Reserving Time for Daddy: The Long and Short-Term Consequences of Fathers' Quotas

People often think economists only worry about inflation, interest rates, or fiscal policy, but did you ever think that economics researchers would be working on figuring out ways for couples to share child care and housework more equitably? Well, they do! In the latest edition of the HKS WAPPP Seminar, economist Ankita Patnaik, from Mathematica Policy Research, presented her work on the long term and short term effects of paternity leave on families. She is part of a group of up and coming scholars that, according to Professor Hannah Riley-Bowles, are producing research that reminds us that the topic of gender encompasses more than women; equality concerns everyone.

Patnaik began by providing an overview of encouraging trends that have emerged in recent decades. In some contexts, women have been catching up to men in the formal labor market, though pay gaps remain, and have closed gaps in realms like education. In contrast, 'care work', which includes unpaid tasks such as housework or child care in the home, is strongly characterized by sex-specialization and takes up more of women's time. In the typical household according to studies, women are assigned inflexible tasks that need to be performed regularly and at fixed times, like cooking dinner, for example. In contrast, men usually take on tasks that can be performed at any time and are not routine, like fixing various items or mowing the lawn.

These differences can hurt women at work and reduce their bargaining power within the household. They can result in lower priority assigned to women's activities outside the home. For example, researchers observe that women are more likely to quit their job in response to husband's long work hours and more likely to relocate to accommodate a partner's professional path.

Before Patnaik's research, studies had found a relationship between parental leave schemes that included a paternity leave provision and the number of men taking leave to perform childcare duties. They could not pinpoint a causal relationship though and the effect of fathers' leave on housework sharing was not clear. Her contribution provides answers to these questions by looking at a very special policy episode that happened in Canada in 2006.

Dr. Ankita Patnaik, Mathematica Policy Research

The province of Quebec put into place a parental leave scheme called QPIP Reform, which made it easier to qualify, provided more compensation, and included a five-week 'daddy-only' provision for leave in addition the mother's. Families with babies born beginning on January 1st would be eligible. This allowed Patnaik to compare eligible families with those that just missed the date and would be governed by the old scheme, which only provided with maternity and shared leave. The results are very impressive.

The likelihood that fathers would take paternity leave went up by 53 percentage points, and their leaves became three weeks longer. "Norms play a critical role", she explained. Because this policy is aimed specifically for fathers, social norms become more accepting of men leaving work to take care of a child than when the policy was shared leave. After the quota, "dads are more likely to take their leave if their brother or their boss took it", she remarked. She calls her findings "the flypaper effect", because the quotas stick to the dad's when they are directed specifically to them. Labels matter!

What is even more impressive is that she found that these five weeks of leave can have effects that are much more long lasting than could have been expected. After five years, moms in Quebec were spending an hour longer at work on average, making about $5,000 Canadian dollars more, and more likely to be working full-time. Dads were spending more time doing 'carework' and their work hours and earnings were unaffected.

Ankita Patnaik will continue to work on this issue, her findings are key to any policy maker working on closing gender gaps.

Making the Law Work for Working Women

When Sarah Iqbal, currently the Program Manager for Women, Business and the Law at the World Bank, first started working on development issues there in 2008, she says she often found herself explaining why the obstacles women faced when trying to start businesses and get jobs mattered on a global scale. Now, she says, there aren’t enough data to meet the demand for such information.

In this week’s WAPPP Seminar, “Women, Business and the Law: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality,” Iqbal discussed the findings of the Women, Business and Law 2014 Report. The report scrutinizes the laws and regulations across the globe that affect men and women differently so as to limit women’s opportunities and incentives to work.

In a survey of 143 economies, 90% were found to have at least one legal difference restricting women’s economic opportunities. The restrictions came in a variety of forms, from property rights restrictions to long lists of jobs that women were prohibited from doing. 15 of these countries had laws allowing husbands to object to – and therefore restrict – their wives’ employment.

The study looked at seven indicators of gender economic equality to make these determinations: (1) ability to access institutions, (2) property use, (3) whether there were restrictions on type of employment, (4) whether incentives to work are provided, (5) ability to build credit, (6) court accessibility, and (7) the degree to which women are protected from violence.

The report found that there were three main obstacles for women’s advancement in business. The first is women’s lack of autonomy to interact with government institutions or conduct official transactions. Iqbal illustrated this by discussing “head of household” rights and responsibilities, such as paying taxes or sending children to school, which are usually delegated to men.

Second, Iqdal explained that marriage is often the trigger for such loss of rights. While single women have as many rights as single men in almost every country studied, women give up some of their autonomy upon marriage in many countries around the world. Lastly, limited property rights are a major factor contributing to women’s restricted economic opportunities, since property can be used as collateral for loans to start small businesses, for example.

Fortunately, there is hope that progress is being made on this issue. Within five years of the ratification of CEDAW, rates of reform in the countries studied had doubled. The report also found that having women legislators increased the likelihood of reform in that country. Over the two year period examined, Women, Business and the Law recorded 59 legal changes in 44 economies. Of these changes, 48 increased gender parity, 11 were neutral to gender parity. None reduced gender parity.

In addition to collecting this data, Women, Business and the Law are working with countries to make their laws less restrictive for women's economic opportunities. Iqbal closed by arguing that “what gets measured gets done,” and that despite the clear challenges ahead, a good first step is measuring the problem in order to tackle it.

Photo source: The World Bank

Does workplace equality come home?

Over the last few generations, many societies have made major strides towards gender equity, particularly in the public sphere. Some of this may come from the demands of economics of the industrial and post-industrial revolutions, others from changes in attitudes, but all over the world, women are coming back into the workplace.

So what effect is this having in households? What is the relationship between women’s income generation outside the house, and intra-household bargaining, i.e. housework shared between spouses?


Last week Kathleen McGinn and Maya Ruiz Castro of Harvard Business School presented some of their preliminary research on these very questions. They suspect that:

1. Women’s income and their involvement in societal leadership roles are shaped by both gender attitudes and intra-household bargaining outcomes, including the allocation of household work and childcare.
2. More equal distribution of household work and childcare between spouses and less traditional gender attitudes are associated with higher earnings, greater supervisory responsibility, less work-life conflict and greater life satisfaction for both men and women.

They’re currently analyzing data from the global 2002 International Social Survey Program to see whether things like 'who does the laundry?' or whether there’s additional help from grandparents might affect equality within marriage and income. Meanwhile, how can public policy on parental leave and workplace equality affect changes in gender attitudes that are carried into the household?

Just last week, The New York Times published an article adding another dimension to the conversation: do women’s empowerment and intra-household bargaining, then, affect marriage dynamics, and in particular sexual behavior?

While having a “peer marriage” in which both partners do housework and childcare has become a bigger factor in women’s marital satisfaction, the article finds that, very often, “the less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.”

With all of these changes---in women’s workforce participation, intra-household bargaining power, sexuality, and power---will societies adjust their expectations accordingly?



Photo: Bertha Stallworth, age 21, inspects 40mm artillery cartridges at Frankford Arsenal during WWII. Source: National Archives, 208-NP-1WW-1