Country-Specific Conditions for Work and Family Reconciliation: An Attempt at Quantification

The country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation have been theoretically and empirically acknowledged to constitute important determinants of fertility and women’s employment. So far, however, there have been very few attempts to quantify these conditions into a single measure which would allow for comparisons across countries of the magnitude of the barriers encountered by working parents. The lack of such a quantitative index precludes the rigorous quantitative testing of the impact of the country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation on women’s fertility and employment behaviors. It also leaves researchers with no option other than to conduct simplistic analyses in which family policies or attitudinal regimes are linked with the outcomes of women’s fertility and employment choices in a descriptive manner. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by proposing a quantitative index of conditions for work and family reconciliation (ICWFR). The index takes into account family policy measures, labor market structures, and gender norms that have been theoretically argued and empirically shown to be relevant for women’s fertility and employment choices. We also perform a series of uncertainty and sensitivity analyses which verify the robustness of the ICWFR to our assumptions, and which illustrate the range of the index volatility.