Family Policies and Women’s Employment: A Regression Analysis

Abstract

There is good reason to suspect that “family-friendly” or “women-friendly” policies such the government provision or subsidization of child care, paid maternity leave, and extensive public employment will increase levels of female employment. There is supportive evidence from studies of individual behavior (Gustafsson and Stafford, 1992; Leibowitz, Klerman, and Waite, 1992; Barrow, 1996; Ondrich, Spiess, and Yang, 1996; Ilmakunnas, 1997; Joesch, 1997; Fagnani, 1998; Kimmel, 1998; Powell, 1998; Anderson and Levine, 1999; Ondrich et al., 1999; Michalopoulos and Robins, 2000; Smith, Downs, and O’Connell, 2001; Chevalier and Viitanen, 2002; Del Boca, 2002; Pylkkänen and Smith, 2003; Rønsen and Sundstrom, 2002; Gottschall and Bird, 2003; Hofferth and Curtin, 2003). But at the macro (country) level, the association has been largely assumed rather than demonstrated