Family Policy Measurement Tool: Advanced Methodologies for Understanding Inequalities in Family Policy

Project Information

FAMPOT

Grant agreement ID: 893008

DOI

10.3030/893008

Project closed

EC signature date 1 April 2020

Start date 1 October 2020

End date 30 September 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 178 320,00

EU contribution

€ 178 320,00

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FAMPOT (Family Policy Measurement Tool: Advanced Methodologies for Understanding Inequalities in Family Policy)

Reporting period: 2020-10-01 to 2022-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Parenthood has a profound effect on people's lives. Not only for the joy it can bring but also for the consequences associated with people's individual and family income. It is an established fact that although parenthood has an impact on both parents, it disproportionately affects women compare to men. Following parenthood, women are less likely to be working or work less hours compare to men. They also earn less and save less into their pensions. Family policies, like parental leave or child benefits, were designed to correct for the gender inequality by encouraging and enabling women to stay on the labour market after they become mothers. The state support from the family policies is, however, build on many rules that determine who is entitled to the support and how big should this support be. Since these rules can be very complex, we know little about who is benefiting from these policies and who is losing out on support. The first objective of the project is to create a tool that can use existing data we have from various social surveys and find their respondents who can benefit from family policies and those who cannot. Such a tool has a strong potential to uncover not only gender inequalities but also inequalities between women with different socio-economic background. This tool will help us understand how well family policies are doing in tackling gender and socio-economic inequalities or whether they might be contributing to the social problem. Such information is crucial for understanding how family policies work and how they can be improved to benefit all parents and carers.
However, family policy design is not the only reason why some parents might benefit from state support than others. Another important problem arise when parents who are entitled to support from family policy programmes do not receive it. There are several reasons for the so-called non-take-up of social benefits. Nonetheless, one of the main reasons is the lack of knowledge either about the policy or one's own entitlements. Despite that, we know little about what do people actually know about family policies and their own entitlements. For that reason, the second objective of the project is to find out what people know about family policies and whether their knowledge changes as they are growing older, build romantic relationships and settle down.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

I collected legislative data on maternity, paternity and parental leave Policies in 28 European countries from 2010 to 2020. I translated this information into a code (Open Family Policy Program, OFPP) that is designed to identify respondents in survey data who are eligible for the aforementioned policies and estimate the size of their entitlements. I also created a Contextual Database that contains quantified data about the leave policy designs. I wrote a Methodology Report that details the principles of the OFPP and the indicators it creates. I also produced a Codebook for the Contextual Database. Both the OFPP and the Contextual Database as well as the documentation are publicly available.
Together with my colleagues, we produced several publications about or using the OFPP. We wrote a journal article and a book chapter where I discuss the relevance of the OFPP for our understanding of inequalities. We also used the OFPP to analyse parental leave entitlements among single mothers with children under six years old in Europe. We also investigated the effect of parental leave entitlements on single mother's employment outcomes. The results of our investigation suggest that inclusive parental leave policies that provide financial benefits to mothers regardless of their employment status before birth are associated with better employment outcomes compare to designs that provide financial benefits only to employed mothers.
I designed a questionnaire aimed at measuring people's knowledge of family policies. The questionnaire was fielded in the Netherlands and I produced a preliminary analysis of the results. The preliminary results suggest that although the knowledge of family policies increase as people progress through the life course, the knowledge is rather limited even among parents.
I presented both the OFPP and the results of the research in several international conferences during the project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project builds on the contemporary knowledge of (comparative) social policy research, gender and social inequality. It identified the limitations in the methodology commonly used in social policy research. The main limitation of current social policy methods and data lies in their inability to capture the complexity of (family) policy designs and identify the distribution of policy entitlements in population. The project quantified the complexity of family policy designs and demonstrated how it tackles gender and social inequalities but also instances when it can contribute to the existing problem. The project also helped to identify the depth of knowledge of family policies in general population. The outcomes of the project not only enrich the resources for the scientific community but provide important insights for policy-makers on regional, national and supra-national level as well as for social workers and families. These insights are crucial for understanding of how policies tackle inequalities and how effective policies can look like.