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Purpose – This chapter examines how gender, parenthood, and partner's employment are related to individual's employment patterns, analyzing paid work at individual and household levels.

Methodology/approach – Analyses use individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) wave 5 for 19 countries, for adults aged 25–45. We use logistic regression and a two-stage Heckman sample selection correction procedure to estimate the effects of gender and parenthood on the probabilities of employment and full-time employment.

Findings – The variation between mothers and childless women is larger than that between childless men and childless women; differences in women's employment patterns are driven by gendered parenthood, controlling for women's human capital, partnered status and household income. Fathers and mothers' employment hours in the same household vary cross-nationally.

Mothers' employment behaviors can identify important differences in the strategies countries have pursued to balance work and family life.

Research implications – Important differences between childless women and mothers exist; employment analyses need to recognize the variation in employment hours among women, and how women's hours are related to partners' hours. Further research should consider factors that shape employment cross-nationally, as well as how these relate to differences in wages and occupational gender segregation.

Practical implications – Employment choices of women and mothers must be understood in terms of employment hours, not simply employment, and within the context of partners' employment.

Originality/value of paper – Our chapter clarifies the wide dispersion of employment hours across countries – and how men's and women's employment hours are linked and related to parenthood.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the social divisions in maternal employment patterns post‐childbirth, recorded by earlier studies have persisted for a later cohort of mothers that had a pregnancy in the early 2000s, in the context of an expansion of childcare and other improvements in reconciliation measures.

Longitudinal data from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study are analysed using logistic regression.

It was found that mothers are more likely to be employed, and employed full‐time, when their child is aged three if they were employed during the pregnancy and resumed employment within nine months of the birth. The mothers' occupational class, ethnicity, household composition and the working hours of a partner also have independent associations with the probability of maternal employment once the child is aged three.

The authors would expect these results to be modified – but not overturned – in a different national setting, for example where childcare services are more extensive or part‐time employment is less common.

These new longitudinal survey results for a recent cohort of mothers in the UK demonstrate that resumption of employment following maternity leave is pivotal for women's subsequent employment integration. Yet maternal employment trajectories remain shaped by social inequalities. Both results are important for informing debates about reconciliation policy for the pre‐school years, including monitoring the impact of the recession on the employment integration of women following childbirth.

This study aims to investigate whether social investment (SI) policies improve employment among single mothers.

This paper analyzes the potential effects of SI policies on vulnerable individuals and workers at the macro level by using the employment position of single mothers as a dependent variable. Time-series cross-national data from 18 OECD countries between 1998 and 2017 are analyzed. Multilevel model analysis is also used for robustness check.

I find that public spending on education and family support is positively associated with the employment rates of single mothers. In contrast, active labor market policy (ALMP) spending is negatively associated. ALMP’s negative effects stand out particularly with public spending on job training. Of all family support policies, family allowances are positively associated with single mothers’ employment, which runs counter to the conventional argument that family allowances are a disincentive for women’s or mothers’ employment. Paid leave (length and generosity) is also associated with higher employment for single mothers. There is also some tentative evidence that public spending on maternity leave benefits (spending level) may raise the odds of single mothers being employed, when individual-level factors are controlled for in multilevel analysis we implement for robustness check.

This paper does not analyze the effects of the qualitative properties of SI policies. Future research is necessary in this respect.

The effects of SI policies on employment among single mothers have not yet been examined in the literature. This paper seeks to be a first cut at measuring the effects.

Purpose – Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variation in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship has examined the effects of social policy on women's and mothers' labor force engagement. This chapter evaluates whether generous social policies have a disincentive effect on single-mother employment.

Methodology/approach – Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we conduct a cross-national, multilevel analysis of the effects of social policy generosity on single-mother employment in 17 affluent democracies.

Findings – We find high rates of single-mother employment – above 60 percent in 15 of the 17 countries and above 70 percent in 5 countries. We find little effect of social policy for employment, as our two measures of social policy are insignificant in almost all models. If there are welfare disincentives, they only appear significant for young single mothers, and this evidence is limited as well. We find contradictory evidence for the employment incentive for low-educated single mothers.

We determine that single-mother employment is largely driven by the same individual characteristics – educational attainment, age, and household composition – that drive employment in the general population, and among women and mothers.

Originality/value of chapter – To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the few cross-national, multilevel tests of the welfare disincentive thesis for single-mother employment. We provide evidence that welfare generosity does not discourage single-mother employment.

Past studies suggest that full-time maternal employment may be negatively related to children’s cognitive development. Most studies measure maternal employment at one time point, while mothers’ work hours may not be stable during early childrearing years. Using data from the 2001 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (N ≈ 6,500), the authors examine stability in mothers’ work hours across four waves when children are 9 and 24 months old, in preschool, and in kindergarten, mothers’ background characteristics associated to it, and its link to child cognitive development. Results show that the majority of mothers change work hours across the four waves. Analysis using multinomial logistic regression models suggests that mothers’ older age, fewer children, and higher household income are related to working full time at all four waves compared to varying work hours across the waves; more children and less than high school completion are related to staying home at all four waves; and mothers’ older age, being White, no change in partnership status, and holding a college degree are related to working part time at all four waves. Compared to mothers’ changing work hours, mothers’ stable work hours, full time or part time, at all four waves is related to children’s better reading, math, and cognitive scores in kindergarten, whereas mothers’ staying home at all four waves is negatively related to these scores. These associations disappear when background characteristics are controlled for in ordinary least squares regression models. These findings underscore the role of background characteristics in shaping both mothers’ stable employment and children’s cognitive development.

