State Intervention and Women's Employment in 39 Countries: A Welfare State Paradox Revisited.

In an important and provocative analysis, Mandel and Semyonov [2006 American Journal of Sociology] argue that the welfare state has paradoxical effects on women's employment, increasing labor force participation but simultaneously reducing women's access to desirable jobs. If true, this has important implications for gender inequality. It also has important political implications, since welfare state policies are a matter of active dispute in many nations and underlie important divisions between the (mostly welfare oriented) nations of the European Union and the (mostly free-market) English speaking nations. But is it true?Mandel and Semyonov's claim is based on survey data from 22 countries, not a large number when the central question turns on differences between nations. Moreover, the nations are mostly rich and Western. They use a narrow definition of the welfare state, a misleading specification of elite jobs, and seriously mis-specified statistical models. It is by no means clear that their findings are robust.In this paper we replicate and extend Mandel and Semyonov's investigation with a much larger and more diverse data set: 39 nations, 119 surveys, and 151,510 individual respondents. We use a broader and more conventional definition of the welfare state, a more appropriate specification of elite jobs, and more flexible statistical models. We find that welfare state policies have no statistically significant effect on women's employment and neither facilitate, nor hinder, women's access to desirable jobs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]