Bridging the Gender Gaps in Labor Markets and in Caregiving: Empirical Evidence from Two Family Leave Programs
Open AccessDespite the tremendous progress women have made in the economy over the last few decades in the US, gender gaps continue to persist in wages, labor market participation and career progression. These gaps become even more prominent when women become mothers and experience a discontinuity in employment along with a substantial drop in wages. This transition to motherhood leaves an indelible impact on the employment trajectories of women and greatly influences their labor market decisions over the life cycle (Blau & Kahn, 2017; Goldin, 2014). Paid family leave is an important policy tool that governments use to support new parents through this vulnerable period. This dissertation studies the effects of two kinds of family leave programs with the aim of understanding their role in reducing gender gaps both in labor markets and in caregiving. Family leave policies are important for a nation’s economy as they support workers in balancing the dual responsibilities of employment and childcare. These policies create holistic conditions to bolster family wellbeing and boost the health of the workforce.This dissertation comprises three papers. The first two papers study a paid family leave program in the US with a focus on the leave-taking and employment outcomes of mothers. The third paper examines a relatively novel father-specific policy tool and seeks to understand how such a policy can influence the work of young fathers. The first paper analyzes the differential effects of the California Paid Family Leave (CA PFL) on leave-taking and employment outcomes of women employed in high-flexibility vs. low-flexibility occupations. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY9) and Occupational Information Network (O*NET), I employ a triple difference-in-differences approach. Overall, the findings indicate that women working in high-flexibility pre-birth occupations are more likely to take paid leave in the third and fourth month post childbirth. They are also less likely to be employed in the 6 months prior to childbirth. The effects on leave-taking are largely similar across the three dimensions of flexibility (time, location, and task) but the effects on labor force outcomes of women vary by the kind of flexibility women have access to. The second essay examines the extent to which wage replacement from California’s paid family leave helped mitigate the aggregate disparity in the earnings of mothers as compared to non-mothers. Using the NLSY97, I employed propensity score matching and difference-in-differences methods to compare the annual earnings of mothers and non-mothers in California with those of mothers and non-mothers in other US states. I found that being a mother in California (a state where wage replacement is accessible to mothers through CA PFL) does not mitigate the motherhood penalty as compared to being a mother in other states that do not have such a policy. The third paper examines how the introduction of paternity leave policies in European Union (EU) countries affects the employment of fathers with young children. Paternity leave is a targeted period of leave that enables fathers to take time off from work close to the childbirth period. Using an assembled dataset from Eurostats and other sources, I found that the introduction of paternity leave in EU countries did not affect fathers’ employment in a substantial and statistically significant way, potentially due to the short length of this leave and low take-up among men.
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