Time pressures in paid work and household labor have intensified in recent decades because of the increase in dual-earner families and long and nonstandard employment hours. This analysis uses U.S. time-diary data from 1998 to 2000 to investigate the association of employment and household multitasking. Results indicate that mothers do more multitasking than fathers and the gender gap in household labor is largest for the most intense type of multitasking: combining housework and child care. In addition, mothers employed for long hours spend more time multitasking than mothers employed 35–40h per week. It appears that motivations for multitasking are heterogeneous: some multitasking is done out of convenience, whereas other multitaskings are a strategy used to manage too much work in too little time.

The purpose of this paper is to solve the puzzle of the disproportionately lower employment rate of mothers of toddlers with relation to the employment rate of mothers of preschool and school-age children in Estonia.

The research is based on the Most Similar System Design and compares Estonia with Lithuania. The applied methods include inferential statistics and microsimulation techniques, employing the OECD Benefits and Wages Calculator, the OECD Family Support Calculator and EUROMOD – the European tax-benefit microsimulation model.

The comparison revealed that the overwhelming majority of the crucial aspects of socio-cultural, economic and institutional conditions were more favourable for maternal employment in Estonia than in Lithuania. This explains the higher maternal employment rates both for mothers of pre-schoolers and school-age children in Estonia. However, one particular element of the institutional context targeted to the mothers of toddlers – the unconditional parental benefit – had an entirely opposite character. This particular feature of the parental leave scheme was the only factor that could explain why the employment rate of mothers of toddlers is disproportionately lower than the employment rate of mothers of older children in Estonia and much lower than the employment of mothers of toddlers in Lithuania.

This study complements previous research by providing evidence on the relative importance of universal parental benefit schemes in the context of other country-specific conditions for maternal employment, including the availability of institutional childcare. Furthermore, the results presented show that childcare regime typologies, at least those that characterise Eastern European countries, should be more sensitive to children’s age.

The aim of this paper is to study employment effects of workfare and training programs for lone mothers receiving means‐tested benefits in Germany.

The empirical analyses are based on a large‐scale administrative data set covering the entire population of unemployed means‐tested benefit recipients. A timing‐of‐events approach is used to control for possible selectivity in program entries.

Findings are that lone mothers particularly profit from participating in vocational training programs. It seems they can benefit from updating their job skills after having interrupted their employment for childcare. By contrast, workfare does not seem to be beneficial for those with young children. Workfare is especially intended to enhance participants' motivation to increase their job search efforts. The main reason lone mothers of young children have not been employed is however likely to be lack of childcare, rather than lack of motivation.

Lone mothers of young children are perhaps not an adequate focus group for workfare, and should be assigned there less often, and instead more frequently to skill training programs.

As of yet, very little research has investigated effects of training and workfare programs specifically for lone mothers in Germany. The findings from the present study can contribute to understanding whether lone mothers, who are strongly targeted by these programs despite facing employment obstacles on account of low levels of childcare provision, can actually profit from program participations.

This research focuses on the extent sharing economy transforms employability for women impacted by domestic and reproductive work. The authors explore the experience of mothers, of how digital peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms can affect their self-perceived employability and skills deterioration by unlocking human capital through technology acceptance.

This study adopted a pragmatism-based approach incorporating using a single-case study research design with the Gioia methodology. It utilised a semi-structured telephone survey to collect data to explore the decisions around usage of a newly developed mobile P2P app, aiming to support employability among mothers. Analysis was conducted inductively using thematic analysis and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The study finds that mothers experience high rates of continued labour market attachment on a casual or part-time basis, difficulty in juggling family and work, and high levels of concern both about future employment/entrepreneurial opportunities and expected stress in balancing dual roles of carer and earner. While mothers are interested in using new sharing economy technologies to reduce skills deterioration and improve signalling, the authors find that there were both technology and non-technology related barriers. These included trust and security, life-stage mismatch, time poverty and limitation of service offerings.

This research was limited to mothers in one state in Australia and by the case study research design, the measurement model and the self-report nature of the data collection. Hence, the findings may lack generalisability in other contexts. It also limits the ability to make conclusions regarding causality.

This exploratory study contributes to research in the intersection between human resources (HR) and entrepreneurship by illustrating how sharing economy platforms can offer women a means to overcome the issues of signalling and skills deterioration in relation to aspects of human capital theory by developing new skills that may act as positive signals signal to potential employers or investors. Additionally, the social interactions between mothers, through technology adoption, can provide a basis for improving future self-employment or entrepreneurship and employability.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of different family policy systems in Europe and evaluate their impact on the employment strategy of mothers with care responsibilities for dependent children.

The paper outlines a typology of family policy regimes in Europe – covering the 26 countries. A typology based on a cluster analysis of macro indicators of family policy – coverage of childcare, effective parental leave and spending on family policies. The cluster analysis is based on data from OECD family data base. Then follows an analysis of the impact of the different family policy regimes on mothers' employment strategies when they return into gainful employment, based on data from the European Social Survey, 2008.

The authors have identified four different family policy models: extensive family policy, long parental leave, family care, and cash for care. For each of the models, different strategies are found for take up of employment for mothers with dependent children.

The paper includes 26 European countries, thereby covering the East and Central Europe, which is not the case in most welfare typologies. Furthermore, the authors distinguish clearly in the analyses between the institutional dimension and the outcome – mothers' employment strategies.