In this study, we analyse the sharp rise in poverty among working-age singles and single parents in Sweden. In a dual-earner society like Sweden, we show that the return of mass unemployment in combination with the retreat of a generous and inclusive welfare state have substantially increased the poverty risks of single-adult households, who cannot rely on the income buffering effect of the family. Whereas cutbacks to unemployment benefits have been detrimental for the relative income position of single-adult households, the poverty risks of couples with and without children are much less affected. Individual-level characteristics of the poor persons themselves provide little explanatory leverage for why trends in poverty diverge by family form. Our results raise a number of issues of relevance for the wider academic debate about the capacity of the welfare state to adequately respond to both old and new social risk groups.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show how the interplay between individual women’s gender role attitudes, having young children at home, as well as the country-context characterized by gender egalitarianism and public childcare support, relates to women’s working hours in 23 European countries. Design/methodology/approach – This study presents results of multilevel regression analyses of data from the European Social Survey (Round 2). These micro-level data on 23 European countries were combined with country-level measures on gender traditionalism and childcare expenditure. Findings – The authors found that the negative association between having young children at home and women’s working hours is stronger for women with traditional gender role attitudes compared to women with egalitarian attitudes. The gap in working hours between women with and without young children at home was smaller in countries in which the population holds egalitarian gender role attitudes and in countries with extensive public childcare support. Furthermore, it was found that the gap in employment hours between mothers with traditional or egalitarian attitudes was largest in countries with limited public childcare support. Social implications – Policy makers should take note that women’s employment decisions are not dependent on human capital and household-composition factors alone, but that gender role attitudes matter as well. The authors could not find evidence of the inequality in employment between women with different gender role attitudes being exacerbated in association with childcare support. Originality/value – The originality of this study lies in the combined (rather than separate) analysis of how countries’ social policies (childcare services) and countries’ attitudes (gender traditionalism) interact with individual gender role attitudes to shape cross-national variation in women’s working hours.

This study examined to what extent family policies differently affect poverty among single-parent households and two-parent households. We distinguished between reconciliation policies (tested with parental leave and the proportion of unpaid leave) and financial support policies (tested with family allowances). We used data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, covering 519,825 households in 18 OECD countries from 1978 to 2008, combined with data from the Comparative Family Policy Database. Single parents face higher poverty risks than coupled parents, and single mothers more so than single fathers. We found that employment reduces poverty, particularly for parents in professional occupations and for coupled parents who are dual earners. Longer parental leave, a smaller proportion of unpaid leave, and higher amounts of family allowances were associated with lower poverty among all households with children. Parental leave more effectively facilitated the employment of single mothers, thereby reducing their poverty more than among couples and single fathers. We found some evidence that family allowances reduced poverty most strongly among single fathers. An income decomposition showed that family allowances reduce poverty among two-parent households with up to 3 percentage points, and among single-parent households (mothers and fathers) up to 13 percentage points.

The conceptualisation and measurement of benefit coverage is muddled with considerable confusion. In this forum contribution, we propose a new consolidated framework for the analysis of benefit coverage. Three sequential steps in measurement are suggested, involving the calculation of coverage rates, eligibility rates and take-up rates in social protection. Each step of the analysis focuses on particular aspects of programme legislation and implementation, and together the new framework will substantially improve the possibilities of research to inform policymaking. We provide an empirical illustration of our approach based on Swedish data, and highlight how our new consolidated framework for analysing benefit coverage provides a reorientation of the research agenda on benefit coverage.

This paper analyzes old-age incomes in Sweden from a pension policy perspective, focusing on both the economic position of elderly citizens and the redistributive effects of the pension system’s different parts. The empirical analyses show that each subsequent cohort that reaches retirement age faces higher relative poverty risks than previous cohorts. The relative decline in the value of the guaranteed minimum pension vis-à-vis the real income growth of wage earners brings to the forefront the issues of indexation of the guarantee and the ceiling on the means-tested housing benefits like the basic safety net for pensioners.

