To be effective, the Youth Guarantee should address the specific needs of mothers with small children

13/06/2022

In many countries, mothers with small children make up a large share of inactive young people. While they may not be immediately ready for work, tailored labour market programmes (and access to quality childcare) can improve their labour market prospects in the long term.

For women, a prolonged absence from the labour market after childbirth induces a long-term "scarring effect", which makes it much more difficult for them to re-enter the labour market and reduces their wage and carreer prospects. The Youth Guarantee (YG) Programme may play an important role in mitigating this effect.

This was one of the lessons presented at the closing conference of the Youth Employment PartnerSHIP project held in Brussels on 8 June 2022. Organised by the Polish research center IBS, the main aim of the event was to share the project’s research findings on the impact of youth labour market programmes and discuss the policy implications with national and EU-level stakeholders. BI researchers contributed by two presentations.

In his presentation "Increasing the effectiveness of youth employment policies", senior researcher Márton Csillag summarised findings on the composition of young people who are not in education, training or employment, and presented the results of counterfactual impact evaluations on youth ALMP conducted within the project.

In her presentation "Do young men and women need different employment policies?", senior researcher Judit Krekó discussed the gender aspects of youth employment policies based on the results of impact evaluations carried out during the project. She stressed that the YG Programme should be better tailored to the needs of mothers with young children, and should be complemented by supporting policy measures (e.g. expanding childcare and elderly care capacities, promoting flexible forms of employment), in order to mitigate the scarring effects of having children or caring for elderly relatives.

The full programme of the final conference can be found here, and further detail on the project is available here.