CSB Working Paper, 2019, 4: Gender and education inequalities in parental employment when having a young child with increased care needs: Belgium and Norway compared

Caring for a child with increased care needs can be a demanding task and the time required to provide such care hampers their parents’ employment participation. Especially mothers and lower educated parents are affected by the increased care burden and reduce or stop their employment participation. So far, the literature lacks studies investigating the employment impact in a comparative perspective, however. We fill this gap with a comparative study of Belgium and Norway. We use comparable admin…

Caring for a child with increased care needs can be a demanding task and the time required to provide such care hampers their parents’ employment participation. Especially mothers and lower educated parents are affected by the increased care burden and reduce or stop their employment participation. So far, the literature lacks studies investigating the employment impact in a comparative perspective, however. We fill this gap with a comparative study of Belgium and Norway. We use comparable administrative datasets, identifying children with increased care needs as those receiving a cash benefit designed to financially compensate for the extra private care. The results confirm that gender and education inequalities exist in both countries. Moreover, the gender inequalities are stronger in Belgium than in Norway, while this is not true for the education inequalities. Our analyses suggest that increased support on multiple fronts is needed for families with children with increased care needs.