This policy note highlights contemporary research on single parents, and reflects on its implications for social policy developments in the European Union. Three directions of thought are developed regarding single parents' resources, employment and social policies. The aim is to expand the scope of choice among policy alternatives for policy makers. The rise of shared residence urges us to reconsider the gendered nature of single parenthood, considering how to support separated fathers to be involved in their children's life. Employment can come with all kinds of advantages, but earnings are often inadequate for single parents to guarantee a poverty-free existence. With respect to redistributive social policies, single parents' economic position can be heavily affected by policies that are not specifically designed for single parents, or even for families with children. This brings into focus, analogue to gender mainstreaming, the importance of mainstreaming family diversity.

Comparative welfare state research as examined the outcomes of active labour market policies (ALMP) and work-family reconciliation policies by and large been separately. As a result, potential complementarities between these policy areas have received scant attention empirically. Using macro-level data, this study answers the question to what extent, and in which way, governments' efforts in ALMP and in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are complementary to each other in promoting women's employment rates and reducing women's unemployment and inactivity rates in 30 OECD countries from 1985 to 2018. The article theorises about how the various policies that constitute a welfare state relate to each other, distinguishing between pluralism, complementarity and substitutability. These findings provide support for the notion of welfare pluralism, in the sense that ALMP and ECEC policies work together in improving women's employment rates in slightly different ways: ALMP achieve this through reducing women's unemployment rates, whereas ECEC also achieve lower inactivity rates for women. There was, however, more support for the notion of substitution rather than complementarity: the marginal benefits associated with an increase in either ALMP or ECEC were smaller in the context of large investments in the other policy. In other words, the highest rates of women's employment, and the lowest rates of unemployment and inactivity, are found in countries with large investments in both ALMP and ECEC, but such higher investments are associated with diminishing returns.

I examine the relative poverty risk among single-parent households in countries that have a large share of households with dual earners. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database are used to analyze eighteen OECD countries in the period 1984 to 2010. I find that single parents face higher relative income poverty risks in countries with a large share of dual-earner households and that this higher risk of poverty is related to higher standards of living in those countries: higher standards of living have raised poverty thresholds, and single-parent incomes are less likely to reach those higher poverty thresholds. I also find that this overall pattern varied across institutional contexts: a rise of dual-earner households puts single parents at a disadvantage only in countries that have relatively low public expenditures on childcare and relatively low income transfer policies.

This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the FEMM Committee, describes trends in the situation of single parents in the EU (with additional evidence from Iceland and Norway). It analyses the resources, employment, and soc ial policy context of single parents and provides r eco mm enda tions to improve their situation, with attention to the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences.

This article provides an overview of the emerging literature on how trends in women’s employment have affected levels of inequality between households. It also sets the stage for future research endeavors. The rise in female labor force participation, and in conjunction the rise in women’s earnings, has been one of the biggest changes in economic activity in recent decades and in many countries. These long-term trends in women’s employment and associated changes in families are discussed in the section on Family Revolution(s). As such, it is remarkable how little attention mainstream analyses of high and rising levels of economic inequality have paid to gender and women’s employment. The first section, on Economic Inequality: Horizontal versus Vertical Perspectives, sets out the distinction between two perspectives on economic inequality. The first pertains to economic differences between households across the income distribution, referred to as Vertical Economic Inequality. The second pertains to economic differences between groups, such as between women and men, referred to as Horizontal Economic Inequality. The next section, on Integrating Horizontal and Vertical Inequality, demonstrates that levels of vertical inequality are affected by horizontal inequality, in this case specifically applied to how economic differences between households are directly related to economic differences between women and men. There is by now a literature that clearly shows how the rise in women’s employment and earnings (and thus smaller horizontal differences between women and men) reduces vertical inequality between households. This has been demonstrated in a vast amount of Country-Specific Studies as well as in Country-Comparative Studies, a consensus that also resonates in a number of Research Overviews. The next section argues that although it has been convincingly demonstrated that women’s employment and earnings have had an attenuating effect on inequality between households, less is known about how and why this is the case and under which conditions. As such, it combines literature from various fields (including sociology, demography, and economics) to develop a Research Agenda to further the literature on the relationship between women’s employment and economic inequality between households. This section addresses six different questions: Who? is employed and has certain levels of earnings, and with whom do they form a household (With Whom? Homogamy and With Whom? Household Formation). These sections also cover determinants of women’s paid work, such as unpaid care- or housework. The next section covers What Income Effect? can be expected from, for instance, motherhood and housework, and whether these effects vary across the income distribution. The section on What Context? brings into focus the welfare state and public policies, and a final subsection briefly addresses the question of Which Methods? may be particularly effective to further this research agenda. This article concludes by acknowledging a few Outstanding Questions that are less developed in the literature and therefore less integrated into this article—but may nevertheless point to interesting venues for further research.

