By Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics University of British Columbia September 2006

1. The Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on Women's Fertility Choices and Labour Market Outcomes Across OECD Countries By Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics University of British Columbia September 2006 CIAR - Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being

2. Stylized Facts of Interest • After two decades on spectacular gains, in many OECD countries, • progress in the gender earnings gap has more or less stalled in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden since the mid 1990s • there are also been a stabilization in female labour force participation in Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom.

3. Figure 1. Female/Male Median Earnings Ratio in Canada Source: Fortin and Schirle (2006) – SCF data 0.8 Hourly Wage 0.75 Age 25-54 0.7 Age 16-64 Annual Earnings Age 25-54 0.65 Age 16-64 0.6 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 In Fortin and Schirle (2006), we find a gender earnings ratio in Canada around 78% since 1992More recent data from the LFS 2004 shows that the ratio was still at 80%

4. Figure 2. Male and Female Labour Force Participation by Age Group in Canada Source: Fortin and Schirle (2006) – SCF data 0.95 male age 25-54 0.85 male age 16-64 0.75 female age 25-54 0.65 female age 16-64 0.55 0.45 0.35 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 In Fortin and Schirle (2006), we find that female labour force participation has stabilized since the early 1990s

5. ■Bernstein (EPI, 2005) presents a similar view of the US gender pay ratio.

6. Motivation • The fact that this stabilization has occurred in many different countries under different economic conditions makes one suspicious that more than the usual economic factors may be at play. • Indeed, Blau and Kahn (2004) who study the slowing gender wage convergence in the United States attribute the slowdown to factors that contributed to changes in the unexplained gender gap • The popular press (Belkin, 2003; Wallis, 2004; Story, 2005) has suggested the notion that women are increasingly “opting out” of employment when they have children.

7. Motivation • Sociologists (Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman, 2006) wonder whether we are witnessing “The End of the Gender Revolution” • There is, of course, the possibility that we have simply exhausted the labour market effects of the “Pill” revolution • Goldin (2004), Goldin and Katz (2002) and Bailey (2006) have provided compelling evidence that changes in labour market outcomes of cohorts born from late 1940s on are due to innovation in contraception

8. Source: Bailey (2006) for the United States Changes in Labour Force Participation by Birth-Cohort

9. Changes in Labour Force Participation by Birth-Cohort Source: Schirle (2006)

10. Hypotheses • If indeed it actually exists, the “opting-out” phenomena would be affecting the 1975-1980 birth cohorts • Interestingly, this phenomena could also be characterized in terms of an identity conflict. • The “Pill” revolution may have allowed women to embrace men’s identity as breadwinners • But women may be uneasy about renouncing their traditional identity as mothers and homemakers • This identity conflict is sometimes referred to as the “working mother’s guilt”

11. Hypotheses • This is a situation where the women’s own well-being is challenged • An alternative explanation offered by the proponents of the “opting out” hypothesis is that mothers are choosing to stay at home in greater numbers due to the stresses of living in two-earner families or making it in the labor market. • In this situation, the women’s choices can be made for the family’s well-being • Booth and van Ours (2005) investigates the impact of working part-time on women’s life satisfaction and of their partners

12. Objective of the paper • As a first step towards testing the hypothesized role of conflicting identities and of a return to traditional gender roles as factors contributing to the slowdown of the economic progress of women, • this paper evaluates the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women’s labour market outcomes and fertility choices across OECD countries, comparing individual outcomes with country-specific ones.

13. Objective of the paper • More specifically, the empirical analysis focuses • on the impact of attitudes towards gender roles, • attitudes towards competition, and • different aspects of work, • on, at the individual level, • women’s employment decisions and • part-status among working women. • on, at the country level, • women’s employment rates • total fertility rates • gender pay gap.

