Child care responsibilities and continuing training participation in Europe: A cross-national comparative study

The proposed project addresses gender differences in the participation in continuing education and training. The dominant model for explaining gender differences in training derives from human capital theory, which predicts that due to family responsibilities that lead to more discontinuous patterns of labour force participation, and therefore shorter periods during which the return to training can be recouped, among women than men, women avoid jobs requiring further training and employers prefer not to offer these jobs to female candidates. Apart from the lower expected returns on the training investment for women, the mere fact that training investments tend to require extra-time, which the working mother spends away from her care responsibilities, would lead to the expectation that women are less likely to participate in further training. The project sets out to examine the ways in which the presence of (younger) children in the household affects men’s and women’s odds of participating in continuing training. Looking at potential gender differences with regard to the ways in which the likelihood to train depends on the presence of child care responsibilities, we aim to contribute to our understanding of the gender gap in continuing training participation and its origin. It is particularly interesting to study this in a cross-country comparative perspective as the impact of children on women’s training investment can be expected to vary across different welfare state and skill regimes. The main data source for the comparative dimension of the project is the European Social Survey (ESS 2004). Moreover, in addition to the comparative effort covering all EU-countries included in the ESS 2004 we plan a smaller scale comparison of Sweden, Britain and Germany, using panel data.