Research question/goal:

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize family policies as key to achieving social and gender equality at the global level by fostering early human development through early childhood education and economically empowering mothers with family-friendly labor policies. However, only recently has the socioeconomic effectiveness of family policies been explored on a global scale, leaving many knowledge gaps. Work-family challenges have been recognized as a ‘new’ social risk or a problem of post-industrial societies in which a large proportion of women are in a formal employment setting. Importantly, the existing research lacks a broader comparative perspective, due to the lack of data on the scope of benefits and inclusiveness of family policies.

In the A06 project, we will investigate the relation of family policies to socioeconomic outcomes and associated policy learning, such as their contribution to combating child poverty, promoting child development, and reducing gender inequality in different world regions. We focus on two questions: (1) How do family policies impact women’s and children’s socioeconomic outcomes? (2) When and how do policy actors adopt information on family policies’ socioeconomic outcomes, leading to policy learning? In a mixed-methods approach, we will, first, formulate hypotheses and evaluate the impact of family policy on women’s labor market outcomes and child development indicators. Using our new family policy database in WeSIS, we will employ causal inference methods at both the micro- and macro-levels to address potential biases arising from the heterogeneity in policy introduction, scope of benefits, and inclusiveness in cross-country empirical analyses. Second, we will combine the impact evaluation with a political science perspective on measuring  socioeconomic impacts’ and family policy learning, investigated through comparative case studies from a Global North and Global South context. Through these complementary perspectives, the A06 project will advance understanding of family policies’ socioeconomic outcomes and their political outcome.