Temporary contracts and work-family balance in a dual labor market

A well-established finding in the literature is that self-employment enables mothers to accommodate work and family needs better than when they are engaged in organizational employment. With this re-sult in mind, the authors investigate within a dual system of job pro-tection if women under temporary contracts face greater work–family conflicts than those under permanent contracts. The authors use data on women’s work and fertility histories from the Spanish Con-tinuous Sample of Working Histories to analyze whether women under temporary contracts transition to self-employment upon motherhood more than those who are under permanent contracts. Analyses show that being under a temporary contract increases women’s likelihood of transitioning to self-employment upon child-birth. Supplementary analyses show that this is partly the result of voluntary transitions and not an employer’s decision to terminate a temporary contract upon motherhood. Overall, these findings re-veal a hidden cost of temporary contracts: the greater difficulty in balancing work and family. The arrival of a child imposes new family demands on parents who need to ensure that their newborn’s needs are fulfilled. Since women con-tinue to bear the major responsibilities for household production, parent-hood is likely to increase the conflict between employment and family duties for working mothers. Given the increased participation of women in the labor force and in the number of dual-earner families, work–family con-cerns have become an important public policy issue. Consequently, during the past two decades employers and governments have shown growing interest in understanding what policies and practices are effective at reduc-ing work–family conflict. Several papers have investigated the relationshi