Maternal employment : enabling factors in context

Maternal employment is still below the overall EU recommended level of 60% in many European countries. Understanding the individual, household and contextual circumstances under which mothers of children of different ages are likely to be employed is crucial to develop strategies capable of increasing maternal employment. This article takes a comparative approach to investigating the characteristics associated with maternal employment in the presence of children aged 0\u20132, 3\u20135, 6\u20139 and 10\u201312 years. We model the probability of being employed full-time, parttime or being a homemaker using EU-SILC data (2004 to 2007) from Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom \u2013 four countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes. The results indicate that individual and household characteristics are more relevant in determining mothers\u2019 employment in countries where the state is less supportive towards maternal employment: Italy and to a lesser extent Germany and the UK \u2013 for the period observed