Should Parents of Young Children Work? Changing Attitudes Toward Maternal and Paternal Full-Time Employment in Spain and Sweden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While there is an extensive literature on cross-country differences in the labor force participation of parents (especially women) with young children that is primarily focused on structural explanatory factors, relatively little is known about attitudes toward maternal and paternal employment. This study used two waves of the European Social Survey (ESS), (2006/07 and 2018/19) to examine whether and how attitudes toward parents of young children remaining in full-time employment have changed in Spain and Sweden, two countries belonging to different gendered regimes, between the two survey points in time. Societal consensus on maternal full-time employment became more widespread in both countries, although it remained higher in Sweden. Moreover, Swedish society’s approval of maternal full-time employment is even higher than that of paternal full-time employment nowadays, but mothers of young children employed full time continue to have lower approval rates than their male counterparts in Spain. Multivariate analyses have shown that differences in approving attitudes by age and educational level have been non-existent between the two waves of the ESS in Sweden, while differences remain significant among certain age groups and social strata in Spain. The study’s results indicate that young people, especially young women, are the most supportive of mothers with young children working full time. Better educated women were found to be the most reluctant to approve of men remaining in full-time employment during the early years of their children’s lives. These results corroborate that change in favor of a more egalitarian family life model is limited to specific, self-selected innovative groups (such as the youngest and most educated) in countries like Spain, where combining work and parenthood is still perceived as a woman’s task, rather than as a social norm for both women and men that needs to be promoted and facilitated by state policies, as is the case in Sweden.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".