Professor Sevilla will present a new framework for understanding the persistence of gender inequality, moving beyond traditional childcare time-use measures.
As part of the Public Policy Frontiers series, Professor Almudena Sevilla will present a new framework for understanding the persistence of gender inequality by moving beyond traditional measures of childcare time. Drawing on recent advances in the economics of the family, the talk introduces the concept of on-call care - the continuous responsibility, monitoring, and availability associated with parenting that is largely invisible in standard time-use data.
Using a pseudo-panel event study based on the 2003–2022 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), Professor Sevilla shows that while primary interactive childcare explains much of the initial decline in mothers' paid work following childbirth, on-call care becomes the dominant factor behind the long-term motherhood penalty. These findings suggest that existing labour market models and policies, including parental leave and childcare subsidies, overlook a key mechanism through which caregiving continues to constrain women's employment.
The talk will discuss the implications of this framework for understanding the persistence of gender inequality in the labour market and for designing policies that better account for the temporal and unpredictable nature of caregiving.
Event Speakers
Professor Almudena Sevilla
Professor Almudena Sevilla is Professor of Economic and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).