This paper studies to which extent progressive gender norms exert an influence on the type of labour market attachment that mothers and fathers have across 31 European countries. We use data at the individual level from the European Union – Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) merged with data from the Integrated Values Survey and consider 11 job characteristics: the probability of (1) working; (2) being in part-time work; (3) being self-employed; (4) having a fixed-term contract; (5) acting as a supervisor in a firm; (6) working in the public sector; (7) working during the weekends; (8) working usually from home; (9) working in more than one job; (10) being an underemployed part-time worker; and, (11) working in a high-skill occupation.
Our results indicate that progressive gender norms are not strongly linked with job characteristics for mothers, who are more likely to work part-time and telework regularly in areas with more progressive past generations. The interlinkage between job characteristics and progressive gender norms is stronger for fathers: fathers living in areas with more progressive past generations are less likely to be employed, work part-time, hold multiple jobs, be underemployed and work in the public sector whereas they are more likely to be a supervisor, telework or have a high-skill job.
This paper is structured as follows. After the introduction, Section 2 provides a literature review on the interrelationship between gender norms and employment characteristics by gender. Section 3 details the multiple datasets used in the study. Section 4 discusses the identification strategy while Section 5 presents the main results as well as all the robustness checks. Section 6 concludes.
Authors: Sara Ayllón, Natalia Carralero