captured by using current year labor force participation rates of women with children age 3-9
in Denmark and age 0-5 in the US in the municipality/state of current residence. Our
hypothesis is that there is a more egalitarian, less gendered notion of tasks in areas where
mothers have a higher labor force participation rate. This more egalitarian outlook may
dampen the impact of any earnings-based power considerations. Our measure of individual
norms is calculated as the national labor force participation rate of women age 25-34 when the
respondent was age 0-10. Our goal was to construct a measure of the likely labor force
participation of the respondent’s mother during his/her impressionable youth. As respondents
may have moved since birth, we match these measures at the national rather than local level.
Sample means, as expected, indicate a higher female labor force participation rate in
Denmark both currently (the social norms measure) and historically (the individual norms
measure), confirming our supposition that there is a less gendered notion of behavior in
Denmark than in the US. However, controls for these variables were not individually
significant in the leisure time equations except in the case of individual norms for Danish men
on non-work days. These results suggest that men whose mothers were more likely to be
working when they were young receive more leisure on non-work days, but education share
(baseline power) is a less significant determinant of leisure time for them as well. Further
analysis breaking down the samples as in Table 3 by employment status and presence of
children (results not reported here) did not reveal any clear patterns. Either norms are not
important within these samples or these variables are not good measures of norms.
CONCLUSION
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