The Effects of Sons and Daughters on the Gender Wage Gap Between Men and Women in Sweden. : Evidence from the European Social Survey

Sammanfattning

This thesis compares the impact of gender on the labour market activities of parents in Sweden by exploring the Child Gender difference in those activities as represented by the European Social Survey (ESS). The authors consider whether mothers and fathers react in different ways to the gender composition of their offspring, based on the existing body of work on gender wage gaps, child penalties and parental labour supply. Analysis comes from Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models which isolate the effects of age, education, marital status, and survey-round to run with the weekly hours data set. The results indicate that there is an important gender difference in labour supply after controlling for relevant characteristics of women work, on average, 5.7 fewer hours a week than men. Results also show that fathers of sons and fathers of daughters are not significantly different in terms of their weekly working hours when compared to childless m, with no significant difference between child gender and the fathers when adjusted for week of the year. In contrast, the association of motherhood is with the reduction in labour supply, especially among mothers, especially for mothers with sons and mothers in mixed-gender households, in which the highest reduction in labour supply (in terms of weekly working hours) is noted. While it has been well documented that Sweden has a long tradition of gender equality legislation and support for families, the study results indicate there is still a lack of equality in the distribution of care between mothers and fathers. To test the thesis's key contribution, a supplementary model controls for individual-level breadwinner norm attitudes using attitudinal variables available in the ESS. Controlling for these normative attitudes does not significantly reduce the child-gender effect on paternal labour supply, providing limited evidence that the son premium operates through a breadwinner identity channel in Sweden. Overall, the study provides limited evidence that child gender influences paternal labour supply and instead highlights the continuing importance of motherhood-related labour market adjustments in explaining gender differences in working hours in Sweden.