Caring parents in a gendered labour market. How do leave to care for sick children and its wage effect vary with socioeconomic position and family status?
Sweden has a long tradition of political engagement for gender equality but marked gender inequalities in work and care still exist. This has implications for many aspects of men’s and women’s lives, not least in the labour market. This project focuses on a particularly understudied aspect of gendered work division: Leave to care for sick children (CSC). CSC is an important part of the lives of parents and analytically interesting also because it reflects gender equality in parents’ division of work and care more generally. CSC is likely to affect workplace organisation and therefore the employee’s wage. It is reasonable to believe that these implications vary with socioeconomic position and working conditions but few studies has yet analysed if and how such variation occurs. Using rich register and survey data and statistical methods for longitudinal analysis, this project gives insights into the need and opportunity to use Sweden’s generous CSC policy, and wage effects of this policy use, in several groups of parents. Mothers and fathers, parents in different socioeconomic positions and parents in intact couples, separated/divorced and re-partnered parents are compared. Analyses of CSC provide a unique opportunity to disentangle some of the major theoretical explanations of the gendered division of care. Are parents dividing care between them according to what is economically rational given gendered labour market opportunities or are they doing gender through work and care?
Final report
The purpose of this project was to study fathers’ and mothers’ use of leave to care for sick children, CSC, a part of the temporary parental leave scheme in Sweden. Fathers take a relatively large proportion of the CSC-days, but they still take fewer days than mothers do. The use of CSC is interesting because it is an important part of the lives of parents with young children that likely affects the parents’ workplace and employers, and thus has consequences for parents’ working lives. CSC is also analytically interesting because it is an aspect of how parents allocate work and care that, unlike parental leave taken over a longer period to care for infants, is not affected by physiological aspects of early parenthood such as, for example, breastfeeding, and norms and ideals surrounding such aspects. In studies of CSC, it is therefore possible to discriminate between the importance of the parents’ characteristics and conditions such as gender, working conditions and income, and such physiological aspects and related norms and ideals, which may otherwise be the real reason why fathers and mothers do different things and divide tasks between them in certain ways.
Development and implementation
The final scope of the project was smaller than planned because early on during the project, Boye started working as coordinator for the Swedish Level-of-living Survey 2020-22, a nationally representative survey that became more extensive and longer than planned due to, among other things, the Corona pandemic. Boye has therefore worked on the project part-time and for shorter periods during the total project time.
Results
The project has resulted in one scientific article where survey data is used to study the relationship between CSC-use and fathers’ and mothers’ working conditions. An additional, unfinished study analyses CSC-use in different socio-economic groups using register data.
In the completed study on the connection between CSC and working conditions, data from the Swedish Level-of-living Survey (LNU) is analysed. Previous studies have shown that CSC is, among other things, related to parents’ financial resources and that greater own financial resources and, if the parents live together, relative resources compared to the other parent are related to use of fewer CSC-days. An underlying, or actual, reason for such connections could be that conditions in the labour market differ between groups with different financial resources. Similar differences exist between fathers and mothers; they tend to occupy different positions in the labour market and thus to have different incomes and wages as well as different working conditions.
Many parents who are entitled to CSC do not use the leave, so both the probability of using some CSC and the number of CSC-days used among CSC-using parents are analysed (with a so-called two-part model). The project’s results indicate that working conditions are important for CSC-use, but it does not explain the relationship between parents’ income and CSC. The patterns also look different when it comes to the probability of using CSC and the number of days that CSC-using parents use. The probability of using CSC is lower among parents with time-consuming work (unpaid overtime, business travel and supervisor duties) and among those who have a relatively unstable position in the labour market because they have temporary employment. A higher income is associated with a lower probability of using CSC among fathers. Among mothers, the probability of using CSC instead is particularly low among those with low incomes. The probability of using CSC is significantly lower among fathers than among mothers and this is to some extent associated with the fact that fathers have more time-consuming work and higher incomes than mothers have. However, a significant difference in probability remains even when these gender differences in the labour market are considered.
