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.
