How within family difference in educational attainment associates with labor market outcomes for women after their firstborn child – using administrative data in Sweden, Statistics Sweden, Sweden

Sweden has for a long time been considered as one of the world's most gender-equal countries.1 The traditional male-breadwinner model is more or less not synonymous with the labour market in Sweden today. In 2024, it is more accepted with a dual-earner model. However, there still exists a perception of differences in gender equality both for paid work and unpaid work. Despite having a society with a dual-earner model, women in Sweden, as in large parts of the rest of the world, generally have lower income than men. On average, women earn 79.3 percent of men’s disposable income (Medlingsinstitutet, 2023). There is a lot of academic literature that points out on how labour earnings evolve over time for women and men. For example, we have a situation in which before women become mothers, males and females are equal in many labour market outcomes (Kleven,2019). But after women give birth, they fall behind men on the labour market, and it takes many years before women catch up (Kleven, 2019; Angelov, 2016). Previously, income differences between genders have most often been studied from an individual perspective. At statistical agencies, the gender difference is primarily measured by calculating the median (mean) value for women and men, respectively. Secondly, the income difference is calculated from these two median values. However, if differences between men and women in different type of households are studied at the group level, it is not possible to answer the fundamental question of how economic equality within families looks, i.e., at the kitchen table where family decisions are made; such as who will stay home with the sick child and how that will affect economic equality in the households. The analysis in this paper will focus on the difference in educational attainment (highest level of education) within the families, and in particular, women’s labour market outcomes in the years following the birth of their first child. 2 The within family difference in educational attainment has largely been unexplored in the context of associating with labour market outcomes. Nonetheless, it is important to understand these dynamics of women behaviour, given that decisions regarding individuals’ labour supply often are made, e.g., at the kitchen table. The gender difference is calculated in two steps: In the first step, i) we calculate the income difference in each family and based on these differences we calculate various measures of central tendency in a second step to ii) various measures of central tendency to describe gender differences within families.