Changing minds: Can information about parental leave contribute to changes in beliefs about the gendered division of parental leave?

By: Marie-Fleur Philipp, Silke Büchau, Pia S. Schober & C. Katharina Spiess

Mothers still spend more time on childcare and less time on employment than fathers. The transition to parenthood contributes to the reproduction of gender inequalities in the labor market, as mothers tend to take longer periods of parental leave than fathers and are more likely to work part-time after their return. This has significant long-term consequences for women in terms of lower lifetime earnings and pensions. Men frequently perceive greater risks of career penalties than mothers if they use family policy measures such as parental leave. To reduce these gender inequalities and offer more genuine choice between varying work-care arrangements, many high-income countries have implemented statutory family policy measures like parental leave and public childcare policies. These family policies offer financial incentives but further convey normative assumptions of what is socially desirable regarding the division of paid work and family care.

To deepen our understanding of the normative influences of family policies, our recent study in Gender & Society investigates whether providing information about consequences of using  parental leave policies, for instance in the form of media reports, might contribute to changes in gender norms. If so, such altered norms and beliefs among current and future parents might promote gradual shifts in the practiced gender division of labor in families.

Our research focuses on Germany. Like in many other countries, the German welfare state’s support for family models in which both partners  divide paid and care work has been expanded through several parental leave and public day care reforms in the last decades. A recent parental leave policy reform created a shorter but better-paid earnings-related parental leave benefit to encourage mothers to return more quickly to the labor market and encourage greater paternal involvement in childcare. The parental leave benefit offers a 65 percent income replacement of the net income earned the year before leave childbirth (minimum 300 Euros and maximum capped at 1,800 Euros per month). Parental leave benefit is paid for 12 months for one parent or 14 months if both parents take at least two months of leave. In practice, mothers often take 12 months of leave. If fathers take leave, they often tend to take the two non-transferable months of parental leave.

We created an experimental study. We asked individuals to decide on the division of parental leave for a hypothetical couple expecting their first child based on different combinations of absolute and relative income. Almost one year later, we provided three different short randomly allocated policy information primers before asking the respondents to judge the parental leave division a second time. The provided information was intended to address frequent concerns about parental leave usage in the German population One piece of information informs the respondent that (1) mothers frequently experience negative long-term financial consequences of long parental leave in terms of lower lifetime earnings and increased risk of old-age poverty, the second that (2) consequences of parental leave take-up for fathers’ wages are generally neutral and penalties appear to be roughly the same or lower for fathers than for mothers, and the third that (3) fathers in Germany are increasingly taking up parental leave. Individuals were shown either one piece of information or none of them before making their judgments. We expected these information primers to draw attention to growing parental leave usage by fathers and to adverse economic consequences of parental leave take-up, especially for mothers, thereby normatively legitimizing a less traditional division of parental leave.

In Germany many policy entitlements are income-based and the parental leave benefit only replaces part of the former income, so partners’ income constellations before childbirth matter for how the information priming affects parental leave take-up decisions. We found that in couples where the woman earned relatively less than her partner, the information on maternal income risks increased peoples’ acceptance of a longer leave of the father. This is likely due to increased attention and greater consideration of the financial consequences of the division of parental leave for mothers’ long-term financial situation. If the woman outearned her partner, receiving the information on the absence of significant wage penalties of leave take-up for fathers reduced widespread fears of career penalties for fathers while at the same time highlighting the more negative consequences for mothers’ wages and therefore led to less traditional judgements regarding the division of parental leave. The effect of our priming conditions about the absence of wage penalties for men was driven by stronger effects on childless respondents, whereas parents’ normative judgements were more resistant to change. There was no statistically significant change in normative judgements on parental leave based on our third prompt about the increasing rates of paternal leave usage.

Our findings suggest that income considerations and situational characteristics are particularly important for judgements on parental leave usage because German family policies do not coherently promote either a two-earner or traditional division family labor, but offer a relatively wide range of both traditional and more gender egalitarian divisions. Perhaps providing people with information relating to different policy options and the consequences of their usage may have a greater potential for changing social norms in economic and policy contexts that offer various choices between different ways of combining work and family.

The effects of prompts were strong among younger, childless cohorts and this suggests that they  are more open to normative change based on economic arguments, perhaps because they have not yet personally experienced traditional norms related to parenthood. Since younger, childless respondents might someday become parents, they might benefit from receiving parenthood-related information before personally facing the question of how to divide their parental leave and organize breadwinning and family care in their own families. It is possible that prompts that alter normative beliefs will contribute to more egalitarian personal preferences and practices in future families.

Our findings have practical implications for policymakers. The effect of prompting information depends on trust in the information-providing institutions, such as governments and the media, and on the high quality and credibility of the research evidence on which that the information is based. Evidence-based policy-related information, if repeatedly diffused even among groups that are not (yet) the target of family policies, might have the potential to shape gender and care norms among the wider public over time.

Marie-Fleur Philipp is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Tübingen. She is interested in gender relations and inequalities within the family, particularly in the interplay between work-family policies and social norms as well as in the role of family structure in gender socialisation.

Silke Büchau is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses primarily on gender inequalities in employment and family work as well as family policies in relation to preferences and norms towards the gender division of labor.

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Pia S. Schober is professor of sociology at the University of Tübingen. Recently, she has been the principal investigator of two research projects on “Family policy information, gender ideologies and normative judgements of the gender division of labour” and “Parental gender socialization across diverse families” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is also a principal investigator of two DFG-funded research training groups: “Doing Transitions” and “Women’s mental health across the reproductive years”. Her main research interests are gender and social inequalities in employment and family work, childcare and child outcomes, and family and early childhood education policy.

C. Katharina Spiess is Director of the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) and professor for population economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her research focuses on issues in education and family topics and other issues related to population studies. She is a member of various research networks and expert groups and commissions, including the Scientific Advisory Board for Family Issues at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs or the European Research Council. Her work has been published in multiple academic journals including Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Population Economics and Journal of Health Economics. She has also edited several books and special issues.