Paid Maternity Leave and Female Employment : Evidence Using Firm-Level Survey Data for Developing Countries
The relationship between the length of paid maternity leave and the proportion of female workers in the private sector is explored using firm-level survey data for 66 mostly developing countries. The paper finds a large, positive, and statistically...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/606031548250184438/Paid-Maternity-Leave-and-Female-Employment-Evidence-Using-Firm-Level-Survey-Data-for-Developing-Countries http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31183 |
| Summary: | The relationship between the length of
paid maternity leave and the proportion of female workers in
the private sector is explored using firm-level survey data
for 66 mostly developing countries. The paper finds a large,
positive, and statistically significant relationship between
the two. According to the most conservative estimate, an
increase of one week of paid maternity leave is associated
with a 2.6 percentage points increase in the share of
workers in a typical firm that are female. As expected, the
stated relationship is much larger when the government pays
for maternity leave versus the employer. The results are
robust to several controls for firm and country
characteristics and other possible heterogeneities in the
maternity leave and female workers relationship. |
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