Fathers and Work Family Balance: Mix Methods for Understanding Fatherhood Involvement and Enrichment Experiences with Marc Grau-Grau

Fatherhood is in transition: the traditional “distant breadwinner” model of fatherhood has eroded to a more nurturing role for fathers. Fathers are doing more care work, and work-family balance is increasingly a priority for men. At the same time, work-life conflict is increasing, leading to high levels of stress, absenteeism, and burnout, along with a lower fertility rate. In Europe, 21% of workers report that they “always” or “almost always” feel too tired when they get home from work to spend time with their families. However, few studies focus on understanding men and work-family balance.

Much of the research on work-family conflict has focused on mothers. We know that involved fathers are good for kids and for gender equality, but less about how these dual roles affect fathers and their work and family lives. This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Marc Grau-Grau, WAPPP Fellow 2016-2017. Marc presented three studies from his thesis on Catalonian fathers to better understand how patterns of paternal involvement may give some clues on how to promote gender equality in parenting.

Study 1: Understanding the predictors of fatherhood involvement 

Fatherhood involvement is positive for children and gender equality, but also for fathers and their jobs. The aim of the first study was to explore the care work contributions of Catalan working fathers with children under 10 to understand how patterns of fatherhood involvement differ based on metrics like education level, income, age, number of paid working hours, occupation, and partner’s occupation. The motivating research question is: Why are some working fathers more involved than others?

Marc hypothesized that well-educated fathers are more likely to devote more time to their children, especially in “developmental care." As the number of paid working hours increase, fatherhood involvement is expected to decrease. Finally, men in managerial occupations are more likely to devote less time to their children.

A sample of 471 fathers and their partners were asked to complete time-use diaries recording what primary and secondary activities they were engaged in throughout the day in ten-minute intervals. Childcare was operationalized into basic care (feeding, dressing, bathing), developmental care (teaching, helping, playing, reading), and secondary childcare. On average, fathers did 59 minutes of basic care, compared to 126 for mothers. Fathers also completed 33 minutes of developmental care, compared to 37 minutes for mothers.

As predicted, fathers with higher levels of education spend more time with their children. There is no clear trend between fathers’ income and childcare. Fathers in elementary occupations and in high-management occupations spend the highest proportion of quality time with their children. Younger fathers spend most time with children, but this effect could be because their children are younger or because these fathers might be unemployed. As expected, more hours spent at paid work means less time spent on care work. Finally, having an adult dependent is associated with a significant decrease in fatherhood involvement – by 29 minutes – all else being equal.

Study 2: Understanding the positive side (work-family enrichment)

Most research on work and family is based on a conflict perspective, under the assumption that time, energy, and attention are finite and that work-family conflict is a zero-sum game. However, an expansion approach may be more appropriate: high performance skills in one role may spill over into one’s other roles. This expansion of skills into other roles is known as work-family enrichment. Do the rewards and benefits perceived by working fathers in one role spill into the other role

In this study, Marc interviewed father and their partners. Seven of 20 fathers chose to do their interviews in the workplace, including 5 of 6 managers. The fathers described skills that they perceived that they learn at work that help them at home, including organization and time management, technical skills, people management, new perspectives, and cultural capital. In the opposite direction, fathers described skills that they perceived that they learn at home that help them at work, including sensitivity, patience, responsibility, people management, support, values, and long-term project management.

Fathers in high-level occupations described their work-family enrichment in terms of people management and cultural capital; fathers in lower-level occupations reported enrichment in organization and technical skills. This study reveals that enrichment is not the opposite of conflict and that soft skills are mainly developed at home.

Study 3: Understanding potential barriers to fatherhood involvement

What happens with these involved fathers? Having a child has an impact on fathers’ professional careers, but not the same effect as for women: previous research has established a motherhood penalty as compared to a fatherhood premium for having children. That said, fathers can receive backlash in terms of being a “poor worker” (that is, not committed 24/7 to their jobs) or a femininity stigma.

This study employed qualitative interviews on a different sample of fathers to examine barriers to fatherhood involvement. Marc identified five key barriers in particular:

• Barrier 1: Poor organizational support. Though organizational policies for fathers exist, there is little institutional support for them, and fathers are rarely explicitly informed of potential options like flextime.
• Barrier 2: Anticipation of negative career consequences due to transgressing the “ideal worker” norm.
• Barrier 3: Personal obstacles to fatherhood involvement based on gender norms and self-image; many fathers reported barriers to fatherhood involvement linked to their masculine identity.
• Barrier 4: Many fathers perceive that being a working father is not a legitimate reason to ask for more flexibility; they may ask for accommodations when completing an MBA or starting a new business, but not for spending time with their children.
• Barrier 5: Money – Fathers perceive that using flex options is associated with wage reductions in a sort of “fatherhood penalty.”

Future potential work

There are a great number of possible research projects within fatherhood involvement. There is certainly more to do on the “sociology of thriving” and how fatherhood involvement can benefit organizations. On the flipside, more evidence on stigmas, barriers, and costs of fatherhood involvement could illuminate obstacles to gender equality in parenting. We look forward to hearing more!

