Incentivizing Equality? How Work-Family Policies Affect Parenthood Penalties in 27 Countries

Work-family policies are theorized to shape the division of paid labor after parenthood, but recent studies have cast doubt on their importance. Leveraging harmonized longitudinal data spanning 27 countries and an analytic focus on couples and couple dynamics, our study shows that work-family policies do shape how divisions of paid labor change with parenthood, and that they also moderate the importance of couples’ relative resources as a determinant of the division of labor. We find that moderate-length paid maternal leave and greater childcare availability reduce parenthood penalties in couples’ division of paid work time, while prolonged leave exacerbates penalties. Furthermore, by focusing on couples, we provide novel evidence that partners’ relative resources do not operate uniformly across work-family policy contexts, showing that policies can incentivize couples to divide paid work in ways their relative resource profiles would not otherwise predict. We find that moderate-length paid leave and greater childcare availability encourage egalitarianism among male-breadwinner couples, although extended leave encourages greater gender traditionalism among female-breadwinner couples. These findings reveal that classic theories of household specialization and bargaining are not universal, and highlight the need for greater theoretical attention to how country- and couple-level forces interact to shape gender inequality.