Should Parents of Young Children Work? Changing Attitudes Toward Maternal and Paternal Full-Time Employment in Spain and Sweden

While there is an extensive literature on cross-country differences in the labor force participation of parents (especially women) with young children that is primarily focused on structural explanatory factors, relatively little is known about attitudes toward maternal and paternal employment. This study used two waves of the European Social Survey (ESS), (2006/07 and 2018/19) to examine whether and how attitudes toward parents of young children remaining in full-time employment have changed in Spain and Sweden, two countries belonging to different gendered regimes, between the two survey points in time. Societal consensus on maternal full-time employment became more widespread in both countries, although it remained higher in Sweden. Moreover, Swedish society’s approval of maternal full-time employment is even higher than that of paternal full-time employment nowadays, but mothers of young children employed full time continue to have lower approval rates than their male counterparts in Spain. Multivariate analyses have shown that differences in approving attitudes by age and educational level have been non-existent between the two waves of the ESS in Sweden, while differences remain significant among certain age groups and social strata in Spain. The study’s results indicate that young people, especially young women, are the most supportive of mothers with young children working full time. Better educated women were found to be the most reluctant to approve of men remaining in full-time employment during the early years of their children’s lives. These results corroborate that change in favor of a more egalitarian family life model is limited to specific, self-selected innovative groups (such as the youngest and most educated) in countries like Spain, where combining work and parenthood is still perceived as a woman’s task, rather than as a social norm for both women and men that needs to be promoted and facilitated by state policies, as is the case in Sweden.