Introduction
As difficulty reconciling work and family has become a more visible social issue over the last half–century (Chung & van der Horst, Reference Chung and van der Horst2018; Lewis, Reference Lewis2009; Pettit & Hook, Reference Pettit and Hook2005; Ruppanner & Huffman, Reference Ruppanner and Huffman2014), so social policy research has investigated patterns and drivers of institutional support for work–family reconciliation (Bettio & Plantenga, Reference Bettio and Plantenga2004; Daly, Reference Daly, Castles, Leibfried, Lewis, Obinger and Pierson2010; Gornick & Meyers, Reference Gornick and Meyers2008; Hook, Reference Hook2015; Pettit & Hook, Reference Pettit and Hook2009). Although more research examines public provision (Baum, Reference Baum2006; Daly & Ferragina, Reference Daly and Ferragina2018; Hank & Steinbach, Reference Hank and Steinbach2019), employer–provided family policy is also a major source of institutional support for employees (Glass & Fodor, Reference Glass and Fodor2018; Ooms, Reference Ooms2019).Footnote 1
Public family policy research tends to interpret patterns of provision as shaped by economic as well as normative considerations (Bergqvist & Saxonberg, Reference Bergqvist and Saxonberg2017; Ferragina & Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser2015; Sarna et al., Reference Sarna, Hegewisch and Hartmann2013). Yet research into occupational welfare is skewed in favour of economic explanations (Budd & Mumford, Reference Budd and Mumford2004, Reference Budd and Mumford2006; Fleckenstein & Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Fleckenstein, Seeleib-Kaiser and Clasen2011; Seeleib-Kaiser & Fleckenstein, Reference Seeleib-Kaiser and Fleckenstein2009). This is particularly true of research on employer family policy in the United States (Glass & Fujimoto, Reference Glass and Fujimoto1995; Morgan & Milliken, Reference Morgan and Milliken1992; Osterman, Reference Osterman1995).
This paper challenges this status quo, showing that for public childcare and female executives, normative explanations are better able to account for certain patterns of employer–childcare provision. The impetus to question the primacy of economic explanations comes from two fields of research. First, studies of occupational welfare in Europe suggest that generous public family policy is associated with more generous public family policy, a mechanism called ‘crowding-in’ (Wiß and Greve, Reference Wiß and Greve2020). This tends to be explained through neoinstitutionalist theory (DiMaggio & Powell, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1983, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1991), where public provision legitimates employees’ demands for employer support on normative rather than economic grounds.
Second, literature on the changing role of women leaders suggests that they can alter what is considered an appropriate level of employer support (Lewis & Smithson, Reference Lewis and Smithson2001; Powell, Reference Powell, Powell and DiMaggio1991). These insights are particularly relevant in the United States, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country with the highest percentage of women in managerial positions (at 41%; ILO, 2020; OECD, 2023). Yet the significance of female leadership for employer family policy has rarely, and in the case of employer-childcare never, been investigated in a representative study of employers in the United States.
However, it is difficult to determine whether and when female leaders are more fruitfully understood as exerting economic or normative pressure, as the predicted employer response stays the same: more employer family policy. To overcome this predicament, this study exploits the landscape of employer-provided childcare in the United States. Two forms of employer childcare are differentiated: The first type, flexible spending accounts (FSAs), are geared towards high–skill, high–income employees and can be provided at a low cost to employers (Kelly, Reference Kelly2003). Here, it can be argued that they are a cost–effective policy that is provided for economic reasons. The second form of employer childcare (non-FSAs) encompasses other forms of childcare support, such as in-house childcare centres or vouchers. Such childcare is used more by employees with lower skills or income (Hipp et al., Reference Hipp, Morrissey and Warner2017; Morrissey & Warner, Reference Morrissey and Warner2009), while at the same time being costlier than FSAs (Ratnasingam et al., Reference Ratnasingam, Spitzmueller, King, Rubino, Luksyte, Matthews and Fisher2012; Ruddy, Reference Ruddy2020). Provision of non–FSA childcare is less plausible on economic grounds alone, but likely motivated more by normative considerations.
