Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper assesses the effect of the number of children on female participation in the labour market, while controlling for female educational attainment and welfare policies. Even if relevant progresses have been made during the last decades, the analysis reveals that a remarkable and embedded gap in the traditional division of gender roles still exists. Through a cross-section and cross-national analysis of the European Union countries’ data, the paper explores, the relation between the number of children and female employment rate both at aggregated and disaggregated levels.

Based on the construction of a new composite index to assess the relative performance of welfare policies, we show that the variability of performances cannot be explained only by the amount of resources devoted to social policies, but also by its composition: countries with higher shares of social public expenditure, specifically aimed at reducing income concentration, obtain better results. This associates the traditional classification of the welfare systems to the performance obtained in the social sector.