Understanding the role of maternal labour markets and workplace contexts for children’s development

• Applicants: Dr. Mathias Huebener; Professorin Dr. Gundula Zoch
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 490729957

Maternal employment has increased substantially in many industrialised countries, and thereby transformed family life and the environment in which children grow up. The employment conditions that enable mothers to reconcile work and family life differ significantly between, e.g., occupations, workplaces, socio-economic groups, and regions. They could create important differences in children’s early learning environments, which are increasingly acknowledged as important sources of early socio-economic gaps in children’s development and social inequalities throughout the lifespan. Yet, we know little about how differences in maternal labour market opportunities and the direct workplace contexts actually create differences in reconciling work and family life, and how they shape children’s early learning environment and development. The proposed research project will investigate how maternal employment characteristics affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development in the first ten years of life. The research project will combine a sociological and economic perspective to (1) examine the role of the macroeconomic environment and local labour market conditions for maternal employment decisions, family life and child development; and to (2) examine factors that contribute to the family-friendliness of maternal workplaces, and how they in turn affect children’s development. As the current Covid-19 pandemic highlights the importance of workplace contexts and macro labour market conditions, the proposed project will also examine (3) whether differences in maternal workplace contexts and local labour market conditions have amplified inequalities in children’s development during the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout the research agenda, we will provide a detailed empirical analysis of potential mechanisms. We focus on Germany, where recent family policies have encouraged early maternal employment. Our analysis will apply modern causal analysis and advanced regression techniques. We will build the analysis on the innovative large-scale survey panel data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS-SC1-ADIAB). The data combines detailed information on family life and high-quality measures of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills with mother’s full administrative employment biographies as collected by the Federal Employment Agency. Additionally, we will link (a) tailored data on local labour markets at different regional levels that we generate from the universe of administrative employment data, (b) information on family-friendly workplace audits, (c) occupational telework index data and (d) data on regional daycare and all-day schooling conditions. Thereby, the project creates a rare opportunity to provide insights on the effects of maternal employment conditions at the macro- and micro-level that have rarely been considered.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants