A major reason for the gendered division of parental leave use is the financial compensation during leave. Swedish national parental leave benefit provides 77.6 percent of earlier earnings up to an income ceiling, but collective agreements cover part of the income loss above the ceiling during leave. We focus on the importance of such collective agreements by examining fathers' parental leave take-up across the 2000s, as agreements were expanded during this period in time. We combine register data for the period 2001 to 2011 with the Longitudinal Integrated Database for Health Insurance and Labour Market Studies (LISA) being the key data source. The main division of agreements is between the state, the municipality and county, and the private sector. Results indicate that fathers with income above the income ceiling increase their use over the time period. Especially in the private sector a polarisation can be seen, where high income fathers increase their leave use, while fathers with lower income fall behind. As we do not find stronger increase in fathers' leave use in sectors where agreements expanded across time there is no evident support of a direct effect of the top-ups.

One of the major reasons for a gendered division of parental leave is the financial compensation during leave. Swedish national parental leave benefit provides 77.6 % of earlier earnings up to a ceiling, but collective agreements between employer and unions have over time developed to cover the income loss during leave. We focus on the importance of such agreements for fathers’ parental leave take-up. The main division of agreements is between the 1) state, 2) municipality and county and 3) private sector. The difference in agreements for different segments of the labor market is likely to influence parental leave use, especially for parents with income over the ceiling and who would otherwise lose a lot financially while on leave. We compare how parental leave is used in the beginning of the 2000s and a decade later, when agreements have been expanded. Our focus will be on men in different sectors and with different income levels, thus differently affected by the change in the agreements. We focus on first born children. Results indicate that high-income fathers increase their use over the time period. Especially in the private sector a polarization can be seen, where fathers with high income increase their leave use over time while fathers with lower incomes fall behind. However, we find only small differences in trends in leave take-up between fathers’ in different sectors. The study deepens our understanding of how and whether the level of financial compensation during leave matters for take-up, even in an already generous statutory system.

One argument for increasing female representation in management is the expectation that female managers will be particularly beneficial for female employees through, e.g., role modeling, mentoring or providing other incentives to enhance female productivity. We explore this issue by analyzing the association between women's wages and the gender of their immediate managers using Swedish matched employee-employer data from 2010. Contrary to the expected positive association, we find that wages are overall 3% lower for female employees with a female instead of male manager. However, dividing the sample by managerial position and controlling for the sorting of employees with respect to, e.g., non-cognitive traits, work tasks, family commitment and establishment gender composition, the negative association is found only for female employees working for lower-level managers, not for women with a manager at the highest rank. One possible explanation could be a difference in decision-making power if lower-level female managers have more limited resources for their subordinates compared to lower-level male managers.

The negative relationship between women’s time in paid and unpaid work is well established in empirical research. We contribute to this literature with an analysis of Swedish population register data 2000–2010 covering a tax discount reform introduced in 2007 which implied a 50% cost reduction for outsourcing of domestic work. We use difference-in-difference propensity score matching to estimate the extent to which purchases of domestic work implies increased time in paid work approximated by earnings. For our samples of married women, the results indicate that domestic outsourcing corresponding to 2.0–3.5 percent of full-time work (40–70 h per year) increase labor market work by a similar amount, 2.4–3.6% of annual earnings. We discuss several possible explanations as to why these estimates are substantially higher than reported by previous studies.

In current research, the extensive family policies of the Scandinavian countries have been problematized and described as hampering women's careers. However, mechanisms have been little investigated and the Scandinavian countries are often regarded as a single policy model. Based on an account of institutional variety we study gender gaps in hourly wages and access to authority positions in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and explore the importance of segregation, skills and work interruptions. The analysis uses pooled cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 2004 and 2010. The results show that gender gaps vary both in size and regarding the mechanisms producing them. In particular, we find that gender segregation has a radically different impact in the four countries. The analysis suggests that the mechanisms linking family policies to labour market outcomes are more complex than envisaged in the current debate and point to the importance of comparing seemingly similar countries.

The wage differential between women and men persists in advanced economies despite the inflow of women into qualified occupations in recent years. Using five waves of the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey (LNU), this paper explores the gender wage gap in Sweden during the 1974–2010 period overall and by skill level. The empirical analyses showed that the general gender wage gap has been nearly unchanged for the past 30 years. However, the gender difference in wage in less qualified occupations fell considerably, whereas the gender pay gap remained stable for men and women in qualified occupations. The larger significance of family responsibilities for wages in qualified occupations is one likely explanation for this result.

Previous research shows considerable variation in the strength of the motherhood wage penalty across countries, which has partially been attributed to differences in policies supporting maternal employment. Although such policies are usually understood to be complementary, their effects on workers—and especially on employees in jobs of diverse skills levels—may differ. Using longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for ten countries, this article describes the associations of different maternal employment policies with the motherhood wage penalty by skill. Findings from Hausman–Taylor panel models indicate that both a high share of small children in publicly funded child care facilities and long paid maternity leave are associated with a decrease in the motherhood wage penalty regardless of skill level. The standardized total effects were larger for the latter policy.

Adding to the debate on the integrative or marginalizing nature of female part-time work, this article provides a comparative analysis of the implications of female part-time work for different intrinsic job quality dimensions and job satisfaction. Drawing on national micro-data from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, our multivariate analyses show cross-national similarities in terms of lower job learning opportunities for female part-timers. We found a significantly higher incidence of repetitiveness only among Swedish female part-timers and lower degrees of task discretion among British, Dutch, and Swedish women working part-time hours. Female part-timers were either equally satisfied with their work as female full-timers or even more satisfied. This held true also after accounting for the lower intrinsic job quality of part-time work. While women working part-time hours were as affected by their job quality characteristics as were full-timers, we conclude that the shorter hours of work per se provide an important additional source of job satisfaction.

This study examines the effect of the sex of the immediate supervisor on the length of time men and women spend in initial on-the-job training (OJT). Using the 2000 Swedish Level of Living Survey and matched employer registry data, this study indicates that men have greater chances of receiving long initial OJT compared with women. In addition, for women employed in the private sector, the chances of receiving long initial OJT are higher if the immediate supervisor is male. For women with a public sector job or for men irrespective of sector, time in initial OJT is independent of the sex of the immediate supervisor.