The number of CSC days that CSC-using parents use is lower among parents who are relatively strong in relation to their employer because they have valuable skills. Furthermore, mothers with flexible working time use fewer days than mothers without flexible working time. They probably use the flexibility to be able to be at home with a sick child without using the insurance. More fathers than mothers have flexible working time, but fathers do not seem to use the flexibility in the same way. Both fathers and mothers take out fewer CSC-days the higher their income. The gender difference in the number of CSC-days used among CSC-using parents is relatively small. However, it is largely related to the fact that fathers have a stronger position vis-à-vis their employers and higher incomes than mothers.
Important conclusions from the project are that working conditions do not explain the relationship between income and the probability of using CSC, but together with income, they can to a great extent account for CSC-using fathers’ propensity to forgo paid work to care for children for fewer days in a year compared to mothers. Importantly, gender differences in neither working conditions nor income (fully) explain why fathers are much less likely than mothers are to use CSC at all.
Development and implementation
The final scope of the project was smaller than planned because early on during the project, Boye started working as coordinator for the Swedish Level-of-living Survey 2020-22, a nationally representative survey that became more extensive and longer than planned due to, among other things, the Corona pandemic. Boye has therefore worked on the project part-time and for shorter periods during the total project time.
Results
The project has resulted in one scientific article where survey data is used to study the relationship between CSC-use and fathers’ and mothers’ working conditions. An additional, unfinished study analyses CSC-use in different socio-economic groups using register data.
In the completed study on the connection between CSC and working conditions, data from the Swedish Level-of-living Survey (LNU) is analysed. Previous studies have shown that CSC is, among other things, related to parents’ financial resources and that greater own financial resources and, if the parents live together, relative resources compared to the other parent are related to use of fewer CSC-days. An underlying, or actual, reason for such connections could be that conditions in the labour market differ between groups with different financial resources. Similar differences exist between fathers and mothers; they tend to occupy different positions in the labour market and thus to have different incomes and wages as well as different working conditions.
Many parents who are entitled to CSC do not use the leave, so both the probability of using some CSC and the number of CSC-days used among CSC-using parents are analysed (with a so-called two-part model). The project’s results indicate that working conditions are important for CSC-use, but it does not explain the relationship between parents’ income and CSC. The patterns also look different when it comes to the probability of using CSC and the number of days that CSC-using parents use. The probability of using CSC is lower among parents with time-consuming work (unpaid overtime, business travel and supervisor duties) and among those who have a relatively unstable position in the labour market because they have temporary employment. A higher income is associated with a lower probability of using CSC among fathers. Among mothers, the probability of using CSC instead is particularly low among those with low incomes. The probability of using CSC is significantly lower among fathers than among mothers and this is to some extent associated with the fact that fathers have more time-consuming work and higher incomes than mothers have. However, a significant difference in probability remains even when these gender differences in the labour market are considered.
The number of CSC days that CSC-using parents use is lower among parents who are relatively strong in relation to their employer because they have valuable skills. Furthermore, mothers with flexible working time use fewer days than mothers without flexible working time. They probably use the flexibility to be able to be at home with a sick child without using the insurance. More fathers than mothers have flexible working time, but fathers do not seem to use the flexibility in the same way. Both fathers and mothers take out fewer CSC-days the higher their income. The gender difference in the number of CSC-days used among CSC-using parents is relatively small. However, it is largely related to the fact that fathers have a stronger position vis-à-vis their employers and higher incomes than mothers.
Important conclusions from the project are that working conditions do not explain the relationship between income and the probability of using CSC, but together with income, they can to a great extent account for CSC-using fathers’ propensity to forgo paid work to care for children for fewer days in a year compared to mothers. Importantly, gender differences in neither working conditions nor income (fully) explain why fathers are much less likely than mothers are to use CSC at all.