Women's Employment Transitions Around Childbearing

(1998) - Shirley Dex, Heather Joshi, Susan Macran, Andrew McCulloch

Journal: Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics
Link:: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0084.00087
DOI:: 10.1111/1468-0084.00087
Links::
Tags:: #paper #NCDS #Gender #school-to-work #Transition #Family
Cite Key:: [@Dex1998]

Abstract

Women’s increasing participation in the labour force since the 1950’s means knowledge about their labour supply needs to keep pace with a changing world. A key change has been among mothers of small children. They showed increasing attachment to paid work in successive generations, as the break in their employment grew progressively shorter (Dex, 1984; Macran et al., 1996). Legislation was enacted in the United Kingdom to outlaw unequal pay (1970, 1975) and discrimination in employment on grounds of sex (1976). Statutory maternity leave was introduced in 1976 and extended in 1986. The proportion of mothers taking maternity leave has risen (McRae, 1991), as has full-time employment amongst mothers (Sly, 1996). In this paper, we examine the transitions into and out of paid work which women make after childbirth. These help answer the questions whether recent generations of mothers have benefited from the policy changes, whether all have benefited equally, and whether any effects persist beyond the period around the first childbirth.

Notes

“Women’s increasing participation in the labour force since the 1950’s means knowledge about their labour supply needs to keep pace with a changing world” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 79)

“Legislation was enacted in the United Kingdom to outlaw unequal pay (1970, 1975) and discrimination in employment on grounds of sex (1976).” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 79)

“as has full-time employment amongst mothers” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 79)

“Longitudinal employment histories have provided dynamic evidence on mothers’ transitions and continuity in employment (Joshi and Hinde, 1993; Macran et al., 1996)” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 80)

“The unique longitudinal evidence on employment in NCDS provides a useful test of the robustness of the cross-sectional story we have been able to tell about these women (Joshi et al., 1996) as well as allowing us to take unobserved woman-specific heterogeneity into account.” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 80)

“The experiences of mothers in the 1958 generation suggests that women have started to benefit from the equal opportunities provisions enacted in Britain in the 1970’s” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 95)

“age of the youngest child is still the most important determinant of women’s participation over the pre-school years, although its impact may well have weakened relative to the influence of the mother’s level of qualifications and own wage. There was not much sign of negative income effects on labour supply in our results, but our data were not able to measure these very accurately.” (Dex et al., 1998, p. 95)