Prof. Anna Matysiak’s project funded in the competition for research projects at CESS

17 01 2024

The project of Prof. Anna Matysiak from the Faculty of Economic Sciences “Career consequences of work-family reconciliation policy measures introduced in the EU Work-Life Balance Directive” was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.

The project received funding in the amount of 80 000,00 PLN.

Project description: There are only a handful of fathers in Poland who make use of parental leaves, despite the fact that they have the possibility to share them with the mother of a child. According to 2021 statistics, women in Poland used 97% of all benefit days paid for by the Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) for maternity, paternity and parental leave. At the same time, in many European countries, the number of fathers actively engaging in care responsibilities of newly born children is growing. Likewise, Poles are less likely to telework than their Western European counterparts, even though this form of work became much more common after the Covid-19 pandemic. Low use of work-family reconciliation measures, such as parental leaves and telework, may have negative consequences for work-family balance and may even discourage young adults from having children. Therefore, efforts have been made at the EU level to improve access to parental leave among fathers and flexible work arrangements via implementation of the Directive of Work-Family Balance. This Directive introduces nine weeks of non-transferable parental leave for fathers and the possibility of requesting flexible working for parents of children up to eight years old.

Given these recent changes in the Polish law, there is a need to understand whether parental leaves and the use of flexible working arrangements carry career consequences for men and for women. Our project aims to address these issues by studying the impact of parental leaves and flexible working arrangements, such as working from home, on workers’ career prospects. Our goal is not only to reveal to what extent mothers and fathers who make use of leaves and work from home face different career prospects from parents who do not use them (or use them to a lower extent as in the case of parental leave taken by mothers), but also to understand why it is so. We will thus also study how employers perceive such parents in terms of their work commitment and reliability.

Finally, we will examine how employers’ perceptions of workers using parental leaves and working from home depend on the employers’ characteristics (i.e. own gender, experience with parental leaves and flexible work arrangements and gender role attitudes). We will thus address questions such as e.g. do managers who are female or have more experience with parental leaves or use flexible working arrangements hold more positive perceptions of workers taking parental leaves?

The results of our project will help to understand the potential reasons why parents in Poland (and fathers in particular) may want to avoid making use of parental leaves and flexible working arrangements by exploring the career penalties related to them. We will also reveal whether parental leaves carry the same career penalties as home-based work, which is highly interesting given the recent implementation of the new regulations.

The novelty of our project lies also in the methodology that we propose. Namely, we will use an experimental setup to analyse how managers with supervisory responsibilities evaluate workers who request parental leave or working from home and how these requests affect managers’ hiring and pay intentions. The respondents of the survey will be recruited by an external research company that has access to an online opt-in panel and is able to ensure interviews with approximately 500-1,000 employers. Each manager taking part in the survey will be asked to compare and assess two hypothetical workers’ profiles. The workers’ profiles will differ with respect to workers’ gender, education, work experience, skills, use of home-based work, and use of parental leaves. The managers will be then asked which worker (out of two) they would like to have in their team/hire and who deserves higher pay as well as which one is more committed, and reliable.