Do Women work more if they feel less guilty?

Sammanfattning: Recent studies identified gender role attitudes as a determinant of the remaining gender gap in labor force participation. In this study, I will investigate the correlations between women’s gender role attitudes and female labor force participation in the European Union. Further, I examine the heterogeneity of the relationship between mother’s gender role attitudes and labor force participation across countries with different family policies. Using the two most recent waves (1999 and 2008) of the European Values Survey (EVS) and performing Probit- and OLS-analyses, my results suggest that women’s gender role attitudes are an important determinant of female labor force participation. Especially anti-egalitarian views and the feeling of ‘mother’s guilt’ (disagreement with the statement ‘A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work’) correlate negatively with female labor force participation. Those relationships are even stronger for mothers than for childless women. Comparing the correlations across Bahle’s (2009) European family policy groups, I find that the relationship between the absence of ‘mother’s guilt’ and individual mother’s labor supply varies between 8.9 percent and 27.2 percent. Therefore, this study strongly emphasizes the importance of considering different family policies for the estimation of gender role attitude effects on women’s labor force participation across countries.