Thus, this paper questions the notion that normative considerations are negligible in employers’ motivation to provide childcare in the United States. It poses three questions regarding employer childcare in the United States: is public childcare relevant? How important is the prevalence of female leadership? And what do these patterns of provision tell us about the relevance of normative considerations?
To preview, the results show that public childcare is relevant for non-FSA childcare, suggesting that public policy can increase normative pressure on employers to provide childcare. Second, female leadership is highly significant for FSAs and non–FSA childcare alike. By examining the public-policy context, the paper differentiates when economic versus normative explanations of female leaders’ relevance to employer childcare are more plausible. The papers’ main contribution is to show that, in context of public childcare and female leadership, normative factors are likely underappreciated in studies of U.S. employer family policy.
Occupational welfare: economic and normative explanations
The occupational welfare literature tends to explain employer provision as economically motivated, i.e., as the result of profit-maximising cost-benefit analyses (Greve, Reference Greve2007, Reference Greve2018; Farnsworth, Reference Farnsworth2013; Sinfield, Reference Sinfield2013). This perspective can be summarised as a rational–choice theoretical approach (DeMenezes & Kelliher, Reference DeMenezes and Kelliher2011; Estévez-Abe et al., Reference Estévez-Abe, Iversen, Soskice, Hall and Soskice2001; Hart, Reference Hart2010). In this view, employers provide occupational welfare to increase profits by improving hiring efficiency or retention of highly skilled employees (Naczyk, Reference Naczyk, Natali, Pavolini and Vanhercke2018; Riva & Rizza, Reference Riva and Rizza2021), increasing productivity (Beauregard & Henry, Reference Beauregard and Henry2009; Konrad & Mangel, Reference Konrad and Mangel2000), or preventing costly confrontations with organised labour (Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Seeleib-Kaiser2008; Trampusch, Reference Trampusch2013). Rational–choice theory is the dominant theoretical approach in studies of occupational welfare by sector or industry (Den Dulk & Groeneveld, Reference Den Dulk and Groeneveld2012; Wiß, Reference Wiß2015), employee skills and shortages (Berg et al., Reference Berg, Appelbaum, Bailey and Kalleberg2004; Mares, Reference Mares, Hall and Soskice2001), number of employees (Farnsworth, Reference Farnsworth and Greve2018; Osterman, Reference Osterman1995), degree of unionisation (Budd & Mumford, Reference Budd and Mumford2006; Jacobi, Reference Jacobi2023) and share of female employees (Kelly et al., Reference Kelly, Moen and Tranby2011; Seyler et al., Reference Seyler, Monroe and Garand1995).
Of special interest to social policy scholars is the relationship between the pillars in the social division of welfare (Mann, Reference Mann2009; Titmuss, Reference Titmuss1956). However, particularly in explaining the relationship between social and occupational welfare, rational-choice theoretical explanations are increasingly insufficient. These predict that employers provide little support in polities with generous social provision, as this is not an efficient use of employer resources, and because public provision decreases economic pressure on employers vis-à-vis their employees. This mechanism – greater public provision in conjunction with less occupational welfare – is referred to as ‘crowding-out’ (Etzioni, Reference Etzioni1995; Wiß & Greve, Reference Wiß and Greve2020). However, the empirical evidence increasingly suggests that generous social welfare is often associated with widespread occupational welfare (Natali et al., Reference Natali, Keune, Pavolini and Seeleib-Kaiser2018), a dynamic termed ‘crowding-in’ (Chung, Reference Chung2019; Wiß & Greve, Reference Wiß and Greve2020). This is especially true in studies examining the relationship between public and employer family policies (Den Dulk et al., Reference Den Dulk, Peters and Poutsma2012, Reference Den Dulk, Groeneveld, Ollier-Malaterre and Valcour2013; Mun & Jung, Reference Mun and Jung2018). Here, neoinstitutionalist explanations of employer behaviour are becoming increasingly relevant.
