Gender, Changing Attitudes and Childcare Policy Reforms in the Federal States of Germany

Representing the prototype of a male-breadwinner model-oriented society for a long time, Germany adopted several reforms in the mid-2000s to enhance mothers’ employment and to achieve more gender-equal participation of men and women in work and care.

Research has suggested that people’s changing normative beliefs towards working mothers fueled these reforms when political parties competed for new groups of voters. Yet, the expansion of public provision of childcare varies strongly across regions and take-up is stratified by mothers’ education.

In this talk, Dr. Agnes Blome will first illustrate the gendered consequences of the work-family reconciliation policy reforms. Second, Blome will investigate regional heterogeneity and inequalities in normative beliefs as a causal factor behind the diverging developments.

Our data includes survey information on attitudes merged with regional childcare data, and complemented by political, institutional, socio-demographic, and economic covariates. We investigate the questions in different static and dynamic model specifications controlling for time-invariant unobservables.

Author Affiliation

Dr. Agnes Blome, associated senior research fellow at the Otto-Suhr-Institute for Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

For more information or to request accessibility arrangements, please contact Eleanor V. Langford (evlangfo@syr.edu)