In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with childcare. One result? Women are paid less.
In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women — even those who are not mothers.
Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or to achieve other high-powered positions at work.
Illustration: Tania Chou
“Family-friendly” policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and they can go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the workforce. However, these policies often have unintended consequences.
They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear that women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits.
“For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Washington-based Center for American Progress.
Unlike many nations, the US has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed, but 8 percent less likely to get promotions than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished study by Mallika Thomas, who is set to become an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. She attributed this partly to companies that do not risk investing in the careers of women who might leave.
As the US public debates whether and how to make the nation’s system more generous, there are lessons from overseas. The childcare law in Chile, the most recent version of which went into effect in 2009, was intended to increase the percentage of women who work, which is less than 50 percent and is among the lowest rates in Latin America. The law in Chile requires companies with 20 or more female workers to provide and pay for childcare for women with children under two, in a location nearby where the women can go to feed them.
The requirement for childcare eases the transition back to work and helps children’s development, said Maria Prada, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and lead author of a study on the effects of the law.
However, it has also led to a decline in women’s starting salaries of between 9 percent and 20 percent. Researchers compared pay at the same companies before and after they grew large enough to be forced to comply with the law.
“That was thought to be a provision to help them participate in the labor force and achieve more work-family balance, and it is doing the opposite,” said Prada, whose study was published last month by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than seven the right to ask their employers for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.
Over the following decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study led by Daniel Fernandez-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid.
The likelihood of women of childbearing age not being employed rose 20 percent, he said.
Another result: Women were more likely to be in less-stable, short-term contract jobs, which were not required to provide such benefits, he added.
“One of the unintended consequences of the law has been to push women into the lower segment of the labor market with bad-quality, unprotected jobs where their rights cannot be enforced,” Fernandez-Kranz said.
These findings are consistent with previous research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, economists at Cornell. In a study of 22 nations, they found that family-friendly policies like long maternity leaves and part-time work protections in Europe made it possible for more women to work, but that they were more likely to be in dead-end jobs.
There is no simple way to prevent family-friendly policies from backfiring, researchers say.
One idea is to make sure that employers do not have to finance their costs so that they do not pass the burden on to employees as they did in Chile.
For example, the three US states — California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — that offer paid family leave finance it through employee payroll taxes.
Another suggestion is to make sure policies are generous, but not too generous. Some say that more than three months of maternity leave is helpful, but that more than nine months begins to hurt women’s career prospects.
Perhaps the most successful way to devise policies that help working families, but avoid unintended consequences is to make them gender-neutral, people who study the issue say.
In places like Sweden and Quebec, for instance, policies encourage both parents to take time off for a new baby.
“It has to become something that humans do, as opposed to something that women do,” Glynn said.
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