Uneven Effects of Childcare Expansion?

In recent decades, welfare states have experienced a renewed interest in family policies, particularly since the beginning of the 21st century, marked by a paradigm shift towards family-work reconciliation policies. A key policy has been the expansion of childcare for children under the age of three years (Ferragina, 2019). Publicly organised childcare allows families to transfer childcare responsibilities from the private to the public sphere. The use of public childcare can reduce work interruptions in mothers’ careers, facilitate their (re-)entry into the labour market and aim to reduce inequality between genders (...)