Marie Evertsson

• Professor of Sociology
• Professor at Stockholm University

Unequal divisions of paid work and care among new parents contribute to increasing inequalities. One explanation for this is joint utility maximization and the benefits of partners (temporarily) specializing in paid work and care. This paper examines the (dis)advantages of specializing compared to dividing tasks more equally by studying whether dif...

This chapter discusses theories and research on social stratification by gender, focusing on wage and earnings inequalities. The first part describes changes over time in gendered economic inequalities and discusses the various theories used to account for the gender pay gap from demand-side and supply-side perspectives. The division of paid and un...

This article presents an analysis of how lesbian couples in Sweden negotiate birth motherhood in a context where equality is thought to be achieved by being and doing the same [Gullestad, M. (2002). Invisible fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-96...

Objective: The purpose of the study is to contribute to an understanding of the cultural and normative meaning of birth motherhood and how lesbian couples decide who carries the child. Background: The decision of who carries the child is central in lesbian family-making, carrying consequences for life after birth. Even so, it has been relatively...

Introduction This study analyses the division of parental leave and the income development in gay father families through surrogacy in Sweden, seen as one of the most family-friendly and egalitarian countries in the world. Methods Based on longitudinal population register data, descriptive and bivariate regression models are estimated to analyse t...

Objective The aim of the study was to analyze factors predicting (a) the transition to parenthood for female same‐sex couples in Sweden and (b) which partner is the birth mother for the first and (any) second child. Background Longitudinal studies in which couples become parents are rare for same‐sex couples in any context, even though these famil...

In this chapter, family sociological theories and research on different-sex couples are discussed from the perspective of same-sex couples’ division of work and care before and after (any) transition to parenthood. Our focus is primarily on research from the United States, the Netherlands, and the four bigger Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, N...

This article ties together key findings from a 12-year cross-national qualitative collaboration that involved researchers from nine European countries. Our comparative analysis draws on longitudinal heterosexual couple data, in which both partners were interviewed first, during pregnancy, and second, between six months and two-and-a-half years afte...

This article applies a couple perspective to assessing gender inequality in Sweden—a setting with high maternal labour force participation, a long history of family policy investment, and strong norms of gender equality. We address open questions about how couples’ earnings following parenthood have changed over time, and how patterns of inequality...

As discussed extensively in this volume, policies have important implications for how families are formed and how they live their lives. Family leave policies, among other things, enable parents to take job-protected leaves from work to care for a newly born or adopted child and/or to take time off from work when a child is ill. However, factors su...

https://socialpolicyblog.com/2019/08/19/forerunners-and-laggards-in-parental-leave-uptake-in-sweden/

This chapter summarizes the conclusions based the country studies and chapters reporting from couples transitioning to parenthood in eight European countries. Based on in-depth interviews with these couples both before and after they had a first child, we have studied how plans and ideals were realized, abandoned or modified in the process.

https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/new-parents-in-europe

Sweden is often considered a forerunner in family change and developments towardsless gendered family production patterns. In this study, we focus on recent developmentstowards more gender-equal sharing of parental leave in Sweden. We explore how fathers’use of parental leave has changed over time before and since the turn of the century. Asthe par...

Working part-time can potentially be a great means of reducing work-life conflict for parents of young children. However, research has not univocally found this attenuating relation, suggesting it may not be universal, but rather contingent on other factors. This study investigates whether the relation between part-time work and work-life conflict...

Research on the division of paid and unpaid work at the transition to parenthood has rarely been able to separate the social construction of gender and motherhood/fatherhood identities from labour market and financial factors. By bringing in female same-sex couples (SSC) and comparing how the transition to parenthood influences the division of pare...

Background: Swedish fathers’ parental leave uptake has increased over time, but progress has been moderate. In relation to this, we ask what factors hinder or facilitate the taking of leave by fathers and how – if at all – the leave influences the father’s relationship with his child. Objective: To study (i) the reasons for parents’ division of p...

One of the challenges faced by research on the gendered transition to parenthood is how to dismantle the interconnected nature of biology, gender and economic reasoning. We contribute to this aim by comparing division of parental leave in different-sex couples (DSC) and female same-sex couples (SSC). Motherhood identity formation appears to be stre...

We discuss the slow process through which the gendered transition to parenthood has changed in Western societies and the degrees to which this process challenges economic theories on the utility-maximizing rational man, woman, and/or couple. The transition to parenthood has long-term consequences for women’s careers, often even in couples in which...

It is common for European couples living fairly egalitarian lives to adopt a traditional division of labour at the transition to parenthood. Based on in-depth interviews with 334 parents-to-be in eight European countries, this book explores the implications of family policies and gender culture from the perspective of couples who are expecting thei...

