Supporting the employment of mothers: Policy variation across fourteen welfare states

This article compares 14 OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on 18 policy indicators are presented. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions. The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare-state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the 14 countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment. They are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers' employment. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare-state regimes.