Neoinstitutionalism explains employer-family policy as the organisational response to normative pressures, such as changing perceptions of what is an appropriate level of support employees can expect from their employers (Lewis & Smithson, Reference Lewis and Smithson2001; Powell, Reference Powell, Powell and DiMaggio1991). The theoretical premise is that the availability of generous public family policies legitimises employees’ claims for support (Scott, Reference Scott, Powell and DiMaggio1991; Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, Reference Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt2019). This creates normative pressure for employers to offer family policies to gain normative legitimacy from their environment (DiMaggio & Powell, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1983, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1991). Neoinstitutionalist perspectives better explain the evidence suggesting that public family policy crowds-in employer family policy in Europe (Chung, Reference Chung2019; Den Dulk et al., Reference Den Dulk, Peters and Poutsma2012; Wiß & Greve, Reference Wiß and Greve2019).
The relevance of the crowding-in dynamic has so far rarely been applied to analyses of the United States (for an exception, see Daiger von Gleichen, Reference Daiger von Gleichen2022), most likely because public family policy is far less generous than in Europe (Daiger von Gleichen & Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Daiger von Gleichen, Seeleib-Kaiser and Shaver2018; O’Connor et al., Reference O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver1999). Yet there has been considerable growth in U.S. public family policy at the sub–federal level, especially in the realm of childcare (Cohen-Vogel et al., Reference Cohen-Vogel, Sadler, Little, Merrill and Curran2020; Daiger von Gleichen & Parolin, Reference Daiger von Gleichen and Parolin2020; Friedman-Krause et al., Reference Friedman-Krause, Barnett, Garver, Hodges, Weisenfeld, Gardiner and Jost2022). This suggests that in the United States, where rational-choice explanations for occupational welfare dominate (Hacker, Reference Hacker2002, Reference Hacker2006; Lynch, Reference Lynch, Béland, Morgan and Howard2014), normative explanations might be underappreciated. Moreover, a burgeoning literature suggests that female leaders – who are particularly prevalent in the United States – are increasingly driving normative change in organisations.
Female leaders: from cogs in the machine to change agents
In this journal, Kowalewska (Reference Kowalewska2020) argued that analyses of the gendered character of welfare states should include considerations of women’s representation in corporate leadership. This argument was born out of a shift in how the sociological literature views the role of women leaders in organisations. Female leaders have been ‘cogs in the machine’, i.e. displaying masculine traits (Miliopoulou & Kapareliotis, Reference Miliopoulou and Kapareliotis2021), bias in favour of men (Dutton, Reference Dutton2018), or lacking power to affect gender-positive change (Kanter, Reference Kanter1977).
Increasingly, however, research suggests that women leaders can be effective ‘change agents’ (Fuwa, Reference Fuwa2021; Kelan & Wratil, Reference Kelan and Wratil2018), i.e. willing and able to weaken gender–biased aspects of organisational culture and procedures (Gould et al., Reference Gould, Kulik and Sardeshmukh2018; Jouber, Reference Jouber2022; Khushk et al., Reference Khushk, Zengtian and Hui2023). This is evidenced when female leaders are not anomalies (Miliopoulou & Kapareliotis, Reference Miliopoulou and Kapareliotis2021) but part of a critical mass of women leaders (Kowalewska, Reference Kowalewska2020, Reference Kowalewska2021). While acknowledging the economic power they wield, the research stresses female leaders’ ability to apply normative pressure for change (Gould et al., Reference Gould, Kulik and Sardeshmukh2018; van Mensvoort et al., Reference van Mensvoort, Kraaykamp, Meuleman and van den Brink2021).
The role of change agents is an important aspect of neoinstitutionalism, which posits that claims-makers within organisations leverage normative legitimacy bestowed by generous public policy (Sauer et al., Reference Sauer, Valet, Shams and Tomaskovic-Devey2021; Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, Reference Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt2019). In this view, employer policy is the result of normative, not economic pressure. Studies of female leadership and employer family policy (Flüter-Hoffman & Seyda, Reference Flüter-Hoffman and Seyda2006; Heywood & Jirjahn, Reference Heywood and Jirjahn2009) explain the generally positive associations as a response to both economic and normative pressures (Ingram & Simons, Reference Ingram and Simons1995; Pasamar & Alegre, Reference Pasamar and Alegre2015; Wiß, Reference Wiß2017).
