The Importance of Social Norms for Maternal Labor-Market Expectations and Attitudes

A growing literature studies the importance of social norms in female labor-market decisions, but little is known about how norms related to childcare affect labor-market attitudes of mothers of young children. Existing studies show that people in conserva-tive societies underestimate the progressivity of social norms regarding female labor-market participation, and that correcting these misperceptions through information provision increases female labor-market attachment. Likewise, misperceived social norms about maternal labor supply could be an important obstacle for labor-market decisions of mothers. In the present experiment, we plan to correct false beliefs for a random subsample of mothers to identify causal effects of correcting misperceptions about prevailing social norms. Specifically, we provide a random subset of mothers with information about the actual share of mothers in their city thinking that mothers with children below three years of age should not work. We aim at answering whether our treatment (1) increases willingness to return to work earlier or increase current working hours, thereby mitigating the gender gap on the labor market, (2) changes mother’s labor-market and childcare attitudes, (3) alters beliefs about returns to full-time employment, and (4) helps correcting mother’s beliefs about similar social norms in the German society. We envisage a sample size of 450 parents with children aged two to three years.