In the past few decades, many rich democracies have adopted work-family reconciliation policies designed to alleviate gender labor market inequalities and to facilitate the employment of mothers. As a result, considerable cross-national and historical variation has emerged in the extent to which countries provide paid parental leave and publicly subsidized childcare. Despite proponents’ view of the gender equality-enhancing qualities of such policies, a number of scholars have claimed that work-family reconciliation policies surprisingly disadvantage women in the labor market. Scholars have especially argued that work-family policies discourage women from attaining higher-level employment. We address this debate by providing the most comprehensive empirical analysis to date. We analyze the length of paid parental leave, the squared length of paid parental leave, and the coverage of children in publicly subsidized childcare. We examine five labor market outcomes – employment, earnings, being a manager, being a lucrative manager, the percent female in one’s occupation – and also scrutinize full-time employment among other alternatives. We compare samples of women, women and men, and mothers and non-mothers. We estimate multi-level models of individual women and men nested in a cross-section of 22 rich democracies in the mid-2000s. Unique to the literature, we also estimate two-way fixed effects models of individual women and men nested in a panel of 12 rich democracies in the mid-2000s and in earlier decades. We find that paid leave is positively associated with women’s employment, and is not robustly associated with earnings, being a manager, or being a lucrative manager. There is however some evidence that paid parental leave is positively associated with the percent female in women’s occupations, and that especially long leaves reduce women’s employment. There is some evidence that childcare coverage is positively associated with women’s employment, with mothers’ employment (relative to non-mothers), women’s earnings, mothers’ earnings, However, there is also modest evidence that childcare coverage is negatively associated with women’s earnings among full-time employees and women being managers. Finally, many models fail to show any relationship between paid leave or childcare coverage and labor market outcomes. Ultimately, we conclude that work-family reconciliation policies are not clearly and robustly associated with either positive or negative labor market outcomes for women or mothers. We contradict claims that work-family reconciliation policies disadvantage women. However, we also urge caution and propose that work-family policies likely do not have clear and robust effects on women or mothers’ labor market outcomes.