The acknowledgement that both pressures are at play is the theoretical frontier of female leadership and employer family policy. This is likely because the predicted effects of both forms of pressure are the same: both normative and economic pressure make employers more likely to offer family policy. The contribution of this study is to show a case when the association between female leadership and employer provision is better explained by normative versus economic pressures. To do so, the study exploits the landscape of public sub-federal and employer childcare in the United States.
Public and employer childcare in the U.S., and hypotheses
Public family policy in the United States is liberal in terms of targeting low-income families (Gornick & Meyers, Reference Gornick and Meyers2003; O’Connor et al., Reference O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver1999), and financial assistance to families is ungenerous in comparison to Western European countries (Daiger von Gleichen & Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Daiger von Gleichen, Seeleib-Kaiser and Shaver2018; Woods, Reference Woods2012). Moreover, the United States is the only OECD country that does not have paid maternity leave at the national level (Engeman, Reference Engeman2020). The United States has thus been labelled a ‘laggard’ in public family policy expansion (Daiger von Gleichen & Seeleib-Kaiser, Reference Daiger von Gleichen, Seeleib-Kaiser and Shaver2018).
Nevertheless, several dimensions of public U.S. family policy have expanded in recent decades. The most prominent has been paid leave, currently offered in eleven states (Engeman, Reference Engeman2020). But state-level public childcare expansion has also been extensive. As of 2020, seventeen states had so-called ‘universal’ pre-kindergarten programs in which age and residency were the only requirements for eligibility (Stanford, Reference Stanford2023). An additional thirty-four states offer programs with eligibility tied to an income cap (Friedman-Krause et al., Reference Friedman-Krause, Barnett, Garver, Hodges, Weisenfeld, Gardiner and Jost2022). This leads to the first hypothesis:
H1: Employers in states with more generous public childcare are more likely to provide employer childcare. This is based on neoinstitutionalist theory, which posits that more generous public family policy increases normative pressure on employers to provide employer policies.
Furthermore, there are two categories of employer childcare in the United States that differ by how they can be conceptualised as responses to economic versus normative pressures. FSAs are economically efficient in that they are both low-cost (Galinsky et al., Reference Galinsky, Bond, Sakai, Kim and Giuntoli2008; Kelly, Reference Kelly2003) and targeted towards high–skill, high-income employees (Hipp et al., Reference Hipp, Morrissey and Warner2017). They enable employees to annually devote up to $5,000 pre-tax dollars, administered by their employer, to childcare expenses. Yet setting up an FSA requires that the full sum for the whole year be paid up front, which deters low-income employees from participation (Hipp et al., Reference Hipp, Morrissey and Warner2017). The low cost to employers and greater take-up by high–income employees suggests that FSAs are likely a response to economic pressure.
In contrast, other forms of employer support for and provision of childcare tend to be both highly expensive for employers (Ratnasingam et al., Reference Ratnasingam, Spitzmueller, King, Rubino, Luksyte, Matthews and Fisher2012; Ruddy, Reference Ruddy2020) without being especially attractive to high-skill employees (Feldman & Schultz, Reference Feldman and Schultz2001; Morrissey & Warner, Reference Morrissey and Warner2009). For example, childcare centres have high fixed costs (Feierabend & Staffelbach, Reference Feierabend and Staffelbach2016), and take-up is stronger among lower–income employees (Hipp et al., Reference Hipp, Morrissey and Warner2017; Morissey & Warner, Reference Morissey and Warner2009). Childcare subsidies are furthermore tied to specific childcare providers, limiting parental choice (Sosinsky, Reference Sosinsky, Lloyd and Penn2012), a criterion more determinate of high- as compared to low-income families’ use (Shlay et al., Reference Shlay, Tran, Weinraub and Harmon2005). Such non-FSA forms of childcare are thus less likely a response to economic, but rather to normative pressure on employers. This leads to the following hypothesis pair:
H2: Employers reliant on high-general skills are more likely to provide employer childcare in the form of flexible spending accounts, but no more likely to provide other forms of childcare. This is based on rational-choice theory, suggesting that employers under economic pressure are more likely to provide the most cost-efficient policy.