Single-parent families face unique challenges when it comes to in-work poverty. Without a second caregiver and earner, single parents have to compete with dual-earner couples for their position in the earnings distribution. Facing precarious employment and gendered wage inequality, single-parent families face a high risk of experiencing poverty even when they are working. This chapter presents empirical evidence on in-work poverty and inadequate wages in the policy context of 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The impact of family structure, occupation, regulations of part-time work, paid parental leave, and various redistributive policies are examined. The authors distinguish three distinct patterns of performance in countries’ approaches to in-work poverty among single parents: a balanced approach of ensuring low inequality on the labor market combined with redistribution; an unbalanced approach of combating in-work poverty mostly through redistribution; and an approach in which high inequality on the labor market is compensated with redistributive policies to only a very limited extent. Countries that rely on a balanced approach to reduce inequality in the labor market, with respect to both class and gender, combined with an adequate level of redistribution, seem best situated for a durable reduction of poverty among working single parents.

This edited collection examines the risks and issues faced by single parent-families and their children such as poverty, wealth/asset accumulation, health, well-being and combinative development, bringing together scholars from diverse social science backgrounds, including sociology, economics, political science, and social work. This book is the first collection of studies to examine previously neglected social policies related to single-parent families and provides innovative outcomes that will improve the lives and well-being of single parents and their children.

Researchers seeking to perform country-comparative and trend analyses using income data have to account for the fact that income surveys differ in whether income is measured gross or net of taxes and contributions. We discuss, develop, and evaluate two ‘netting down procedures’ for data in the LIS Database. Evaluations of these netting down procedures indicate that comparisons across gross and net datasets can be greatly improved when netting down procedures are applied. In several cases, however, substantial amounts of bias remain.

This discussion paper provides an updated analy-sis of gendered economic inequality in high- and middle-income countries. A review of the literature demonstrates that such an analysis needs to explic-itly recognize that gender, poverty and (economic) inequality are intrinsically linked. Specifically, the paper addresses two sets of questions: First, how do intra-family resource allocation and distribution patterns both reflect and shape gender inequalities in power and well-being, and what factors—including policy-related ones—can mitigate these inequalities? Second, how do families as gendered institutions contribute to broader socio-economic inequalities, and what can be done to reduce/reverse these inequalities? Using data from the LIS Database, this paper shows considerable differences among 42 countries with respect to how likely women were to have their own income. The period from 2000 to 2010/2014 saw increasing rates of own incomes as well as women’s incomes consti-tuting larger shares in total household income. A key finding is that in countries where many women have an income of their own, relative poverty rates are lower. The comparative analyses, combined with a review of the literature, suggest that welfare state arrangements that support working women not only improve the overall employment rates of women but also help to prevent particularly women in low-income households from living in dependence and instead to have an income of their own—thus reinforcing the potential for poverty reduction. Moreover, institutional contexts that are generally conducive to women’s employment tend to be effective across family forms.

It is demonstrated that family policies are an important aspect of the institutional context of earnings inequality among coupled households. Although seldom integrated into prominent analyses of economic inequality, women’s earnings are consistently found to reduce relative inequality among households. This means that family policies, as well-known determinants of women’s employment and earnings, are important contextual determinants of economic inequality. Using Luxembourg Income Study data from 18 OECD countries in the period 1981–2008, this study demonstrates that women have higher earnings, and that their earnings reduce inequality among coupled households more in institutional contexts with generous paid leave and public childcare. We found no sizeable association between financial support policies, such as family allowances and tax benefits to families with children, and the degree to which women’s earnings contribute to inequality among coupled households. Family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and earnings are associated with less economic inequality among coupled households.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the question whether women’s employment is negatively affected in countries with very long periods of childcare leave.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors analyzed data on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18-countries, combined with country-level data on childcare, unemployment and service sector size.

