The Swedish system has for long been one of the most generous with respect to family parental leave policies in the world. Is there evidence that this system raises women's possibilities of an academic career? I present new longitudinal evidence for more than 11,000 first-time fathers and mothers, examining survival chances with a focus on the characterizing the gender gap in terms of wages and publications. Descriptive statistics show that women in the Swedish system are somewhat behind men in their academic career in terms of publication rate and positional advancement before having children, which is in part due to their younger age. After their first child, the publication gap between men and women is substantially widened across all fields, conditional on staying in academia, while this drop is not nearly as severe for wages. Women have only slightly lower survival chances than men after their first child. In recent years, parental leave has become more equally shared between fathers and mother, but I find no evidence that this trend has lowered child penalty rates for women in publications, rather the opposite. This suggests that a more equal distribution of parental leave may not be a panacea to improving women's career prospects in academia.
Contact person: Rainer Widmann
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