Can Financial Incentives Reduce the Baby Gap? Evidence from a Reform in Maternity Leave Benefits with Anna Raute

As women’s educational attainment and labor market participation have increased, so too have concerns about decreasing birth rates and below-replacement fertility levels. All OECD countries other than the US provide paid parental leave in order to reduce the cost of childbearing. However, the structure of parental benefits may affect different groups in different ways. This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Anna Raute, WAPPP Fellow and Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Mannheim, as she presented her research on the effects of the 2007 German parental leave reform.

Highly educated and high-earning women tend to have fewer children than lower-educated and lower-earning women, leading to what researchers have called a “baby gap” between these two groups. For highly-paid women, having children is associated with a greater opportunity cost than for women who are less well paid. In Germany, this manifests in a stark difference in number of children born to highly-educated versus lesser-educated women, as well as a large gap in the percentage of childless women. Close to one-third of highly educated women in Germany never have a child, compared to 18% of lower-educated women (here meaning women who have completed a high school degree but no vocational training or tertiary education). However, in other countries with family policies, such as Sweden, this gap in childlessness or number of children is not quite so stark. The structure of family policies may affect these figures.

Prior to the 2007 reform, parents received a fixed sum of 7,200 euros per child. However, after the reform, parental benefits were linked to the mother’s pre-birth earnings. Rather than the flat payment, mothers could receive between 67-100% of their pre-birth earnings, up to 21,000 euros per child. Prior to the reform, lower-earning mothers were getting a much greater relative benefit from parental benefits than their higher-earning peers. By contrast, with the new reform, higher-earning women stood to benefit much more from wage replacement than from the flat payment, which may have decreased their perceived opportunity cost of having a child.

The key question, Professor Raute asks, is whether fertility post-reform exhibited differential changes across the income and education distribution. Much of the prior literature on parental benefits focuses on cash transfers and welfare programs that provide greater incentives for lower-income mothers than higher-income mothers. This study provides a critical window to examine whether high-earning and highly-educated women are less elastic, or whether they too react to financial incentives in terms of their fertility.

Nine months after the implementation of the law, there was a statistically significant increase in the average monthly birth rate per thousand mothers, as well as a small drop in the number of abortions. In addition, the rate of IVF between 2006 and 2011 increased by 33%. The increase in fertility nine months after the law’s implementation translates to an additional 2,300 children born per year.

Using German pension data, Professor Raute examined this increase in terms of income and education level. This birth data reveals that medium- and high-earners benefitted substantially from the new reform. While benefits for lower-earning mothers did not change substantially pre- and post-reform, medium-earning mothers received an additional 4,000 euros, on average, and high-earning mothers received an additional 8,000 euros. If the difference in these benefits affects fertility, we should expect to see a relative increase in fertility for women who are benefitting greatly from the reform versus those who are not benefitting as much.

For women who are below the median income, there is not a statistically significant change in the probability of having a child. By contrast, for women who earn above the median income, fertility increases for each income bracket. Overall, each additional 5,000 euros in expected benefits raises the probability of having a child in a given year by 6%.

Professor Raute observes the same effect when examining education. Post-reform, the average probability of having a child increases by 6% for medium-educated women and by 13% for highly-educated women.

Given the recency of the reform and the lag in available data, these are only short-term effects. Professor Raute examined women at the end of their fertility cycle in an effort to understand whether we might see a permanent effect on fertility and for which groups. Indeed, for women at the end of their fertility cycle, each additional thousand euros in benefits increases mean fertility level from pre-reform levels by 5.1%. This strong effect indicates that we might expect to see a permanent effect of the reform on completed fertility.

In addition, there is a significant increase in fertility for women ages 40-45. This effect seems to be driven by women who already have one child and decide that – now that it’s cheaper – they will have a second, as opposed to childless women deciding to have their first child due to the effects of the reform. Highly-educated women are also having their first children 4.8 months earlier, on average, which is correlated with a greater number of children overall.

Overall, these findings provide strong support for a discontinuous increase in overall fertility as a result of the reform, resulting in strong effects on fertility for women with higher earnings and educational attainment. The observed baby gap between highly-educated and lesser-educated women therefore seems to be narrowing.

Interestingly, the 2007 reform also increased paternity acknowledgement, in which unmarried fathers can opt to legally register as the child’s father, with all of the attached rights and obligations. In Germany, paternity acknowledgement is strongly associated with better outcomes for children.

Professor Raute hypothesizes two possible explanations for why the 2007 reform increased parental acknowledgement. It could be that as benefits to mothers increase, fathers have to contribute less to support the household, and therefore paternal acknowledgement is cheaper (the “cost channel”). Alternatively, the reform reserved two months of paid leave for fathers, which may have encouraged paternity acknowledgement (the “paternity leave channel”).

Looking at children born in the first few months of the reform, whose parents couldn’t have known about the new reform when they were conceived, paternity acknowledgement increased by 1.5 percentage points. However, this effect was driven primarily by women who were working prior to giving birth, who were entitled to a larger share of benefits under the reform. This effect implies that the cost channel, rather than the paternity leave channel, is responsible for the increase in paternity acknowledgement post-reform.

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.