School schedules and mothers' employment

Abstract

Women’s employment plays an important role in household well-being, and among mothers, lack of child care is one of the main reasons for not working and not seeking employment. We investigate the effect of a reform that lengthened school schedules from half to full days in Chile — providing childcare for school-aged children — on different maternal employment outcomes.

Using a panel of 2,814 mothers over a 7-year period, we find evidence of important positive causal effects of access to full-day schools on mothers’ labor force participation, employment, weekly hours worked, and months worked during the year. We also find that lower-education and married mothers benefit most from the policy. Findings suggest that alleviating childcare needs can promote women’s attachment to the labor force, increase household incomes, and alleviate poverty and inequality.

The policy: Chile’s full-day school reform

In 1997, Chile launched a nationwide education reform — known as the Jornada Escolar Completa (JEC) — that extended primary school schedules from half-day shifts to continuous full-day programs. Weekly instruction hours in grades 3–8 increased from 30–33 to 38, and lunch breaks were extended, adding roughly 1.5–2 extra hours per school day.

For most families, this meant the school became a source of supervised care for children aged 6–13 during the full working day. The reform was phased in gradually — each school could switch based on its own infrastructure and finances — creating variation across municipalities and over time that we use for causal identification.

By 2009, about 70% of primary schools in the sample had adopted the full-day regime. Our study asks: what happened to mothers’ labor outcomes as their local schools made this transition?

How we measure it

We combine three data sources. Individual-level panel data come from Chile’s Social Protection Survey (EPS), a nationally representative longitudinal survey. We follow 2,814 mothers across four waves (2002, 2004, 2006, 2009), tracking labor force participation, employment, weekly hours worked, and months worked during the year. School administrative data from the Ministry of Education provide the key policy variable: the share of primary schools in each municipality that had adopted the full-day schedule by each survey year.

Our identification strategy uses a panel fixed-effects model that controls for stable individual preferences (e.g., attitudes toward work or childcare arrangements). This makes our estimates unbiased under weaker assumptions than cross-sectional approaches: as long as individual preferences don’t change over time, the estimated effects are causal.

The central test: do mothers’ employment outcomes improve when their local schools switch to full-day schedules — and only for mothers with school-aged children, not for women without children, mothers of teenagers, or fathers?

Key findings

Mothers worked more — in every way we measured

Moving from 70% to 100% full-day school coverage in a municipality (a 30 percentage-point increase — equivalent to reaching full coverage from the 2009 baseline) leads to:

• +9% labor force participation (probability of being in the labor force during the year)
• +8.1% employment (probability of holding paid work at some point during the year)
• +3 hours per week worked (a 10.8% increase over the average of 27.3 hours)
• +1% in months worked during the year, and a higher probability of sustained employment (working more than 6 months)

These effects are concentrated during the school year (March–December). During summer vacation (January–February), when schools are closed and parents must find their own childcare, the employment effects shrink to near zero. This confirms that the channel is childcare provision, not a general change in local economic conditions.

Lower-education mothers benefit most

The benefits were not shared equally. Among mothers with 12 or fewer years of schooling (high school or less):

• LFP increased by +11.8% (compared to +0.5% for mothers with more education)
• Employment increased by +9.8% (versus essentially no effect for higher-education mothers)
• Weekly hours worked increased by +13.8%

Higher-income mothers can buy private childcare alternatives. For lower-income mothers, full-day school is often the only option — so when it arrives, it changes their labor decisions substantially.

Married women respond more strongly

Mothers who were not the head of their household (i.e., had a spouse or partner) showed larger responses: +10.3% LFP and +8.9% employment. Single mothers, who were likely already working out of necessity, showed smaller changes.

A clean placebo test

The policy has no effect on women with no children in the household, mothers whose youngest child is already in secondary school (age 14+), or fathers’ main employment outcomes. This rules out alternative explanations tied to local economic conditions and confirms that the reform affected mothers specifically by relaxing school-age childcare constraints.

Keywords

Full-day schooling · School schedules · Female labor force participation · Maternal employment · Education reform · Childcare · Latin America · Chile