"If its proposals are adopted, Ohio would join 18 states that require employers to offer maternity leaves that exceed those mandated by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. That law offers workers at businesses with 50 or more employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave for infant care.

Expectant mothers must have worked for a business for a year, or 1,250 hours, to be eligible.

The Ohio commission has proposed that businesses with four or more employees offer 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave to pregnant employees, regardless of how long they have worked for the businesses."

"America also rediscovered about 20 years ago an alternative to state child allowances and paid parental leave that has a positive fertility effect.  Specifically, after two decades of neglect, the U.S. Congress in 1986 nearly doubled the value of the personal income tax exemption for children to $2,000 per child, and indexed its value to inflation.  Repeated studies have found that European child allowances-where the state pays mothers a monthly stipend for each of their children-have little positive effect on fertility.  However, in the U.S., there is strong evidence of a "robust" positive relationship between the real, after inflation value of the tax exemption for children and family size....

Why this difference?  It appears that allowing families to keep more of what they earn while raising children-that is, turning children into little tax shelters-has a positive, even life-affirming psychological effect on parents that money coming from the state cannot replicate.  In any case, the significant increase in overall American fertility coincides with the sharp increase in the exemption's value in 1986.  More recently, the rise in marital fertility, starting in 1996, correlates precisely with the introduction of a new, additional Child Tax Credit that year.  It seems that pro-family tax cuts work!" 

What Big Government Has Wrought 

As was the Great Society in the United States, the welfare state has been sold to the public as a do-good effort to help the poor. To what extent it truly helps the poor can be debated, yet an international study published in the prestigious American Journal of Sociology demonstrates a far less-debatable assessment: that the expansion of the welfare state has played a key role in pushing mothers, whether poor or not, out of the home and into the paid labor force.

In the study, two sociologists at Tel Aviv University created a "welfare state intervention index" to capture government's role in promoting women's employment using three indicators: the state as legislator and provider of services like public daycare and maternity leave, the state as employer in health, education, and social services, and the overall size of the public service sector of a country. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were at the top of the distribution whereas the United States, Australia, and Ireland were at the bottom.

Against this welfare state index, the Israeli researchers plotted 1990s demographic and labor market data from 22 industrialized countries provided by the Luxembourg Income Study. As to be expected, the labor force participation rate among women, and especially among mothers of preschool children, strongly and positively correlated with well-developed welfare states in each of the three components of the index.

Multivariate regressions that controlled for both individual-level and country-level characteristics not only confirmed these correlations, but also found that, all things being equal, women's odds of employment are almost three times higher, relative to men, in countries at the high end of the welfare scale than in countries at the bottom. The correlations with women's employment also remained significant in models that controlled for variables whose effects could be mistakenly attributed to the welfare index: GDP, unemployment, the Gini index of income inequality, and attitudes toward gender egalitarianism.

While the two researchers do not lament this consequence of big government, they lament their other findings that document how these state interventions simultaneously raise women's odds of being confined to "female-typed" occupations while decreasing their odds of moving into "managerial and lucrative positions." In essence, they find that large welfare states create and sustain "sheltered labor markets" for women with convenient working terms (day care, maternity leaves, and flexible hours) and where women continue doing what they have historically done: caring for children and families, although now in institutional settings like schools as well as health care and social services, funded by the state.

While considering their findings a paradox for their sex, the women researchers unfortunately avoid a question that may be more pressing: whether the removal of mothers out of their formerly protected and natural sphere of the family into a new state-created industry is actually good for children.