The Elephant in the Family Policy Room: How Care Culture Influences the Effects of Public Childcare on Women’s Labor Market Participation in Europe

Abstract This paper examines how cultural contexts influence the extent to which policies aimed at supporting women’s employment and gender equality achieve their objectives. More specifically, it addresses how the availability of formal public childcare services for children under the age of three and their expansion support women’s labour market participation in different cultural contexts. Few studies have examined cultural and structural factors together. The study integrates individual-level data from the European Social Survey on women’s employment and their attitudes with time-varying regional-level information from statistical offices on public early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision and information on gender care culture obtained from different waves of the European Values Study. We find that increasing the availability of ECEC is particularly effective in promoting women’s full-time employment and women’s labour market participation in contexts where traditional cultural values regarding gendered care prevail. The results appear to be independent of individual attitudes. The paper highlights the interaction between structural and cultural factors in shaping employment behaviour and suggests that the outcomes of social policy interventions, such as the expansion of ECEC, are strongly influenced by cultural contexts, although not necessarily in the expected direction.