Is there a Second Shift for Women in Europe?

Helen Eriksson , Stockholm University

The aim of the study is to provide the first European evidence of the gendered penalties employers allot on individuals taking parental leave. As the expectations on parents are clearly gendered in the European context – women are expected to prioritize family over work while men are not – we hypothesize that employers penalize male leave-taking to a greater extent than female leave-taking, even when the leaves are of the same duration. The underlying mechanism we are testing is the penalty a worker derives from deviating from gender expectations. We test our hypothesis by a survey experiment in which we manipulate the length of leave and the gender of the worker being evaluated. To provide a European perspective, we conduct our experiment in both Sweden and Poland. Although the countries are very different in terms of gendered expectations of leave – in which Swedish fathers take around 30 percent of the leave compared to 3 percent in Poland – we expect to find the same underlying mechanism of penalties incurred from deviating from the gender expectation of the particular context. The study will provide new evidence of why the second phase of the gender revolution – men’s increases in family work – is progressing so slowly.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course