An increase of over a third in the time that children in Chile spend in primary school each day has had a big positive effect on the quality of mothers’ jobs. What’s more, the labour market benefits of the full-day schooling policy have been disproportionately higher for women with relatively lower levels of education. These are the central findings of new research by Matias Berthelon, Diana Kruger, Catalina Lauer, Luca Tiberti and Carlos Zamora Siervo.

The results indicate that extending full-day schooling coverage to all schools increased the likelihood of women having a formal contract, decreased the likelihood of self-employment and raised wages. The authors conclude that greater access to childcare through longer primary school schedules can lift household wellbeing and play a role in reducing income and gender inequalities.

About half of the world’s workers remain poor or are vulnerable to slipping into poverty. Among them, in all regions of the world, women are over-represented, as they work and earn less than their male counterparts and are more likely to participate in unpaid work and jobs without social protection. This is mirrored in the higher participation of women in informal employment, where jobs are of poorer quality reflected in terms of lower wages, shorter tenure and uncovered by social protection systems.

Reducing gender gaps in job quality is a desirable objective because doing so would lead to higher growth rates, increased household wellbeing, reductions in poverty and greater women’s empowerment, as well as preventing further increases in gender gaps in times of recessions.

But many women cannot access higher-quality jobs when they become mothers due to the time-intensive nature of child-rearing and traditional gender roles, which often cause mothers to delay entry to or exit from the labour force.

Recent empirical studies have shown that there is a ‘motherhood penalty’ when mothers who exit the labour market are temporarily unable to catch up to the earned wages of women who were never mothers or never exited the market during their employment life. There is also a motherhood penalty with better-quality jobs.

Well-designed childcare programmes and primary school conditions (such as school schedules and the school calendar) can help to make motherhood and work more compatible, allowing mothers to access better quality jobs and, therefore, reducing such penalties.

In Chile, the provision of full-day schooling for primary school-aged children, which involved an extension of around 35% in the time spent at school, significantly and positively affected the quality of mothers’ jobs.

According to the new study, an increase in full-day school coverage of 25 percentage points – the equivalent of extending full-day schooling coverage to all schools from observed 2015 levels – would lead to an increase in the likelihood of having a formal contract by 3.1%, and would decrease the likelihood of self-employment by 10%.

Moreover, the full-day schooling policy has had heterogeneous effects. Among lower education mothers (those with just a high school degree or less), reaching full implementation of the policy would increase the likelihood of full-time jobs by 4.0% and of having a contract by 5.5%, and decrease the likelihood of being self-employed by 11.1%.

Among higher-educated women (those with at least some college education), full-day schooling increased wages by 1% and open-ended contracts by 3.7%.

These results suggest that the full-day schooling policy contributes to improving the quality of employment among mothers. Access to childcare through longer primary school schedules can increase household wellbeing and can play a role in reducing income and gender inequalities.

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Longer School Schedules, Childcare and the Quality of Mothers’ Employment

Authors:

Matias Berthelon (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and IZA)
Diana Kruger (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and IZA)
Catalina Lauer (Graduate School of Economics, Finance and Management, Goethe University)
Luca Tiberti (University of Florence and Partnership for Economic Policy)
Carlos Zamora Siervo (Euromonitor International)