Séminaire scientifique de l'OSC 2019-2020

98, rue de l'Université 75007 Paris - salle Annick Percheron

vendredi 7 février 2020 de 12h à 13h30

The Care Penalty in the United States and European Union:
Analysing the role of the labour market and social policy context

Emanuele Ferragina* - Zach Parolin**

*Associate-Professor, Sciences Po-OSC
**Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Columbia University, Center on Poverty & Social Policy

Care occupations grew in the U.S. and Europe throughout the past decade, now amounting to nearly a third of the workforce in many of these countries. While past explanations of the care penalty pointed to individual and economic factors, this study adopts an institutionalist perspective. Specifically, we suggest that labour market and welfare state institutions can help to explain why the care penalty is larger in the U.S. than most European countries.

We test competing explanations of the care penalty in a comparative framework, analysing the sources of differences in the care gap between 25 countries, employing harmonized micro-data from the U.S. and EU Member States from 2005 to 2016 (EU-SILC 2016; U.S. Current Population Survey 2019). We use country and year fixed effects models to test the extent to which the relative earnings of care occupations are conditional on demographic and time-varying contextual factors, such as collective bargaining coverage, employment protection legislation, and welfare state spending.

Following recent developments in the care literature, we also take into account the heterogeneity of care work, considering earnings penalties or premiums among reproductive care occupations, as well as high- and low-status nurturant care occupations.

Our primary findings suggest that labour market and welfare state institutions are far more important than individual or demographic characteristics in explaining the relative earnings of care occupations. Specifically, we find that higher rates of collective bargaining coverage and welfare state spending contribute to higher relative earnings for reproductive care occupations, and lower relative earnings for the well-paid, high-status nurturant care occupations. A counterfactual analysis comparing care penalties in the U.S. to EU Member States demonstrates that demographic factors explain a very small portion of cross-national differences in the relative earnings of care occupations.

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