In research on fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties in career-related outcomes, employers' discriminatory behaviours are often argued to constitute a possible explanation for observed gender gaps. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence of such discrimination. Utilizing a field experiment design, we test (i) whether job applicants are subject to recruitment discrimination on the basis of their gender and parenthood status, and (ii) whether discrimination by gender and parenthood is conditional on the qualifications required by the job applied for. We applied for 2,144 jobs in the Swedish labour market, randomly assigning gender and parenthood status to fictitious job applicants. Based on the rate of callbacks, we do not find that employers practise systematic recruitment discrimination on the basis of the job applicants' gender or parental status, neither in relation to less qualified nor more highly qualified jobs.

Utilizing a field experiment design, this article examines whether discrimination based on any combination of job applicant gender and recruiter gender occurs in the first stage of the recruitment process, that is, selecting applicants to be contacted. This study includes 1,643 job applications in the Swedish labor market. Overall, based on the callbacks received, male recruiters, unlike female recruiters, are found to contact male applicants more often than female applicants. The results show a pro-male bias by male recruiters in gender-mixed occupations, whereas no significant gender differences in callbacks by recruiter gender are found in male- and female-dominated occupations.

Using register data from the Finnish Census Panel, this paper studies the relationship between the use of the child home care allowance and second and third births among women aged 20–44 in Finland during the period 1992–2007. Discrete-time event-history analysis is applied to examine (i) whether women taking up the child home care allowance while their previous child was under the age of 3 have a higher risk to proceed to subsequent childbearing, (ii) whether these women proceed to a further birth more quickly, and (iii) whether the risk to proceed to a subsequent birth is related to educational level. The results show that women using the allowance have a higher risk of having a second and a third birth than women not using it. The risk of having a second birth is higher than that of having a third birth. Also, women using the allowance get their subsequent child sooner than women not using the allowance. No large educational differences in the effect of allowance use are found for second or third births.