An assessment of the impact of maternity leave provisions in UK Academia
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Economics
Abstract
While it seems now ascertained that extensions in the duration and generosity of parental provisions succeeded in increasing job market participation and in delaying mothers' return to work, with important consequences on their and their children's wellbeing (Gregg et al. 2007), the evidence is not as conclusive for what concerns long-term outcomes such as employment and wages (Lalive & Zweimuller 2009).
On the one side, more generous leave provisions might in fact raise the perceived cost of hiring women for employers, as they will be necessarily stay away from the workplace over a longer period, possibly causing their human capital to depreciate (Jacobson et al. 1993). On the other, longer mandated leave could improve the mother's welfare in the short-run (Dahl et al. 2016), serve as an insurance mechanism for the family (Tominey 2016) and, most importantly, prevent career interruptions (Baker & Milligan 2008). Therefore, some authors find a positive effect of more generous leave provisions on the human capital of mothers, reflecting in higher wage and employment rates in the long-run.
Our work belongs to the strand of economic research addressing the short- and long-term salary, marital, fertility and career implications of maternity leave extensions on working mothers. A further goal of the project is to disentangle the impact of an increase in the length of maternity rights - the number of weeks over which employers have the duty to reinstate mothers to the same position occupied before pregnancy - from that of an increase in the generosity of maternity pay. By generosity here we refer to both the magnitude of the instalments received, upon satisfying given eligibility criteria in terms of employment continuity, and the strictness of such criteria for a given pro-rata amount.
It is worth stressing out in fact that, in the UK, the legislative gap between the so-called right of reinstatement - unpaid leave - and the provision of paid leave is still significant: 13 out of the 52 weeks of unconditional statutory maternity leave are in fact unsalaried. This is why Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) generally top-up statutory pay in the first 33 weeks of leave, with significant variation in generosity across them (Epifanio & Troeger 2018). We therefore wish to exploit quasi-random reforms in the eligibility requirements, length and pro-rata instalments of maternity benefits offered by UK HEIs to study their impact on mothers employed in UK academia at the time of their child's birth.
In order to perform our analysis, we exploit a unique survey conducted in 2017 among 59,000 women employed in UK HEIs. The 9,979 respondents were asked a set of questions about their personal and employment history, as well as their experience around the birth of their three youngest children (if any). Particular attention was devoted to the mother's occupational and relational status, the childcare provisions utilized and the perceived supportiveness of their partner and working environment before, throughout and after each pregnancy. We expand such dataset with information on the research intensity, income, reputation and staff composition of UK universities coming from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).
On the one side, more generous leave provisions might in fact raise the perceived cost of hiring women for employers, as they will be necessarily stay away from the workplace over a longer period, possibly causing their human capital to depreciate (Jacobson et al. 1993). On the other, longer mandated leave could improve the mother's welfare in the short-run (Dahl et al. 2016), serve as an insurance mechanism for the family (Tominey 2016) and, most importantly, prevent career interruptions (Baker & Milligan 2008). Therefore, some authors find a positive effect of more generous leave provisions on the human capital of mothers, reflecting in higher wage and employment rates in the long-run.
Our work belongs to the strand of economic research addressing the short- and long-term salary, marital, fertility and career implications of maternity leave extensions on working mothers. A further goal of the project is to disentangle the impact of an increase in the length of maternity rights - the number of weeks over which employers have the duty to reinstate mothers to the same position occupied before pregnancy - from that of an increase in the generosity of maternity pay. By generosity here we refer to both the magnitude of the instalments received, upon satisfying given eligibility criteria in terms of employment continuity, and the strictness of such criteria for a given pro-rata amount.
It is worth stressing out in fact that, in the UK, the legislative gap between the so-called right of reinstatement - unpaid leave - and the provision of paid leave is still significant: 13 out of the 52 weeks of unconditional statutory maternity leave are in fact unsalaried. This is why Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) generally top-up statutory pay in the first 33 weeks of leave, with significant variation in generosity across them (Epifanio & Troeger 2018). We therefore wish to exploit quasi-random reforms in the eligibility requirements, length and pro-rata instalments of maternity benefits offered by UK HEIs to study their impact on mothers employed in UK academia at the time of their child's birth.
In order to perform our analysis, we exploit a unique survey conducted in 2017 among 59,000 women employed in UK HEIs. The 9,979 respondents were asked a set of questions about their personal and employment history, as well as their experience around the birth of their three youngest children (if any). Particular attention was devoted to the mother's occupational and relational status, the childcare provisions utilized and the perceived supportiveness of their partner and working environment before, throughout and after each pregnancy. We expand such dataset with information on the research intensity, income, reputation and staff composition of UK universities coming from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).
Organisations
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/P000711/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 2109767 | Studentship | ES/P000711/1 | 01/10/2018 | 31/03/2022 | Riccardo Di Leo |
| Description | While the analysis is still ongoing, here is an outline of the work performed so far. We present a novel database that combines an original survey of women and mothers working in the Higher Education sector in the UK with detailed data on the occupational maternity benefits offered to academic women. Our data allow tracking, at the individual level, the child-bearing experiences and employment histories simultaneously. To give an illustration of how researchers can use our data, we offer a portrait of mothers in UK academia and how their situations have changed over time. We also carry out an empirical analysis of the determinants of leave uptake. We show that female academics' employment status and their family arrangements have a significant impact on the types of maternity leave taken. Being a mother appears to have no effect on salaries, but still slows down career progression, even in a high-skilled sector like academia. Motherhood also has an ambivalent impact on women's evaluation of their working environment, improving satisfaction, but reducing the perception of salary fairness relative to men. More generous maternity provisions are associated with higher salaries, possibly as they reduce the crowding out of research activity, similarly to longer childcare hours and an even distribution of responsibilities within the household. Our findings also highlight the importance of supportive work environments for mothers' careers and well-being. Taken together, these findings suggest the necessity of a multi-faceted policy response to the motherhood penalties. Motherhood is widely believed to be an important factor slowing down the career progression of women, hence explaining the so-called ``gender pay gap''. Depreciation in productivity and broadly-defined ``human capital'' associated with career breaks has been found to be an important channel, especially in high-pay sectors. We investigate the relationship between motherhood, generosity of maternity pay, and productivity in academia. Our findings consistently show the existence of a motherhood penalty in productivity (but not in the quality of the output), and a robust, positive link between more generous maternity pay, i.e. more weeks with full salary replacement, and academic productivity, both in terms of quantity and quality of research output, in the short-, but also in the long-term. |
| Exploitation Route | This project generated some robust evidence at the individual level regarding the motherhood penalty academic women in the UK face, as well as indications on factors possibly alleviating (or exacerbating) it. As a result, policymakers could take advantage of our study when analyzing how to address the crucial issue of the gender gap in pay and representation in the academic context and beyond. Our study could in fact be extended both geographically (i.e.m looking at the legislative scenario in other countries) and sectorally (i.e., where better-paid maternity leave provisions are granted according to different eligibility criteria), as we are planning to do in the future. |
| Sectors | Education,Other |