14. Objective of the paper:Theoretical Perspectives • The analysis considers the effects of • whether both men and women agree with the traditional gender roles, following Becker’s (1985) model of the household division of labor • the identity conflict faced by working mothers, following Akerlof and Kranton (2000) model of identity • attitudes towards competition, following Becker’s (1971) model of employer discrimination • gender differences in work values and involvement in altruistic volunteering, extending Beckers’ model of limited to include altruistic amenities (Fortin, 2005). • social norms (average attitudes by country), following Akerlof’s (1980) model

15. Preview of the findings • Perceptions of men as the main breadwinners are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap. • However, these views are softening among recent cohorts. • Perceptions of women’s role as homemakers are more persistent over time. They could be implicated in the recent slowdown of the gender convergence in pay. • Finally, the unavoidable clash between family values and equalitarian views, that takes the form of an identity conflict for many women─ the so-called mother’s guilt─, is another obstacle in the path towards greater gender equality in the labour market.

16. Data • The paper uses three waves of the World Value Surveys (WVS): the 1990-93 and 1995-97 waves (ICPSR 2970), and 1999-2001 wave (ICPSR 3975), which also includes answers to the European Value Survey (EVS). • The coverage of societies/countries in the Values Studies has grown from 43 in the 1990 wave to 62 in the 1995 wave and 82 in the 2000 wave. • Because of the difficulty of finding comparable measures of the gender pay gap across countries, I limit my analysis to 24-26 OECD societies/countries.

17. WORLD VALUE SURVEYS:Questions on Gender Role Attitudes

18. WORLD VALUE SURVEYS:Questions on Work Values

19. WORLD VALUE SURVEYS:Questions on Volunteering

20. Countries selected • They include the following countries, classified according to the gender-sensitive typology of countries proposed by Siaroff (1994): • Protestant social democratic states: Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. • Protestant liberal states: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, with minimal family welfare but a relatively egalitarian labour market • Advanced Christian democratic states: Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands • Late female mobilization states: Greece, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey, although Japan and Turkey are actually singletons. • Transition from communist regimes: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia.

21. Gender pay ratio and total fertility rates • Data on the gender pay gap and total fertility rates for these countries for periods corresponding roughly to the ones of the WVS were available from secondary sources, the OECD and Eurostat among others. • In view of important problems in finding figures for the raw gender pay ratio that are comparable across countries, I paid close attention to the methodologies used and supplemented data from reporting agencies with those from individual researchers. • As in other studies, there are substantial limits to comparability across countries.

24. Descriptive StatisticsTable 1. Average Gender Role Attitudes and Work Values Across Birth Cohorts

25. Empirical Strategy: The issue of causality • A difficult question is the issue of causality. • Despite efforts to address this issue, many of the results below should be more precisely referred to as partial correlations, rather than causal factors. • Were the women’s attitudes formed before their employment decisions, in their youth for example, or are these attitudes subsequent rationalizations to their previous labour market choices? • Do individual preferences dictate labour market choices or are individual choices are conditioned by country-specific social norms?

26. Empirical Strategy: The issue of causality • Remedies: Ex-post rationalization • Secondary evidence from panel survey data (Thornton, Alwin and Camburn, 1983; Kiecolt and Acok, 1988; Burt and Scott, 2002) claims that traditional gender role attitudes are linked to religious beliefs and developed in youth. • I also consider a sample of immigrant women; the effects of attitudes formed early in life in a sample of immigrant women will likely be different from those estimated from a sample of natives.

27. Empirical Strategy: The issue of causality • Remedies: Impact of social norms • Male country-specific average attitudes are used to capture societal influences. • Country-fixed effects capture country-specific other country-specific variables arising from institutional differences. • Robust standard errors clustered by country are used to adjust for differences in the variance of individual heterogeneity by country. • The regressions are also estimated on a sample of men to assess, as in Fernandez and Fogli (2005), whether the attitudes are not capturing some other economic factors, such as persistent unemployment.