H3: Employers with a higher share of female leadership are more likely to provide flexible spending accounts as well as other forms of employer childcare. The first association is based on rational-choice theory, suggesting that female leaders exert economic pressure on employers to provide cost–effective employer policy. The second association is based on neoinstitutionalism, suggesting that female executives exert normative pressure on employers to provide childcare, even if doing so is not cost efficient.
Data, measures, and method
Data
The data stems from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a nationally representative employer survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute (Matos et al., Reference Matos, Galinsky and Bond2017), covering private sector employers with at least fifty employees. Employers were selected using a stratified random sampling procedure. The respondents were human resource directors, generally members of organisational leadership.Footnote 2 The study had a 38% response rate, with the total sample containing 919 observations. Following listwise deletion of incomplete observations, the analysed samples consist of 880 and 878 observations for FSA and non–FSA childcare, respectively.Footnote 3
Data regarding public childcare stems from the National Institute of Early Education (NIEER) 2016 State of Preschool Yearbook (Barnett et al., Reference Barnett, Friedman-Krause, Weisenfeld, Horowitz, Kasmin and Squires2017). The employers’ industry skill-profile was determined by analysing the skill composition of industries in the United States using the 2016 American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). Data on state GDP per capita and regional price parities by state were drawn from the U.S. Department of Commerce (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2016a, 2016b). State female labour force participation rates were drawn from the U.S. Department of Labor (Women’s Bureau, 2018). Data on what percentage of the state population prefers a male–breadwinner model come from the 2016 Pew Research Center’s paid parental, family, and medical leave survey (Horowitz et al., Reference Horowitz, Parker, Graf and Livingston2017).
Measures
Dependent variables
The NSE queried respondents about seven forms of employer childcare: information to help locate childcare, childcare vouchers or subsidies not funded by payroll taxes but by the employer directly, childcare at or near the work site, childcare during school vacations, back-up when regular childcare fails, childcare for sick children, and FSAs that pay for childcare with employees’ pre-tax income matched by employer subsidies from payroll tax deductions. Of these seven forms of childcare, six were included in the analysis. Information to help locate childcare was excluded because this sets a very low bar for employer involvement, including for example a simple internet search or mentioning the existence of a nearby crèche. This low cost to employers combined with uncertainty as to how valuable such information is to employees (who can likely obtain it themselves) made it theoretically ambiguous, which is why it was excluded.
From the remaining six categories, I created two binary dependent variables, operationalised as ‘not provided/provided’: FSAs and childcare other than FSAs (‘non-FSAs’). The variable FSAs captures whether employers provide flexible spending accounts, while the variable non-FSAs captures whether the employer provides any of the other five forms of childcare. Thus, the dependent variables capture overlapping samples: employers providing FSAs may or may not additionally provide non–FSA forms of childcare, and vice versa. Correlation between the two forms of childcare is not significant. The distributions are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Descriptive statistics of dependent variables
Note: Unweighted data. Data weighted for employer size suggest that FSAs are provided by 56%, non-FSAs by 13% of employers in the United States.
Independent variables
The explanatory variables are state-level public childcare, the prevalence of female employees, and industry skill profile. State-level public childcare is binary, indicating whether the state in which the employer is located offers public pre–kindergarten not subject to a family income cap, but accessible to children with the appropriate age and residency requirements independent of family income. This operationalisation ensures that public pre–kindergarten represents an option for employees irrespective of income. The prevalence of female leaders is coded as an ordinal variable, the only one provided by the NSE. The categories are ‘no female executives,’ ‘women on some executive levels,’ and ‘women on all executive levels.’ The skill–profile variable is binary, categorising employers’ industry as ‘high-general skills’ or ‘not high–general skills,’ the latter combining low–general and mixed-skills industries.Footnote 4
At the organisational level, the models control for the number of employees, difficulty filling vacancies, share of female employees, and presence of unionised employees. To capture additional state-level distinctions, the models control for state GDP per capita, state-level female labour force participation, and an attitudinal variable capturing the percentage of people per state who prefer a male breadwinner model. Table 2 shows the distributions of the explanatory variables, and those for the control variables are given in Table A3 of the appendix.
