Home-winners and bread-makers: gender role norms and the consumption of childcare

Abstract Despite the progress made in gender equality since the latter half of the 20th century, there are still significant structural gaps in the relative position of women to men in a number of areas, including labour supply and wages. Childcare subsidies are at the forefront of policy interventions to address this issue. However, these policies assume that mothers are responsive to economic incentives, generated by a rise in lifetime income, and ignore the role of culture in a mother’s decision to provide care to her children. We assess the impact of a mother’s and her partner’s attitudes to gender role norms on the household consumption of formal childcare, given their labour supply. Using detailed microdata, we show that traditional gender role attitudes of a mother and her partner are associated with a lower consumption of formal childcare at the extensive and intensive margins, net of labour supply. Furthermore, we use a novel mediation analysis to reveal that the variation induced in formal childcare consumption by gender attitudes can be decomposed into fast-moving peer-effects, slow-moving intergenerational transmissions and internal learnings. Our findings support the assertion in recent literature that gender norms may be blocking the effectiveness of family policies, however, a societal evolution towards gender-egalitarianism, coupled with a deeper understanding by policymakers of how these attitudes are diffused throughout society, will enhance the efficacy of these policies and foster greater convergence of gender disparities in labour market outcomes.