European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE)
EIGE
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European Institute for Gender Equality, Gedimino pr. 16, LT-01103 Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 215 7444
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14/12/2021
The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) conducted a study monitoring the eligibility for parental leave in the EU Member States. This study mapped parental leave policies and calculated eligibility rates for parental leave with a focus on men and women in employment, in 2017. The analysis is conducted at the individual level rather than household level, to capture novel factors that might increase the likelihood of non-eligibility.
The aim of the analysis was to assist EIGE in improving its technical monitoring of work-life balance in EU Member States.
The specific objectives of the study were to:
The data distinguishes between 2 main reasons of ineligibility for parental leave (i.e., the eligibility conditions employed parents do not meet in each Member State). These are:
The ISCED 2011 classification is used for level of educational attainment:
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Parental leave is a complex policy provision across the EU and internationally. It is not always paid but usually available equally to mothers and fathers, either as:
According to Leave Policy and Research (LP&R) country-reports, parental leave is defined as “a care measure, intended to give both parents an equal opportunity to spend time caring for a young child; it usually can only be taken after the end of maternity leave.”
Following this definition, and taking a gender equality perspective, the principle for identifying the target statutory Parental Leave policy in each country was that it:
Is available to men and women at the point of entry - a fundamental principle of Parental Leave as distinct from Maternity & Paternity leave, not Maternity leave which is for women as mothers and Paternity leave which is for men/fathers/ second parent.
In the light of differences in national policies, the selected parental-leave policy was the one that immediately followed maternity or paternity leave and thus allowed parents to take care of small children. Although in some Member States, such as Sweden, parental leave was coterminous with paternity leave.
Persons
The unit of analysis is employed individuals, including self-employment. The specific units of analysis are available as drop-down option in each indicators’ variables:
Persons in employment, aged 20-49.
For indicator ‘Percentage of employed women and men (20-49) that are not eligible for statutory parental leave by reason for ineligibility’ the statistical population is persons in employment, aged 20-49 not eligible for statutory parental leave. The conceptual and strategic approach is to calculate eligibility to parental leave for a random sample of men and women (aged 20-49) within each Member State of the EU + UK using high quality survey data from the EU-LFS and EU-SILC.
EU Member States and UK.
2017
The base period is 2016 when EIGE conducted the first study on eligibility for parental leave in EU-27 + UK countries. Due to the changes in methodology, the results for 2017 are not directly comparable to those for collected in EIGE’s 2016 study for all Member States.
Percentage of the reference population.
2017.
No legal acts are applicable. The EU-27 implement the new Work-Life Balance Directive (adopted by the European Parliament on August 1st, 2019) at national level. Member States have three years to ensure that their national laws comply with the provisions of the Directive with its new rights to parental leave and incentives to increase fathers’ take-up for all parents across Europe.
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Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.
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EIGE will publish the results in its dedicated Gender Statistics Database:
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No regular news releases.
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No micro-data are disseminated.
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Available upon request.
Please refer to sections 14 and 20.5 of these metadata.
EIGE’s conceptual and strategic approach was to calculate eligibility to parental leave for a random sample of men and women (aged 20-49) within each Member State of the EU using high quality survey data from the EU-LFS and EU-SILC. This micro-level data approach enabled optimal sensitivity to various within-country factors that shape the leave entitlements such as employment conditions.
For further information, please see: Quality Considerations for EIGE’s Gender Statistics Database
EIGE started pre-populating the policy-mapping template by using the 13th Annual Review of Leave Policies and Related Research as the primary source of information, which describe the legal provisions in place in each Member State, in April 2017. This was supplemented by EIGE with EU and national-level policy documents where necessary. The resulting content was then reviewed by national experts
The focus of the statistical data is to provide an overview about the eligibility for parental leave and shed light on potential challenges and disadvantages people with caring responsibilities face in participating in employment, especially those in non-standard and precarious employment contracts who might not be eligible.
There is growing awareness that basic statutory work-life balance support may be beyond the reach of those that need it especially at key times in life such as the birth of a child and for those in low-income jobs struggling to make ends meet.
The statistics have just been disseminated and no user opinions have been collected yet.
Three main datasets were used to populate the indicators and below is summary of completeness issues for each one:
The EU LFS is a large sample survey among private households in Europe and an important source for European statistics about the situation and trends in the EU labour market. Eurostat provides quarterly and annual data collections. Around 1.5 million people are surveyed per quarter. This dataset provides the necessary information on continuous employment with the same employer, required to estimate eligibility for DK, IE, FR, CY, and UK, but also has a large sample size and includes information on sector and nationality which are used for cross-sectional and multivariate analysis. As such, the EU-LFS is the preferred data source, and is used for the simulations where possible.
The EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) is the EU reference source for comparative statistics on income distribution and social inclusion at the European level. It provides annual data for 28 European Union countries, on income, poverty, social exclusion, and other living conditions. Approx. 130,000 households and 270,000 persons aged 16 and more are interviewed in the European Union countries.
The design of the EU-SILC presents some challenges for the simulations of parental leave eligibility. The EU-SILC dataset uses a self-defined economic status rather than the International Labour Organisation definition as standard (and used by most countries in the EU-LFS). Within the EU-SILC guidance on economic status, those on parental leave should be defined as not working (whilst those on maternity or paternity leave as in work). Therefore, those on parental leave at the time of the survey – a key sub-group for our analysis – would not be included in the simulations and may bias the results.
Overall, the accuracy of data is considered high due to the use of EU-LFS and EU-SILC microdata for simulations. Moreover, the analysis is conducted at the individual level rather than household level, to capture novel factors that might increase the likelihood of non-eligibility. A fundamental issue with the specifications of EU-SILC is its guidance on economic status, which considers persons on parental leave as not in work and biases the results to some extent.
The European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) is a large sample survey among private households in the EU and an important source for European statistics about the situation and trends in the EU labour market. Around 1.5 million people are surveyed per quarter.
The EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the EU reference source for comparative statistics on income distribution and social inclusion. It provides annual data for the EU Member States on income, poverty, social exclusion, and other living conditions. Approximately 130,000 households and 270,000 persons are interviewed each year.
Even though these are both large sample surveys some of the simulation results – particularly the intersectional analysis – suffered from reliability issues due to small sample sizes for the population groups concerned.
For the non-sampling error of EU-LFS and EU-SILC, the reader may also consult section 13.3 of the respective Eurostat metadata: EU-LFS and EU-SILC.
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Cross-country comparability is high for all three sources used to populate the indicators: Leave Policy and Research country reports, EU-LFS and EU-SILC.
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The indicators have been produced from the same sources, with a coherent set of methods. Therefore, they are fully coherent with each other.
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EIGE used the following data sets:
The Annual Review is a high quality annual standardised country review of all leave policies, including paid parental leave, across 40 countries, including the EU, with cross-national comparative tables produced by country experts. Each country report in the LP&R Annual Review has a section on eligibility conditions for all forms of leave, including accessing paid parental leave.
The EU-LFS is a large sample survey among private households in the EU and an important source for European statistics about the situation and trends in the EU labour market. Eurostat produces quarterly and annual indicators. Around 1.5 million people are surveyed per quarter. This dataset provides the necessary information on continuous employment with the same employer, required to estimate eligibility for DK, IE, FR, CY, and UK, but also has a large sample size and includes information on employment sector and nationality which are used for cross-sectional and multivariate analysis.
The EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the EU reference source for comparative statistics on income distribution and social inclusion. It provides annual data for the EU Member States on income, poverty, social exclusion, and other living conditions. Approximately 130,000 households and 270,000 persons aged 16 and over are interviewed each year. This dataset includes information on changes of employer and discontinuous employment (either with the same or different employers). Such information is required for those countries which specify an eligibility requirement of social security contributions within a certain timeframe: BE (private sector workers), BG, EL (private sector workers), LV, LT, LU, HU, PT, and RO.
The production of the indicators on parental leave eligibility was a one-off activity.
No primary data collection. Information on eligibility for parental leave was compiled through desk research based on information from the International Network for Leave Policy and Research country reports (LP&R) complemented by input from national experts. The estimations on the number of men and women eligible for parental leave relied on data from the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) or the EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), depending on the member state.
Parental leave eligibility estimations are considered of good quality as they are based on reliable sources (EU-LFS and EU-SILC microdata, and the International Network for Leave Policy and Research country reports) and are produced with careful application of common, sound methodology.
The data are collected and processed by a team of experienced researchers and are subject to validation that includes:
EIGE conducted an analysis of eligibility for each Member State, adopting a multi-dimensional and intersectional approach with a primary sensitivity to gender. Overall levels of ineligibility for those in employment were individualised and non-eligibility was broken down by main reason. EIGE also explored the extent to which non-eligibility varies by age and level of educational attainment.
The estimates of the number of men and women in employment who are eligible for parental leave in the Member States were produced using micro-simulation on EU-LFS or EU-SILC data, depending on the Member State.
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