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

Emmanuele Pavolini, Elisa Brini and Stefani Scherer ()
Additional contact information
Emmanuele Pavolini: University of Milan
Elisa Brini: University of Florence
Stefani Scherer: University of Trento

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2025, vol. 180, issue 3, No 13, 1619-1637

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Female employment; ECEC; Child care; Social investment; Care culture; Gender culture; European social survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-025-03719-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:180:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-025-03719-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-025-03719-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().