Lynn Prince Cooke is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Bath, conducting comparative quantitative research on group differences in paid and unpaid work, and their impact on families. Her primary interests are in how labour market and social transfers structure economic inequalities among women and men, as well as between them. She is also interested in life course research, such as the impact of household divisions of labour on the risk of divorce and its consequences. She is a board member of the ISA Research Committee 19 on Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy, and a research fellow of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Prof Cooke is currently PI on a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the NEWFAMSTRAT project (grant agreement #680958), exploring the ‘new’ shape of family-related gender stratification in Finland, Germany, and the UK.

Title of key note: “The Family Wage Gap in Context:  Parental Effects among Women and Men in Britain, Finland and Germany”

At the heart of gender economic inequality is the disparate impact parenthood has on women’s and men’s wages. Whereas motherhood predicts wage penalties, fatherhood in many countries predicts an earnings advantage. Recent studies on liberal welfare regimes reveal parental wage effects vary among mothers and among fathers as well. The research presented here is the first to assess the contribution of parenthood to within-gender wage inequalities in diverse socio-political contexts over time. Using 1995 to 2015 waves of British, Finnish, and German panel data and quantile regression allows us to map the impact of parenthood across women’s and men’s wage distributions in three regimes that differ in their policy supports for both gender and class equality. The span of the data also allows us to compare how within-country parental wage effects changed in the wake of policy reforms. Notable among these reforms are the 2003 introduction of statutory paternity leave in Britain, and Finnish fathers’ parental leave quota, and the 2007 German family policy reforms to increase mothers’ labor activation. Results highlight that while between- and within-gender inequality associated with parenthood differs across socio-political contexts, recent pro-equality reforms have had little impact on parenthood’s stratifying effects.