{"id":984,"date":"2017-03-08T06:44:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T12:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=984"},"modified":"2017-03-08T06:44:34","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T12:44:34","slug":"international-family-research-for-international-womens-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2017\/03\/08\/international-family-research-for-international-womens-day\/","title":{"rendered":"International Family Research for International Women\u2019s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Years ago, the Council on Contemporary Families<\/a> (CCF) gave the United States a \u201cGentleman’s C\u201d in terms of family policy,<\/a> and not much has changed since then. CCF scholars have used the international variation in work-family policy to look at how families are doing \u2013 inside and outside of the United States. For International Women\u2019s Day, here is a review of CCF research using international populations and the international media that reported on the research.<\/p>\n

Supportive work-family policies foster women\u2019s entrepreneurship<\/strong><\/p>\n

UC-Santa Barbara sociologist Sarah Th\u00e9baud\u2019s<\/a> investigation into “What Helps Women Entrepreneurs Flourish?”<\/a> found that women in countries with more generous work-family policies like subsidized childcare and paid parental leave have more successful entrepreneurial endeavors: they \u201cemploy more workers, express more ambitious growth intentions, and are more likely to report introducing a brand new product or service to the market\u201d than in countries without such benefits. There are higher numbers of women entrepreneurs in countries without progressive work-family policies, like the United States, but they don\u2019t really succeed like those in the more generous countries. Their lack of success led Th\u00e9baud to conclude that these were cases of entrepreneurship as a \u201cfallback\u201d option in situations where balancing work and family was not possible otherwise.<\/p>\n

Supportive work-family policies help men and women split up housework and childcare:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Economist Ankita Patnaik reports in \u201c’Daddy\u2019s Home!\u2019 Increasing Men\u2019s Use of Paternity Leave,\u201d<\/a> that in Quebec, after the implementation of a new non-transferrable, paid five-week paternity leave policy that paid parents seventy percent of their income (Quebec Parental Insurance Plan), fathers were more likely to take advantage of paternity leave than were fathers in Quebec before the policy implementation in 2006 or in provinces without the new policy. Eighty percent of fathers eligible for the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan utilized it, compared to less than twenty percent of those taking advantage of the previous policy, which paid fifty-five percent of income and was transferrable from fathers to mothers. After participants\u2019 paid paternity leave had finished, participating fathers and mothers had a more egalitarian division of household and market labor than couples in which the father did not take the paid paternity leave. This research was profiled to Canadian readers in the National Post<\/a>, and to Sri Lankan readers in Viva Lanka<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Patnaik\u2019s encouraging finding is important, because in the United States \u2013 where paid paternity leave is not guaranteed\u2014parents tend to revert to \u201ctraditional\u201d family roles after the birth of a child. Arielle Kuperberg\u2019s<\/a> research, outlined in the CCF brief “First comes love, then comes\u2026housework?”<\/a> was profiled in the Australian edition of the International Business Times<\/a>. Kuperberg, a sociologist at UNC-Greensboro, reported that it was not the transition to marriage, but the transition to parenting that increased gender inequality in household labor among couples.<\/p>\n

Balancing market and non-market work leads to happier couples and families:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are the implications of policies that allow parents to share work and family obligations? Well, for one, couples who share housework have more sex, and couples who share childcare have better sex, according to Cornell\u2019s Sharon Sassler<\/a> in her CCF brief, \u201cA reversal in Predictors of Frequency and Satisfaction in Marriage.\u201d<\/a> This report was covered by The Daily Mail<\/a> in the U.K., The Sydney Morning Herald<\/a> in Australia, and Edizione Italiana<\/a> in Italy, among others.<\/p>\n

More broadly, variation in work-family policy accounts for the \u201chappiness gap\u201d between parents and non-parents. Jennifer Glass<\/a> (UT-Austin), Robin Simon<\/a> (Wake Forest University), and Matthew Andersson<\/a> (Baylor University), in “Parenting Happiness in 22 Countries,”<\/a> review that in the United States, where work-family policies are lacking, the happiness gap is wide \u2013 parents tend not to be as happy as non-parents. But in countries with \u201cgood parental policy \u2018packages,\u2019\u201d made up of paid parental leave, guaranteed time off, affordable childcare, and \u201cwork schedule flexibility,\u201d the differences are less stark. In Norway and Hungary, where there are generous parental policy packages, parents are even happier than non-parents. In addition to many English language articles around the world, this report was covered in a Spanish-language article entitled \u201c“La paternidad y la infelicidad”<\/a> at Proexpanci\u00f3n, and in “Un buon welfare pu\u00f2 rendere felici i genitori,”<\/a> in the Italian news outlet Internazionale.<\/p>\n

Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago, the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) gave the United States a \u201cGentleman’s C\u201d in terms of family policy, and not much has changed since then. CCF scholars have used the international variation in work-family policy to look at how families are doing \u2013 inside and outside of the United States. For International Women\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38846],"tags":[30859,255,21458,371,431,3724,76],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heard-around-ccf","tag-couples","tag-housework","tag-international-womens-day","tag-policy","tag-research","tag-womens-rights","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":999,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}