Does the Firm Make the Difference? The Influence of Organizational Family-Friendly Arrangements on the Duration of Employment Interruptions after Childbirth

Abstract

AbstractDespite the increase in dual-earner couples in Germany over recent decades, starting a family still often leads to a (re-)traditionalization of the division of labour in partnerships, with considerable gender differences in working hours and family obligations remaining. Consequently, after a child is born especially women face the challenge of reconciling career and family. Against this backdrop, a growing proportion of firms has started to create family-friendly working conditions to relieve the burden on their (female) employees. In the course of doing so, firms have also increasingly invested in organizational family-friendly arrangements in recent years. In this article, we analyse the effects of these arrangements on employees’ behaviour by using German-linked employer–employee data. We ask how specific organizational family-friendly measures affect a crucial point in women’s careers: the employment interruption after childbirth. Based on time-specific piecewise constant models, our results reveal that organizational family-friendly measures positively influence women’s return to the labour market after childbirth and thus result in benefits for both firms and employees. Furthermore, we find that the effects of the measures are determined by the structural context and are not time constant but vary according to the age of the child.