28. Empirical Strategy: Individual-level Regressions

29. Empirical Strategy: The issue of causality • At the country-level, reverse causality is the problematic issue. • Are women’s employment rates lower in some countries because “the man as main breadwinner” is the norm and “scare jobs are given to men first,” • or have women’s low employment rates in some countries resulted in men being the sole provider for most families and thus getting priority for jobs?

30. Empirical Strategy: The issue of causality • Remedies: reverse causality • use lagged attitudes • include a measure of child care support used by Jaunotte (2003) (country fixed-effects saturates the model.) • use country-specific average male attitudes, which are less likely suffer from endogeneity problems.

31. Empirical Strategy: Country-level Regressions

32. Table 2. Determinants of Employment Status:Marginal Effects from a Probit Model

33. Empirical Results: individual employment status • The absence of mother’s guilt is the dominant explanatory gender role attitude • The magnitude of the positive effect on employment status is comparable to upper secondary education, or half of tertiary education • Men as breadwinner and women as homemakers have significant negative effects • Leadership skills (from volunteering question) have also strong positive effects, especially for immigrant women

34. Table 3. Determinants of Incidence of Part-Time Work among Employees:Marginal Effects from a Probit Model

35. Empirical Results: Part-time work status • The value or attitude with greatest statistical significance is “importance of good hours in a job” (positive effect) • Followed by • “religious volunteering” (positive effect) • “competition OK” (negative effect) • “housewife fulfilling” (positive effect) • “importance of good pay” (negative effect)

37. Table 4a. Determinants of Women’s Employment Rates Across Countriesl

38. Empirical Results: Women’s employment rates across Countries • Traditional gender role attitudes are negatively correlated with women’s employment rates. • “Scarce jobs should to the men first” is the only robustly significant explanatory gender role attitude (negative) • It is stronger using lagged values • Men’s attitudes still very significant • Finding is similar to the finding of Azmat, Güell and Manning (2004) regarding gender differences in unemployment rates. • Men’s “competition is OK” has a strong positive and significant effect, but only contemporaneously

39. Empirical Results: Women’s employment rates across countries • The effect of log expenditures on child care is cut by half when attitudes are included, • This supports Algan and Cahuc (2004)’s claim that the effect of policy variables may be over-estimated when values given rise to them are not controlled for

40. Empirical Results: Fertility rates across countries • Starting in the 1960s the massive entry of women in the labour market was coupled with a fall in fertility rates, which seems to have bottomed out in some high FLP countries. • The cross-sectional relationship between total fertility rates and women’s employment rates was negative in the 1970s and up to the early 1980s, but became positive in the late 1980s (Ahn and Mira, 2002). • The emergence of high and persistent unemployment rates has been suggested as an explanation for the reversal in the relationship (Adsera, 2005). • In the presence of high unemployment and unstable contracts, women postpone childbearing to increase lifetime income through early skill acquisition and minimize unemployment risk.

41. Total Fertility Rates across Countries

42. Table 4b. Determinants of Total Fertility Rates Across Countries

43. Empirical Results: Fertility rates across countries • When gender role attitudes are included as explanatory variables, fertility rates are shown to depend on employment rates rather than the opposite • “being a housewife fulfilling” has a significant positive impact on fertility • This effect is similar when • Women’s attitudes are included (identity story) • Men’s attitudes are included (social norms story) • Combined with the positive effect of women’s employment rates on fertility indicates that “balancing work and family” is a central concern in fertility decisions.

45. Table 5. Determinants of the Gender Pay Gap across Countries

47. Conclusion • The identity conflict faced by working mothers has implications for both their labour market decisions and their fertility decisions • The role of firms and the state in facilitating the work-life balance of the family may be helpful (flexible work hours, affordable day-care, etc) • Traditional gender roles attitudes (social norms) continue to play a role in women’s labour market outcomes.

48. Future research • Incorporate measures of life-satisfaction to assess the importance of the identity conflict of working mothers • Perform the analysis with completed fertility to address to issue of cohort effects and the “opting-out” hypothesis