Table 2. Descriptive statistics of explanatory variables for each model
Method
Answering the questions necessitates determining the relationship between state-level public childcare, prevalence of female executives in the organisation, and employer childcare provision. Significant associations between independent and dependent variables are important indicators for this relationship, which is why regression analysis is employed. Specifically, given the binary dependent variables, simple logistic regression was used. For the main analysis, two simple logistic regressions were conducted, one for each dependent variable.Footnote 5 In order to accurately interpret and compare the models, the findings are presented as average marginal effects (Mood, Reference Mood2010).
Findings
The findings displayed in Table 3 show repeatedly that patterns of FSA and non–FSA provision are governed by different logics. Public childcare without an income cap is associated with a 5% greater likelihood that an employer will provide non-FSA childcare but is insignificant for FSAs. This confirms H1 regarding non-FSAs, but not FSAs. Similarly, employers dependent on high-general skills (HGS) are 13% more likely to provide FSAs, whereas HGS are not predictive of non-FSA provision (confirming H2). Meanwhile, female executives are positively associated with both forms of employer childcare (confirming H3), but the effect size differs by policy depending on the prevalence of female leaders across executive levels. Specifically, employers with women on some executive levels are 12% more likely to offer FSAs and 6% more likely to offer non-FSA childcare than employers lacking female executives. In comparison to employers lacking female executives, those with women on all executive levels are 16% more likely to offer FSAs and 19% more likely to offer non-FSAs.Footnote 6
Table 3. Average marginal effects based on logistic regression models
Note: Original calculations. Models control for number of employees, presence of unionised employees; as well as state-level gdp per capita, female labour force participation and gendered breadwinner/carer preferences. Full models presented in Table A6 of the appendix. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
Discussion
What do these findings mean for our three research questions? The first question asked whether public childcare is relevant to employer childcare provision in the United States. As employers in states with more generous public childcare are 5% more likely to provide childcare other than flexible spending accounts (non-FSAs), the results suggest that public childcare is relevant for non-FSA childcare in the United States. Why might this be the case? As FSA childcare is more likely provided by HGS employers, while no such association is found for costlier non-FSA childcare, we can interpret this difference in provision patterns as reflecting different types of pressures exerted on employers: FSAs are more likely a response to economic, non-FSA to normative pressures. And while costly childcare might feasibly be offered to attract low-skilled workers for economic reasons when these workers are in short supply, Table A6 of the appendix shows that difficulty filling entry-level or hourly positions does not increase the likelihood that employers provide non-FSA childcare.
Distinguishing FSA from non-FSA childcare in this way, we can better answer the second research question, which concerned the relevance of female leaders. We find that female executives are highly significant for both forms of childcare, suggesting they exert both economic and normative pressure on employers to provide childcare. Furthermore, the critical mass effect (operationalised as female leaders on all levels) is seen for both policies, and slightly more strongly for non-FSA childcare provision. Employers are 12% more likely to provide FSAs once they have women on some executive levels, while employers with a similar prevalence of women leaders are only 6% more likely to provide non-FSAs. Yet once employers have women on all executive levels, they are 19% more likely to provide non–FSAs, a greater likelihood than providing FSAs (16%). This suggests that the critical mass argument for female leaders as change agents is particularly relevant to normative change.
This is the first study to examine the relevance of female leadership to employer childcare in a representative study of U.S. employers. Nevertheless, the variable presents a limitation in that it could be more precise. NSE respondents were not queried about the percentage of female leaders, nor their exact position in the organizational hierarchy. The low number of observations is a further limitation. While samples below 1,000 are common for employer surveys (see: Davis & Kalleberg, Reference Davis and Kalleberg2006; Osterman, Reference Osterman1995; Seeleib-Kaiser & Fleckenstein, Reference Seeleib-Kaiser and Fleckenstein2009), this reduces statistical power, limiting analytical options.
Also, the main argument rests on the ideas that profit-maximisation is an insufficient explanation for non-FSAs provision, and that normative explanations are extraneous in explaining FSA provision. Yet employers driven by normative considerations may also offer FSA childcare, even if this is cost–effective and feasible for high-skilled employees. It is a limitation of the paper that it does not parse the plausibility of normative motivations for FSA provision more precisely, and it is likely that both normative and economic considerations factor into employer behaviour. Yet the notion that normative explanations may be overlooked in FSA provision bolsters the broader finding that normative explanations for employer behaviour remain underestimated. Generally, the cross-sectional nature of the data precludes inferences about causality, and explanations of employer behaviour based on such data remain interpretive.
