It’s All about the Money? Family policies, individual gender-role attitudes, and childbearing intentions in an international perspective

This study aims to explore whether individual gender-role attitudes moderate potential policy effects on planned childbearing. This is done by employing a typology of earner-carer and traditional-family support in multilevel analyses, pooling data from 2010 for 23 countries. It is expected that individuals preferring earner-carer arrangements react more positively to earner-carer support, while individuals preferring traditional-family arrangements react more positively to traditional-family support. The results show that gender-role attitudes moderate the effect of family policies on mothers’ and childless men’s planned childbearing. Gender-egalitarian mothers have stronger childbearing intentions with higher income replacement in earner-carer support. Contrary to expectations, gender-egalitarian childless men have stronger childbearing intentions with higher income replacement in traditional-family support. Moreover, the results show that both family policies and gender-role attitudes influence childbearing intentions independently, and that family policies play a role mainly for childless respondents.