Now three decades since the United Nations’ Beijing Declaration – a landmark global blueprint for gender equality – the message remains as urgent as ever: equality is not only a matter of rights, it is also smart economics. The arrival of the first child is the most decisive factor behind persistent gender gaps in employment, hours, and wages. Research shows that the most effective way forward is not compensating women for traditional roles but to promote policies that bring fathers into equal partnership in childcare. Such policies shift gender norms across generations, boost maternal employment, and strengthen both families and the economy.
Barcelona recently hosted the Beijing+30 forum, a gathering that reflected on progress since the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995, a landmark agreement adopted by 189 governments at the United Nations World Conference on Women, remains the most comprehensive global blueprint for gender equality and is still recognized by the United Nations as the key reference framework for governments and institutions worldwide. The Barcelona Forum brought together more than 400 participants, with one of the central themes being the economic dimension of gender equality. The discussion made clear that this is not merely a question of fairness and rights, though it certainly is, but also of economic prosperity, especially in the face of demographic challenges such as persistently low fertility rates. These are issues that cannot be addressed without greater gender equality.
In Spain, for example, gender gaps in the labor market remain substantial despite decades of progress. According to the National Statistics Institute (INE), the employment rate among women aged 16–64 in 2024 was around 47%, about 10 percentage points lower than that of men. Even when employed, women worked on average 29.3 hours per week, compared to 34.2 hours for men, a difference of nearly five hours weekly. Wage disparities persist as well: Eurostat data show that the unadjusted gender pay gap in hourly earnings stood at around 9–10% in Spain in 2023. Across OECD countries, recent research confirms that closing such gender gaps in employment and working hours could raise GDP per capita by several percentage points. Spain’s figures highlight not only the social inequity at play here but also the significant macroeconomic cost.
Beyond the economic cost of this underutilization of talent, evidence also suggests that women are essential to innovation and drivers of sustainable practices within organizations. For example, my IE colleague Patricia Gabaldón and coauthors Giovanna Campopiano of the University of Bergamo and Daniela Gimenez-Jimenez of the Technical University of Dortmund have found that greater female representation in leadership positions is associated with more organizational innovation, more forward-looking corporate strategies, and stronger commitments to environmental and social governance. Moreover, as countries face ultra-low fertility rates and an accelerating demographic crisis, gender employment and wage gaps on the one hand, and declining birth rates on the other, are often two sides of the same coin.
Why do such gaps persist? A vast literature points to one key turning point: the arrival of the first child. According to research from Henrik Kleven of Princeton, motherhood explains the bulk of the gender gap in labor supply and wages, with persistent effects on women’s careers that endure for decades and across generations. The unequal distribution of unpaid household and care work after childbirth remains the central barrier to achieving full gender parity in the labor market.
Persistent gender gaps are not only about equity or labor market efficiency
Thanks to existing research, we also know more today about which policies work, and which do not in addressing this challenge. For example, Libertad González, who spoke at the Barcelona Forum, found that Spain’s 2007 paternity leave reform shows that even a short two-week non-transferable entitlement for fathers nudged many couples toward more egalitarian arrangements. Fathers increased their childcare and housework by more than an hour a day, mothers raised their employment rates, and overall gender roles within the household shifted. More importantly, such effects persisted even two years after childbirth, demonstrating that well-designed paternity leave can have long-lasting effects on gender norms. A related paper by Lídia Farré shows the intergenerational effects of the same policy. Children born after the Spanish paternity leave policy change exhibit more gender-egalitarian attitudes and perceive less stereotypical social norms. They are also more likely to engage in counter-stereotypical day-to-day behaviors and to deviate from the male-breadwinner model in the future.
The Nordic countries, for example, are often held as models of gender equality, with policies that reserve a portion of parental leave exclusively for fathers – measures that have proven quite effective in shifting norms. In Iceland, reforms introduced in the early 2000s led parents to divide childcare more equally during the first three years of a child’s life. In Sweden, a 2012 reform that allowed fathers to take thirty days of leave at the same time as the mother reduced postpartum health complications, according to research by Stanford University’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater. While the evidence on whether such policies immediately rebalance household caregiving is less clear, they have contributed to shifting attitudes and reducing stigma around fathers’ involvement.
These and similar work about other family policies yield a clear lesson: the most effective policies are those that promote equality between mothers and fathers in childrearing, often by nudging fathers to take on more of the childbearing responsibilities. Furthermore, those policies that seek to help or compensate women who adopt stereotypical roles in relation to childrearing tend to fail. For example, my own research with Núria Rodríguez-Planas illustrates the risks of well-intentioned but poorly designed interventions. In our study of Spain’s 1999 law granting parents of young children the right to reduce working hours, we found that while the policy aimed to support work-family balance, it was mostly mothers, not fathers, who applied for the workweek reduction rights. And as firms anticipated this behavior, they hired fewer women and promoted them less often – and as a result, the law locked mothers into part-time positions with lower pay and weaker career prospects. In other words, a family-friendly policy became, paradoxically, a driver of inequality.
In contrast, in two recent articles with my coauthors Natalia Nollenberger and Jenifer Roff, we show that the progressive introduction of pro–joint custody laws in five out of seventeen Spanish regions since the mid-2000s nudged fathers into taking a greater share of childrearing responsibilities, resulting in more balanced arrangements between mothers and fathers. This, in turn, reduced the incidence of contentious divorces, lowered rates of domestic violence, and increased mothers’ labor force participation – not only among divorced women but also among those still married – indicating that these reforms helped shift gender norms even within intact marriages.
The lesson from both international and Spanish evidence is clear: persistent gender gaps are not only about equity or labor market efficiency, they also shape family formation and fertility. Spain, like many advanced economies, faces one of the lowest birth rates in the world, a challenge with profound economic and social consequences. Claudia Goldin’s recent work on the downside of fertility highlights how much of the decline in fertility reflects a mismatch between men’s and women’s attitudes toward family responsibilities, particularly childcare. Policies that foster equal caregiving, challenge entrenched gender norms, and rebalance bargaining power within households are therefore not only about fairness in the workplace, but also about addressing the demographic sustainability of our societies. At a time when falling birth rates and population aging threaten long-term prosperity, few strategies hold as much promise as making gender equality in the household a central pillar of economic policy.
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