Understanding Migrant Integration under the Lens of Family Policy Use: Parental Leave Use among Migrants in a Couple Perspective

Ann-Zofie Duvander , Stockholm University
Eleonora Mussino, Stockholm University
Konstantin Kazenin, Stockholm University
Hernan Mondani, Stockholm University

The Swedish parental leave policy aims at facilitating the combination of work and caring for children by allowing for a temporary exit from the labor market with relatively high income compensation. Even though it is considered one of the most generous and flexible parental leave schemes in the world, the ability to use it efficiently depends on the parent’s position in the labor market. Low maternal employment, early and high fertility as well as more gender-based division of paid and unpaid labor among couples from some migrant populations raise questions related to unequal parental leave uptake and how such uptake might have different consequences among groups with a migrant origin as compared to the non-migrant majority population. Understanding the division of parental leave among couples with different origin background is therefore central to understanding immigrant integration and implementing policies to promote integration. Our aim is to disentangle systematic variations in the use of parental leave that is related to very different labor market exits at childbirth for various groups of parents by migrant background. As the parental leave use of the mother and father are interdependent, we aim to model their use together with a couple perspective. We use the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) data, a rarely used and unique administrative register data compilation including parental leave spells over period and specific to parent and child.

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 Presented in Session 82. Migrant Populations, Family Life and Gender