NEWFAMSTRAT is an innovative research project providing the most comprehensive picture to date of how within- and between-gender differences in employment, earnings, and domestic divisions predicted by family status are constructed at the individual, couple, and employer levels in Finland, Germany, and the UK.

The comprehensive map of the shape of family-related gender inequalities will be achieved via four comparative sub-projects exploring:

• within-gender differences in the individual sources of economic inequalities in their country context
• within-gender differences in the trade-off between paid and unpaid work and equity within households, and their impact on family stability in UK and Germany
• employer hiring preferences at the intersection of gender, family, and class in Finland, Germany and the UK
• the role of firms in configuring gender-class earnings inequalities predicted by partnership and parenthood in Finland

Data includes several existing national panel and linked employee-employer panel datasets, as well as new primary data to be gathered on real-time employer hiring decisions via co-ordinated field correspondence studies.

View project website.

Project team

Professor Lynn Prince Cooke (DPhil, University of Oxford) is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Bath. Her research draws on sociological and economic theories to deepen our understanding of gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work, and their impact on family stability. Her dominant tool is comparative analysis of large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, but she often frames these analyses in their historical institutional context.

Rossella Icardi joined the NEWFAMSTRAT project as a Research Associate on 1 March 2017. Her academic interests include the study of labour market inequalities in a comparative setting and the investigation of which policies succeed in reducing them. Prior to joining NEWFAMSTRAT, Rossella worked at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) where she conducted impact evaluation on a wide range of projects related to labour market research.

Kathrin Morosow joined the NEWFAMSTRAT project as a Research Associate on 1 September 2019. Her general area of research expertise lies within Social Demography, situated at the intersection of policy-research and life-course analysis. Her research interests lie with the study of social and labour market inequalities combined with unintended consequences of social policies. Prior to joining NEWFAMSTRAT, Kathrin finished her doctoral thesis at Stockholm University entitled "Side Effects: Unintended Consequences of Family Leave Policies".

Soyoung Kweon is a PhD student at the University of Bath, joining the NEWFAMSTRAT project from October 2017. Her thesis will investigate gender differences in employer discrimination around parental status in hiring processes across different skill levels. Her broader research interest is how social policy affects gender inequality in labour markets.

Project outputs

Cooke, Lynn Prince. 2018. Pathology of Patriarchy and Family Inequalities. In Unequal Family Lives: Causes and Consequences in Europe and the Americas, edited by Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Laurie DeRose and W. Bradford Wilcox. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cooke, Lynn Prince and Jennifer L. Hook. (2018). Productivity or Gender? The Impact of Domestic Tasks across Women’s and Men’s Wage Distributions. Journal of Marriage and Family 80(3): 721-36. DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12467

Cooke, Lynn Prince and Sylvia Fuller. (2018). Class Differences in Establishment Pathways to Fatherhood Wage Premiums. Journal of Marriage and Family 80(3): 737-51. DOI:10.1111/jomf.12475

Fuller, Sylvia and Lynn Prince Cooke. (2018). Workplace Variation in Fatherhood Wage Premiums: Do Formalization and Performance Pay Matter? Work, Employment and Society 32(4): 768-788. DOI: 10.1177/0950017018764534

Cooke, Lynn Prince. 2016. Gender Equality at the State-Market Nexus: Bringing Organizations Back In. Research on Finnish Society 9: 45-49.

Funder

This research was made possible with funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Grant agreement number: 680958

Principal Investigator: Lynn Prince Cooke