The problem with the concept of work–life balance is that most of the onus of achieving such clarity and satisfaction is left to the employee. As a pediatric intensivist and mother of two, I am ruled by the demands and requirements imposed both by my employer and academic position and by my beautiful children. It is the culture around and perception of working mothers that needs to change – bot...

In this study, the utilization of temporary parental leave (leave from work to take care of a sick child) of single and cohabiting women is compared, both as regards the probability of taking temporary parental leave and the number of days taken. Since cohabiting women have the possibility of sharing the temporary parental leave needed with their partners, we would expect them to have a lower u...

We study the impact on children of increasing the time that the mother spends with her child in the first year by exploiting a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway. The reform increased maternal leave on average by 4 months and family income was unaffected. The increased time with the child led to 2.7 percentage points decline in high school dropout. For mothers with ...

BACKGROUND This study examines differences in the factors female and male physicians considered influential in their rural practice location choice and describes the practice arrangements that successfully recruited female physicians to rural areas. METHODS This cross-sectional study was based on a mailed survey of physicians successfully recruited between 1992 and 1999 to towns of 10,000 or ...

Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish “Daddy-Month” Reform Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in ...