Findings

The authors found that in countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, while in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is bigger than with short periods of leave.

Originality/value

The authors argued that to correctly answer the long-leave question – the relationship between duration of leave and employment of women should be explicitly hypothesized as being curvilinear; and childcare leave should be expected to affect only mothers, not women without children; testing the long-leave hypothesis requires the use of country-comparative data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time; and is best tested against person-level data.

Weighted effect coding refers to a specific coding matrix to include factor variables in generalised linear regression models. With weighted effect coding, the effect for each category represents the deviation of that category from the weighted mean (which corresponds to the sample mean). This technique has particularly attractive properties when analysing observational data, that commonly are unbalanced. The wec package is introduced, that provides functions to apply weighted effect coding to factor variables, and to interactions between (a.) a factor variable and a continuous variable and between (b.) two factor variables.

This article shows that women's rising earnings contributed to reducing inequality in household earnings, with respect to couples. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) on 1,148,762 coupled households, covering 18 OECD countries and the period from 1973 to 2013. In this period, women's share of household earnings grew, spouses' earnings became more strongly and positively correlated in various countries, and inequality in women's earnings was reduced. Inequality in household earnings increased due to the rising correlation between spouses' earnings, but was reduced more by the decline of inequality in women's earnings. Had women's earnings remained unchanged since the 1970s and 1980s, inequality in household earnings would have been higher around 2010 in all observed OECD countries. Household inequality was reduced least by trends in women's earnings in countries with a long history of high female labor-force participation, such as Finland (3% reduction) and Sweden (5%), and most in countries that observed a stronger increase in female labor-force participation in recent decades such as Spain (31%) and the Netherlands (41%). As more countries are reaching a plateau in the growth of women's employment and earnings, the potential for further stimulating women's employment and earnings to counter both women's and household inequality seems to be increasingly limited.

Although employment growth is propagated as being crucial to reduce poverty across EU and OECD countries, the actual impact of employment growth on poverty rates is still unclear. This study presents novel estimates of the association between macro-level trends in women’s employment and trends in poverty, across 15 OECD countries from 1971 to 2013. It does so based on over 2 million household-level observations from the LIS Database, using Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca (KBO) decompositions. The results indicate that an increase of 10% points in women’s employment rate was associated with a reduction of about 1% point of poverty across these countries. In part, this reduction compensated for developments in men’s employment that were associated with higher poverty. However, in the Nordic countries no such poverty association was found, as in these countries women’s employment rates were very high and stable throughout the observation period. In countries that initially showed marked increases in women’s employment, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United States, the initial increases in women’s employment rates were typically followed by a period in which these trends levelled off. Hence, our findings first and foremost suggest that improving gender equality in employment is associated with lower poverty risks. Yet, the results also suggest that the potential of following an employment strategy to (further) reduce poverty in OECD countries has, to a large extent, been depleted.

In this Voices article, we use emerging evidence to reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for various aspects of workers' wellbeing. This brief review emphasises how COVID-19 exacerbates existing, well-understood inequalities, along the intersections of community, work, and family. Workers on the periphery of the labour market, including non-standard workers and the self-employed, but also women and low-paid workers, are experiencing significant losses in relation to work, working hours and/or wages. Even once the pandemic is contained, its impact will continue to be felt by many communities, workers, and families for months and years to come.

