Public Child‐Care Expansion and Changing Gender Ideologies of Parents in Germany

• Author: Gundula Zoch,Pia S. Schober
• Date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12486
• Published date: 01 August 2018

G Z Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories

P S. S University of Tübingen∗and German Institute for Economic Research∗∗

Public Child-Care Expansion and Changing Gender

Ideologies of Parents in Germany

This study investigates whether the expansion

of public child care for children aged younger

than 3 years in Germany has been associated

with individual-level change in gender ideolo-

gies. The authors develop and test a theoretical

framework of the short-term impact of family

policy institutions on ideology change. The

analysis links the German Family Panel pairfam

(2008 to 2015) with administrative records

on county-level child-care provision for those

aged younger than 3 years and applies xed

effects panel models. The ndings show that

the child-care expansion has been associated

with moderate changes toward less-traditional

gender ideologies only among mothers in West

Germany and mostly among mothers without a

college degree. In East Germany, the authors

found evidence of more traditional gender ide-

ologies among mothers without a college degree

as the child-care reform unfolded. The results

provide evidence that policy reforms may alter

gender ideologies also in the short-term.

During the past decades, many Western

countries have invested increasingly in family

Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories,

Wilhelmsplatz 3, 96045 Bamberg, Germany

(gundula.zoch@lifbi.de).

∗University of Tübingen, Wilhelmstrasse 36, 72074

Tübingen, Germany.

∗∗ German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin),

Mohrenstrasse 58, 10117 Berlin, Germany.

Key Words: child care, employment, family policy, gender

roles, longitudinal research,quantitative methodology.

policies to facilitate the combination of employ-

ment and child care and to reduce persistent

gender differences in domestic and paid work

(International Network of Leave Policies &

Research, 2016). Comparative studies have

highlighted the importance of family policy

institutions, particularly the availability of non-

parental child care (Ciccia & Bleijenbergh,

2014; Steiber & Haas, 2012), not only for

shaping opportunity structures but also for

inuencing gender culture within society. In

addition, recent longitudinal studies provide

evidence that the formation of gender ideolo-

gies is not completed in early adolescence but

remains subject to the inuence of later life

course events, such as marriage or childbirth

(e.g., Baxter, Buchler,Perales, & Western, 2015;

Brooks & Bolzendahl, 2004; Schober & Scott,

2012). However, to date, little evidence exists

as to whether institutional reforms can alter

gender culture and ideologies only in the long

term via cohort replacement or also in the short

term (Ellingsæter, Kitterød, & Lyngstad, 2017;

Gangl & Ziee, 2015; Unterhofer & Wrohlich,

2017). In addition, few studies have investigated

through which channels family policy reforms

may alter gender ideologies in the short term.

The recent expansion of child-care provision

for those aged younger than 3 years in Germany

provides a unique opportunity to investigate the

short-term impact of family policy change on

individual-level gender ideologies.

Investigating gender ideologies is important

to understand their formation and, thus, persis-

tent gender inequalities in related behavior, such

as the gender division of domestic and paid labor

1020 Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (August 2018): 1020–1039

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12486

Child-Care Expansion and Changing Gender Ideologies 1021

(for an overview,see Davis & Greenstein, 2009;

Steiber & Haas, 2012). Wecontribute to the liter-

ature on cultural change and ideology formation

during the life course by investigating whether

the recent expansion of public child care for

those aged younger than 3 years in Germany has

been associated with a change in gender ideolo-

gies, particularly with the increased acceptance

of maternal employment due to role exposure or

normative policy effects. We use the term gen-

der ideologies to denote individuals’ level of

support for the division in paid and domestic

work based on the belief in (multiple) gendered

separate spheres (Grunow & Veltkamp, 2016),

whereas gender culture refers to macro-level

gender ideologies and social norms. The latter

have been dened as clusters of self-fullling

expectations (Schelling, 1980), which are sus-

tained through people’s conditional preferences

for conformity and through the belief that other

people will conform (Bicchieri, 2017). The term

gender role attitudes only refers to empirical

measures that aim at capturing the multidimen-

sional concept of individual-level gender ideolo-

gies (for an overview, see Davis & Greenstein,

2009). Although we acknowledge the increasing

complexity of different combinations of egalitar-

ian and traditional gender ideologies (Grunow

& Veltkamp, 2016; Knight & Brinton, 2017),

this study concentrates particularly on gender

ideologies with respect to the sphere of mater-

nal employment. It relies on the continuum of

traditional and less traditional gender ideolo-

gies much in the same way as previous research

on gender ideologies focusing on the gendered

division of paid and domestic work (for an

overview,see Davis & Greenstein, 2009; Steiber

& Haas, 2012). For our empirical analyses, we

combine longitudinal individual-level informa-

tion on parents’ ideologies with annual admin-

istrative records on county-level child care for

those aged younger than 3 years, and thus exploit

regional and temporal variation in the expansion

of public child care.

B

Institutional and Cultural Context in East

and West Germany

Persistent East-West differences in the accep-

tance of maternal employment and formal child

care have long been explained by different

family policies before the German reunication

(e.g., Adler & Brayeld, 1997; Banaszak, 2006;

Bauernschuster & Rainer, 2012; Goerres &

Tepe, 2012; Lee, Alwin, & Tus, 2007). Before

1990, the institutional setting in West Germany

was characterized by long but low-paid parental

leave entitlements and a lack of public child-care

services. Together with the joint taxation for

couples and a family health insurance, still

existing, this has frequently been classied

as supported familialism (Hook, 2015) and is

considered to suppress employment of second

earners and, thus, reinforce gender inequality.

New mothers tended to interrupt their employ-

ment for several years and often returned to the

labor market only part-time. By contrast, in the

German Democratic Republic shorter parental

leave and extensive provision of formal care

for very young children encouraged a fast and

full-time return to the labor market of mothers

(Rosenfeld, Trappe, & Gornick, 2004).

Since reunication, employment trends

among mothers with young children have con-

verged somewhat, and part-time employment

has become the most prevalent arrangement

to combine employment and family care in

both regions (Konietzka & Kreyenfeld, 2010).

Yet historical East-West differences are still

reected in longer employment interruption

durations, lower maternal employment partici-

pation, and more traditional gender ideologies of

parents toward maternal employment and using

formal child care for young children in West

Germany when compared with East Germany

(e.g., Banaszak, 2006; Bauernschuster & Rainer,

2012; Gangl & Ziee, 2015). In addition, the

reunication process has resulted in long-lasting

labor market consequences, with persistently

lower wages and higher unemployment in East

Germany (Blien, Möller, Hong Van, & Brunow,

2016).

Since the mid-2000s, reforms of parental

leave and child-care policies in Germany

indicate a paradigm shift from the previous

model of supported familialism (Hook, 2015).

They aimed at improving the compatibility of

employment and family care, speeding up mater-

nal labor market return, and increasing paternal

child-care involvement. Before a major reform

in 2007, parents on parental leave were eligible

to receive a child-rearing benet of about 300

Euros per month for the rst 6 months and

depending on household income, parents could

extend this until the child’s second birthday.

In 2007, the German government introduced