Demographic consequences of Nordic family policy - evidence from administrative data
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of promoting gender equality through family policy. It has been argued that generous family policy aiming at a gender equal division of childcare and economic responsibility will have a positive impact on childbearing and family stability. The major argument for why gender equality in parental leave use would increase fertility is that a more equal division in the household would ease women’s work burden at home and thus enhance the degree of compatibility between childrearing and female employment, thereby making it easier to realize childbearing plans. Family instability has been linked to increasing proportions of dual-earner couples. These changes have not resulted in equal division of labor at home and create a gap between gender equality in the public and private spheres which is a possible source of family instability. In this presentation I will ask two questions. First, I ask whether more gender equality in the family is related to childbearing in Norway and Sweden. Second, I ask whether a more active father’s role in the family has a negative effect on the risk of union dissolution in the same countries. Our analysis focuses on family policy reform, namely the father’s quota of the parental leave, which is a unique Nordic feature with a specific aim of challenging the gender roles in the family. In order to distinguish causality in effects from selection we use the natural experiment of the introduction of the father’s quotas in Norway and Sweden. Using unique data from population registers we use the reform to estimate the causal effect of more gender equality in the family on the risk of continued childbearing and union dissolution.
Trude Lappegård is a senior researcher at the Research Department in Statistics Norway. She has a PhD in sociology (2006) from University of Oslo. She works within the field of family demography/sociology with a special interest in family change, fertility choices, gender equality and family policy. She is the principal investigator of two major ongoing projects: ‘Family dynamics, fertility choices and family policy’ and ‘Demographic consequences of Nordic family policy’. She has published in a wide range of journal, most recently in European Journal of Population, Demography, Journal of Marriage and the Family and Journal of Family and Economic Issues.