The European Pillar Action Plan highlighted the importance of childcare as an important element to increase women’s employment rates. Childcare is also a headline target of the European Pillar of Social Rights, and central to the Gender Equality Strategy. Against this background, we provide a focused literature review to inform the preparation of a proposal for a Council Recommendation on early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision, including a revision of the Barcelona targets on childcare. Specifically, the focused literature review should contribute to answering two questions: y Which aspects of childcare policy reform affect parents’ decision to use childcare (i.e., participation rates of children)? y Which aspects of childcare policy reform affect labour market participation for mothers as well as gender equality in general? The aim of the focused literature review is to provide an evidence base directly relevant to policy makers regarding the revision of the Barcelona targets. To that end, the emphasis in the literature review is on formal childcare (i.e., paid, non-parental care typically outside the parental home) and specifically on childcare policy reforms (i.e., changes to childcare policy rules relating to various aspects of policy design, such as childcare accessibility (including eligibility conditions), affordability (including out-of-pocket expenses and mode of financing), and quality (mostly focusing on structural quality, such as staff educational requirements or restrictions on group sizes). The review is focused explicitly on reforms related to the outcomes of interest to the European Commission: children’s participation rates, mothers’ employment, working hours, and earnings. This report is structured as follows. First, we provide a theoretical background based on the (comparative) literature on ECEC in relation to its use and outcomes relevant to maternal employment and gender equality. This background covers literature outside the scope of the focused literature review itself, to provide a broader context to interpret – and organise – the results. Next, the methodology will be introduced. A third section presents the results of the focused literature review, focusing consecutively on (aspects of) reforms that affected ECEC use, maternal employment rates, working hours, and finally earnings. The review concludes with an overview of key findings, and a number of broader reflections.

This study investigates housing conditions of single mothers in the context of housing policies. We study single mothers’ probability to experience housing deprivation, overcrowded housing, overburdening costs of housing, and neighbourhood problems across European countries. We consider the structural consequences of home ownership rates, and policies related to regulation of rental markets, housing benefits and housing prices. We apply a multi-level framework to EU-SILC data on 21,937 single mothers, from 195 country-years and covering 21 European countries from 2008 to 2017. First, we find a trade-off in the provision of free housing or housing at reduced rents, that helps to reduce housing cost overburden for single mothers, but is also associated with higher rates of housing deprivation, overcrowding and neighbourhood problems. Next, in contexts with stricter rental market regulation, single mothers’ housing deprivation is lower. Higher housing benefits reduce the risk of housing deprivation as well as overcrowding, but in contexts where home ownership is common, single mothers tend to experience more overcrowding. Single mothers are more likely to report neighbourhood problems in societies where housing prices are high. Our findings suggest that factors within the control of policy makers can be beneficial to the housing conditions of single mothers.

This chapter argues for the importance of developing theoretically grounded family policy indicators, with emphasis on childcare/ECEC indicators. The chapter critically introduces the conceptual frameworks underpinning the most prevalent currents in comparative research, and then presents the most prominent empirical approaches utilized in existing studies. Next, it maps the availability of comparative data on the most widely used indicators and discusses the main sources from which this data originates. The final section concludes by pointing toward some challenges for the current research agenda, along with some tentative solutions. In particular, we argue for the need to engage in a research agenda that integrates family policies, including social care services, as essential components of social citizenship.

In this concluding chapter, we reflect on future research about social policy in Europe. We note three key developments in research about social policy before outlining where how future research should be directed. We note the need for research to broaden the view on social policy once again, the need for greater theoretical development to ensure a robust future of research on social policy, and the need to further strengthen and exploit the multidisciplinary nature of our research community, as highlighted by the chapters in the book. European welfare states will continue to face unforeseen, far-reaching challenges in the next decades that are difficult to predict today. However, this book shows that social policy research is well positioned to address these challenges, informing policymakers and the public about the immediate problems at hand, bringing clarity about which policies work and for whom, and what alternative policy solutions may be available.

To explain single-mother poverty, existing research has either emphasized individualistic, or contextual explanations. Building on the prevalences and penalties framework (Brady et al. 2017), we advance the literature on single-mother poverty in three aspects: First, we extend the framework to incorporate heterogeneity among single mothers across countries and over time. Second, we apply this extended framework to Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, whose trends in single-mother poverty (1990–2014) challenge ideal-typical examples of welfare state regimes. Third, using decomposition analyses, we demonstrate variation across countries in the relative importance of prevalences and penalties to explain time trends in single-mother poverty. Our findings support critiques of static welfare regime typologies, which are unable to account for policy change and poverty trends of single mothers. We conclude that we need to understand the combinations of changes in single mothers’ social compositions and social policy contexts, if we want to explain time trends in single-mother poverty.