Employment Preferences or Family Values - Where Are the Pitfalls for Women's Labour Participation?

A better reconciliation of work and the family life is one important issue on the political agenda in many areas of the world. In West-Germany, the male-breadwinner family model is still well established. Only recently, the development of child-care for children less than three years of age offers mothers the possibility to re-enter the labour market early. Apart from such important structural restrictions, family values and gender attitudes play an important part for explaining labour force participation of mothers. With regard to family values, the family-home plays a decisive role. In West-Germany there is a widespread believe that children should grow up in sub-urban or rural neighbourhoods, so that moving to a child-friendly home can be seen as a proxy for a strong value orientation towards family life. Such moves normally add space between the family home and the work place, which results in the necessity of long-distance commuting. Hence, an early re-entrance in the labour market might become un-attractive for women, although they had a strong labour market orientation before the move. The goal of this contribution is to estimate the influence of family-oriented relocations on the re-entry in the labour market of mothers, controlling for employment preferences and gender attitudes.

The data comes from the German Socio-Economic-Panel Study (GSOEP). The sample consists of 900 women who had a partner and a first birth between 2001 and 2010 and event-history models are applied. Preliminary results show that a child-oriented move indeed impacts mostly negatively on the re-entry of mothers in the labour market, whereas employment preferences have positive influences. Other important influences like marital status, that are partly interacted with the family values and employment preferences, support the view that both concepts are useful for enhancing our understanding of the underlying processes.