|
PROJECT DESCRIPTION You can also download a detailed project description: pdf format (829 kb) 1. Introduction Women's attitudes towards motherhood are at the core of all economic and social problems raised by the decline in fertility rates and the ageing process of Europe's population. The future of the welfare states depends on women's willingness to insure a reproduction function. However, as far as their choice is to take part in paid employment, are public policies adapted towards facilitating the combination between employment and motherhood? The project I shall continue to describe here below is entitled " The Rationale of Motherhood Choices : Influence of Employment Conditions and of Public Policies (MOCHO) ". It is part of the Key Action " Improving Human Research Potential and the Socio-economic Knowledge Base " of the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission. It is a three-year project that has started on the 1st of October 2001 and will run until the 1st of October 2004. Five countries participate in the project. Besides Belgium, the coordinating country, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece and France are involved. 2. The partners The project was initiated by Prof. Dr. Danièle Meulders at the Département d'Economie Appliquée (DULBEA) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In organizing the research work, she closely collaborates with Prof. Dr. Siv Gustafsson of the Department of Economics and Econometrics of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Among the remaining participant countries, Italy is represented by Prof. Dr. Daniela Del Boca of the Department of Economics at the University of Turin, Greece by Prof. Dr. Haris Symeonidou of the Institute of Social Policy at Greece's National Centre for Social Research and, finally, France is represented by Prof. Dr. Jacques Le Cacheux of the Département des Etudes OFCE at the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques. 3. Objectives This project aims to study how the motherhood decision is
affected by labour market conditions and how public policies can be designed
in order to promote parenthood by dual career couples, which is becoming
the normal way of life in the European Union's member states. The interdisciplinary
and international character of the research team including policy analysts,
economists and sociologists will allow both furthering the research front
and encouraging a broad discussion and dissemination of the results. First, this project will make a contribution to the prediction
of fertility rates. Over the last twenty years, two opposite trends were observed in European countries: on the one hand the rise of women's labour supply and employment, on the other hand the decrease in fertility rates. The first objective of this project is to make a contribution to the prediction of fertility rates. The fertility rates decreased continuously in all European countries between 1970 and 1990. In 1990, only Ireland attained the level necessary for substitution between generations (Tanda, 1994). Women's attitudes towards motherhood are at the core of all economic and social problems raised by the ageing of the European population. The single most important reason for the ageing of the population and the difficulties to design pension systems is the variability and unpredictability of the fertility rate (Cutler et al., 1990; Weil, 1997). The future of the welfare states depends on women's willingness to reproduce. Because they choose to take part in paid employment, fertility rates will depend on their possibilities to combine employment and motherhood. The second objective is to analyze the impact of employment conditions on fertility. The feminisation of the labour market, the growing proportion of women in the working population are common features of European economies. In the 1960s, women accounted for almost 30% of the working population in Europe; in 1996 this figure rose to 42.5%. Working women seem to have become the dominant social norm. The increase in the working population within Europe for at least the last ten years is due to the upsurge in the number of working women between the ages of 25 and 49: the employment relationship of women in the age range 25-49 - that is to say women of child-bearing and child-rearing age - has changed. Increasingly young women in all European countries educate themselves for a lifelong labour market career. However, gender inequalities in the European labour market are persisting, the high unemployment level exerts a pressure on job quality of women who are exposed to atypical forms of employment like part-time and temporary work and to low wages (See for example: Maruani, 1999; Meulders, 1993, 1994; Rubery, 1998). In this context, many women find that there is no room for children. Maternity leaves, parental breaks, employers' attitudes towards motherhood exert a negative influence on careers and earnings prospects, which results in postponing childbirths or refraining from children altogether. The third objective is to investigate the influence of social policies on parenthood choices. Social policies can affect women's decisions in different ways: on the one hand, there are policies that facilitate the combination of work and motherhood by reducing the costs of care, by providing quality services or legal protection against firing and by acting against discriminatory practices preventing the hiring of mothers, on the other hand, lots of policies give advantages to non-working parents: by giving tax or cash advantages in case of a non-working spouse with children or by providing replacement income in case of career breaks which encourages women to leave the labour market. The traditional appraisal of employment traps in the literature (OECD, 1994) suggests that they are gender neutral, however, tax and social systems in Europe still contain different advantages for traditional male breadwinner families imposing high marginal tax rates for women entering or re-entering the labour market. Since the 1980s, European employment policies, in order to decrease unemployment rates, have built new forms of employment traps for women. Some policies aimed at facilitating the combination between work and family life, like parental leaves and other forms of career breaks, that are taken nearly exclusively by women, decrease the growth in the female share of the labour force (Bettio, 1998). Public policies regarding children and motherhood have been developed in various and contradictory ways: on the one hand, measures aiming to encourage women to stay at home were reinforced: tax advantages for breadwinners, increase in different benefits for one-earner families, derived or created rights in social security systems, and, of equal importance, career break systems providing replacement incomes appeared as one of the major employment policies of the eighties (Meulders, 1999). On the other hand, recent years have witnessed the emergence of policies facilitating mothers' employment like the provision of public child care facilities, child care allowances for working parents, educational systems with combination-friendly time tables, and, last but not least, some countries saw a rise in the level of child allowances (Bettio, 1998; Del Boca, 1998). The project will make a contribution to the analysis of the influence of social policies on fertility decisions. 4. Countries to be studied This project will include intensive quantitative and qualitative research on Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Greece and Italy but more extensive research will include all EU-15. Emphasis is on comparative research in order to generate comparable data and undertake comparative analysis. This means that we are comparing policies and analyzing panel data sets of several of the included countries simultaneously. 5. The project's use and value In this project we examine how social policies in the different countries included in our study are organized and how they exert an impact on the reproductive and career planning decisions of young couples with special emphasis on mothers' choices. In this way, we also aim at coming to a recommendation of what features social policies should include in order to achieve the conclusion of the EU Lisbon summit that female employment rates should be increased while simultaneously assuring that the population will be reproduced, so that the welfare states in Europe can be sustained and not deteriorate because of the ageing problem of the population. By using and integrating the research approaches described above intensively for a number of EU countries and on a more aggregate level including all EU15 countries we will be able to arrive at policy recommendations. Particularly we focus on supplying results to the EU officials that are responsible for the gender mainstreaming of the policy recommendations coming from the EU. A similar target group are officials at the national government level who are responsible for gender mainstreaming and equal opportunities. We are inspired by scientific work in the following fields particularly: population economics, demography, policy analysis and econometric panel data estimations. Our project will contribute to all these areas. Until recently the research agenda in the field of population economics that focuses on the lack of equal opportunities has stressed the labour force participation of women with young children. In this project, however, we chose to test the reverse relationship: what are the determinants of women's choices concerning motherhood (dependant variable) and, more specifically, what is the role played by employment prospects and public policies concerning children and motherhood (explanatory factors)?
Bettio F., Preshal S., Bimonte S. and Giorgi S. (1998),
Care in Europe, Report to the European Commission, DGV-equal Opportunities
Unit. Brussels: European Commission. |