Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Prior research demonstrates that parental leave policies can impact gendered differences in parents’ time use. However, little investigation has examined how parental leave policies might affect socioeconomic differences in how parents spend their time. Given existing research finding that mothers with higher levels of education spend more time with their children than less-educated mothers do, a question of particular relevance is whether parental leave policies might exacerbate or ameliorate such differences. This study tests if the introduction of a specific parental leave policy, the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP), expanded, reduced, or had no impact on differences in maternal time with children between college-educated mothers and mothers who hold less than a college degree.

Among other policy changes, QPIP established five weeks of parental leave time specifically for fathers in the province of Quebec, Canada. For married and cohabiting parents, QPIP introduction was associated with a general decrease in gendered time use differences between mothers and fathers, but with an increase in the amount of time that mothers spend in childcare (Patnaik 2016, SSRN). Possible explanations for this increase in mothers’ childcare time relate to changes in fathers’ time use post-QPIP implementation. Given that partnership status often varies by maternal education, the impact of QPIP might be reduced for less-educated mothers, who are less likely to reside with their child’s father. On the other hand, other aspects of QPIP (such as changes in leave eligibility rules) might have increased the ability of less-educated mothers to take parental leave (McKay et al. 2016, Journal of Industrial Relations 58(4)).

The present analysis uses data from the 2005 and 2010 Canadian General Social Survey cycles to examine how the introduction of QPIP affected differences in maternal time with children by maternal education. My sample includes mothers aged 18 to 49 whose youngest child is 1-3 or 5-14 years old. Analytical models build on earlier work by Patnaik (2016) through an exploration of heterogeneity in the effects of QPIP on mothers’ childcare time, with effects estimated using difference-in-difference and triple-differencing methods.

Difference-in-difference results suggest that QPIP implementation was associated with a large and statistically significant increase in childcare time among mothers with a college education. In contrast, among less-educated mothers, QPIP implementation was not significantly associated with an increase in childcare time. Triple-differencing estimates are consistent with these findings. Models interacting mothers’ education with QPIP implementation variables suggest that QPIP’s introduction was associated with an increase in maternal childcare time differences by maternal education. Interestingly, these findings hold when examining partnered mothers only, so variation in partnership by maternal education is an unlikely explanation for these results.

These findings suggest that certain parental leave policies could contribute to socioeconomic differences in the time that mothers spend with their children. However, the relatively small number of mothers eligible for QPIP “treatment” in this sample limits my statistical power and ability explore the mechanisms driving these results. Future research might examine which aspects of QPIP policy most contributed to these changes.