Yet despite these limitations, and in response to the third research question, this analysis suggests that normative considerations are likely highly relevant to employer decisions to provide childcare in the United States. The findings are in support of neoinstitutionalist explanations of employer provision and are the first to arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of state-level policy comparison, employer childcare policy differentiation, and female leadership.
Conclusion
What do these findings and their interpretation mean for our understanding of occupational welfare? Evidence suggesting that normative considerations are playing an important and often overlooked role in employers’ considerations exist for other areas of occupational welfare (e.g. Senatori, Reference Senatori2017) but remain sidelined as economic explanations remain dominant. Future research on occupational welfare would be well advised to give more consideration to normative explanations and develop research designs which enable a differentiation between policies more and less likely explained by normative versus economic approaches.
Making this distinction has important policy consequences: if, in a given area, profit maximisation is not an employers’ primary concern, subsidies won’t change employer behaviour. Similarly, public policy communication may be counterproductive if it doubles down on the economic importance of occupational welfare, sidelining the importance of norms to employers’ consideration. Indeed, the primary ethical implication of this study is the need to recognise the potential power of social policy to shape norms, which in turn can shape employer behaviour. A policy implication is to let this recognition shape policy design and messaging. Doing so has the potential to increase access to employer welfare, especially for employees who lack the ability to impose economic pressures.
While this study was conducted in the United States, which is exceptional for its comparatively ungenerous public childcare policy and high level of women in leadership positions, there is reason to believe that the patterns observed here and the explanations for them will be illuminating in other countries. Regarding public policy, while the cross–sectional nature of the evidence precludes claims of causality, the evidence suggests that normative considerations are an important component of the relationship between public and employer childcare. And while this relationship specifically has yet to be studied in Europe, there is no reason to assume that the relevance of normative explanations is restricted to the United States. Similarly, the role of women leaders as change agents in employer family policy, or occupational welfare in general, is likely not limited to the United Staates. While the share of organisational leaders who are female is particularly high in the United States, critical masses of female leaders are also reached in individual organisations in countries where fewer women achieve leadership positions overall. Considering the critical mass effect evidenced in this study may sharpen the analysis of the relevance of female leaders in other countries.
In sum, this study challenged the prevailing stance in most research on employer family policy in the United States that employers’ decisions are primarily, if not solely, guided by rational choice and are aimed at improving their financial performance. The evidence suggests that public childcare is a relevant factor for employer–provided childcare in the United States, particularly for forms of employer childcare that are more easily explained as the result of normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that a high prevalence of female leaders is also highly relevant for employer childcare provision in the United States, likely exerting both economic and normative pressure on employers to provide forms of childcare that are cost-effective and ones that are less so. Taken together, these findings suggest that normative considerations play an important role in employer decisions to provide employer childcare in the United States, and likely beyond.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of the research group FOR 5173: Reconfiguration and Internalization of Social Structure, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 439346934. The author further acknowledges support from the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council, as well as the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers, as well as to Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Brian Nolan, Daniela Grunow, Marek Naczyk, and Cassandra Engeman for valuable feedback on earlier drafts.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Appendix
Table A1. Skills classification according to Fleckenstein et al. (Reference Fleckenstein, Saunders and Seeleib-Kaiser2011)
Table A2. Skill profiles by industry in the United States
Note: Data from the 2016 American Community Survey. Any industry lacking at least 50% in one skill category is classified as mixed.
Table A3. Descriptive statistics of control variables for each model
Table A4. Descriptive statistics of polytomous dependent variable
Table A5. Average marginal effects based on multinomial logistic regression model
Note: Original calculations. The table shows associations with different outcome values of a single dependent variable. Model controls for number of employees, presence of unionised employees; as well as state-level gdp per capita, female labour force participation and gendered breadwinner/carer preferences. Full model available upon request. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
Table A6. Average marginal effects based on logistic regression (full models)
Note: Original calculations. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
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