines – sociology, politics, economics and demography – remains
scattered and fragmented. This article addresses this gap, discussing whether family policy regimes
are converging and how different policies influence women’s employment outcomes in high-income
countries. The main findings can be summarized as follows: family policy regimes (‘Primary Caregiver
Strategy’, ‘Choice Strategy’, ‘Primary Earner Strategy’, ‘Earning Carer Strategy’, ‘Mediterranean
Model’) continues to shape women’s employment outcomes despite some process of convergence
towards the Earning Carer Strategy; the shortage of childcare and the absence of maternal leave
curtail women’s employment; long parental leave seems to put a brake to women’s employment;
unconditional child benefits and joint couple’s taxation negatively influence women’s employment
but support horizontal redistribution; policies and collective attitudes interact, influencing women’s
behaviour in the labour market; and the effect of policies is moderated/magnified by individual
socioeconomic characteristics, that is, skills, class, education, income, ethnicity and marital status.
The article concludes by suggesting avenues for future research.
Keywords
family policy, women’s employment, childcare, leave, family allowances
Accepted: 21 August 2017
Introduction
There is considerable interest in understanding the relationship between family policy
and women’s employment in high-income countries, with extensive comparative research
published in leading social sciences journals over the past two decades, as for example,
Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC), CNRS and Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des
Politiques Publiques (LIEPP), Sciences Po, Paris, France
Corresponding author:
Emanuele Ferragina, Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC), CNRS and Laboratoire
Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP), Sciences Po, 27 Rue Saint-Guillaume, 75337
Paris, France.
Email: emanuele.ferragina@sciencespo.fr
736438PSW0010.1177/1478929917736438Political Studies ReviewFerragina
research-article2017
Article
66 Political Studies Review 17 (1)
American Economic Review, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Political
Theory, Journal of Comparative Policy and Analysis and Journal of European Social
Policy. This rising interest has come in the context of a parallel rise of female employ-
ment and the expansion of employment-oriented family policies. In this regard, Goldin
(2006) spoke of a ‘quite revolution’, while Esping-Andersen (2009) indicated this revolu-
tion remains largely ‘incomplete’ as growing inequalities accompanied women’s broader
access to labour market in several countries.
There are at least two other reasons for this emerging debate. The first is that women’s
labour supply and demand diverge sharply from that of men, as women are more likely to
experience work interruptions and take irregular employment trajectories. The second
relates to the growing availability of data and the quantitative turn of the social sciences.
This availability influences the scholarship: while critical works based on theory and
qualitative evidence were prevalent in the past, more recently, quantitative accounts
become more widespread. A new generation of social scientists – chiefly concerned with
policy effects – has gained momentum, shifting the focus of the investigation. Gender has
perhaps gone ‘mainstream’ (Daly, 2005), and over this process, the quantitative literature
complemented the old critical focus with more systematic comparative accounts of policy
developments and their effects.
In this context, while previous scholarly reviews survey the literature, such works are
either thematically broad – only briefly discussing the influence of family policy among
other determinants (Cooke and Baxter, 2010; Steiber and Haas, 2012) – or they do not con-
sider the effect of several components of the family policy package, that is, the tax system,
cash benefits and the interaction between attitudes and policy (Hegewisch and Gornick,
2011). We address this gap by summarizing data on family policy and related employment
outcomes and by taking stock of the main empirical findings presented during the past
20 years in order to answer two overarching questions. First, are family policy and employ-
ment outcomes converging and does it still make sense to consider alternative regime types?
Second, what are the main findings concerning the relation between specific family policy
domains, that is, leave-taking, childcare, cash benefits and taxation, and female employ-
ment in different national contexts? And, by extension, does their effect change in combina-
tion with different attitudes and individual socioeconomic characteristics?
Context and Definitions
The relation between family policy and women’s employment outcomes has been
approached from a welfare regime perspective – especially on the part of political scien-
tists and sociologists – and also testing abstract theories on different national contexts
(mostly by economists and demographers). This work bridges both literatures – which are
rarely jointly analysed – focusing on the regime approach, on one hand, and covering the
theoretical and empirical ground mostly developed at the national level, on the other.
Family policy is an umbrella of instruments that includes both ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’
policies (all policies related to family characteristics/dynamics) (Kamerman and Kahn,
1978). To disentangle the effect of family policy from the overall social policy package, we
focus on a restrictive definition of explicit family policy, considering child income support
(cash or tax), leave-taking and childcare for young children. Kamerman and Kahn (1994)
originally argued – and most subsequent literature accepted – that scholars should use indi-
cators able to distinguish between cash benefits, time and services. Furthermore, Lewis
(2006) emphasized the uniqueness of family policy as a cross-cutting policy area.
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