Persistent gender differences in caretaking and the parental leave length have been proposed as one important reason why the gender wage and income gap has remained stable in Sweden for a long period of time. In this article, we study whether and how parental leave uptake (PL) affects mothers’ and fathers’ earned income and wages during a period of...

This article assesses the impact of discontinuous work histories on young women’s occupational mobility in Germany, Sweden and the US. Women with continuous work histories are compared with those with gaps due to family leave, unemployment, or other reasons. The German Life History Study, the Swedish Level of Living Survey and the US National Longi...

The quantitative scholarship on domestic labor has documented the existence of a gender gap in its performance in all countries for which data are available. Only recently have researchers begun to analyze economic disparities among women in their time spent doing housework, and their studies have been largely limited to the U.S. We extend this lin...

We use the Swedish Young Adult Panel Study to study spouses’ gender ideology and women’s and men’s division of routine housework and child care. The results show that men with an egalitarian gender ideology spend one hour more in housework per week than do other men and that their spouses spend approximately two hours less in housework than do othe...

Även om ojämlikhet avseende utbildning, social klass och kön har minskat över tid ser människors levnadsvillkor under uppväxten, i skolan, i hemmet samt i och utanför arbetslivet olika ut. I denna unika lägesrapport om Sverige av idag beskriver bokens författare – med utgångspunkt i material från Levnadsnivåundersökningen (LNU), ett av Sveriges stö...

We use the longitudinal Young Adult Panel Study to examine changes in subjective work commitment among new mothers in Sweden. With a sample of childless women in 1999, we study changes in work commitment occurring between 1999 and 2003, comparing those who had a child during this period with those who did not. In the 1999 sample, there is no differ...

We theorize how social policy affects marital stability vis-à-vis macro and micro effects of wives' employment on divorce risk in 11 Western countries. Correlations among 1990s aggregate data on marriage, divorce, and wives' employment rates, along with attitudinal and social policy information, seem to support specialization hypotheses that divorc...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on two welfare state regimes with differing degrees of de-familialisation strategies, Germany and Sweden, to study whether and how women’s career interruptions influence their labour market prospects. By comparing women with continuous careers to those with discontinuous careers due to: parental leave...

This article compares the duration of and consequences for employment interruptions for mothers with distinct educational qualifications in cross-national perspective. We analyze the duration of mothers’ employment interruption and the relative quality of the job after childbirth, for high and low qualified mothers in Germany, Sweden, and the Unite...

Sweden is known for its policies aimed at facilitating the combination of work and family for both mothers and fathers. The parental leave insurance is one important part of these policies, considered to reduce the work-family conflict for women. However, there is scarce knowledge about the effects a long family leave break may have on women's occu...

This chapter investigates the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities among women and disparities in the time they spend on housework. It analyzes the gap related to income differences of women in Germany, Sweden and the United States. The chapter compares this economic disparity in the time spent by women on housework with respect to the g...

We compare how gender inequality varies by educational level in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States, representing three different welfare regimes: the conservative, the social democratic, and the liberal. With few exceptions, gender inequality in labor force participation, work hours, occupational segregation, and housework are less seve...

This article focuses on three countries with distinct policies toward motherhood and work: Germany, Sweden and the United States. We analyze the length of mothers' time out of paid work after childbirth and the short-term career consequences for mothers. In the United States, we identify a career punishment even for short time-out periods; long tim...

In this article, we compare how gender inequality in labor force participation and earnings vary by educational level in Sweden and the United States, focusing on "prime age" individuals from twenty-five to fifty-four who have at least one child in their household. We also examine how educational differences in gender inequality vary across the lif...

Most research on the division of housework is based on cross-sectional studies. This study instead focuses on the way in which changes in spouses’ relative resources are related to changes in housework. The data come from the Swedish Level of Living Survey for the years 1991 and 2000. An important issue is whether spouses can use their relative res...

The housework Swedish girls and boys age 10 to 18 do, and their attitudes towards gender equality in the home are studied. One aim is to see whether the work children do is gendered and if so, whether they follow their parents’, often gendered, pattern in housework. A second aim is to see whether children's attitudes are influenced by their parents...

This article assesses the relative explanatory value of the resource-bargaining perspective and the doing-gender approach for the division of housework in the United States and Sweden from the mid-1970s to 2000. The data used are the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Swedish Level of Living Survey. Overall results show that housework wa...

Formal on-the-job training (FOJT) can have a positive impact on wages and on promotion opportunities. According to theory and earlier research, a two-step model of gender inequality in FOJT is predicted. First, women are less likely than men to take part in FOJT and, second, once women do get the more remunerative training – such as general trainin...

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 2004.

This article focuses on three countries with distinct policies toward motherhood and work: Germany, Sweden and the United States. We analyze the length of mothers' time out of paid work after childbirth and the short-term career consequences for mothers. In the United States, we identify a career punishment even for short timeout periods; long time...