Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence. I

This substance is in accord with what I would have anticipated but their rigor and the strength of their conclusion is striking.  From Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality?  Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation by Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer,Josef Zweimüller.

I do not recognize these researchers by name but they are all from first rate research institutions and they are referencing strong researchers whom I do recognize.  They methodology does not throw up any red flags (beyond those that any sociology research entails).  I do like that it is a 60 year study.  

Do family policies reduces gender inequality?  No.  Resoundingly No.  From their Abstract:

Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and child care, using administrative data covering the labor market and birth histories of Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates into a decomposition framework a la Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2019) to compute counterfactual gender gaps. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.

I have always been more interested in whether there is robust empirical evidence of discriminatory gender behavior in the market.  Such malicious discrimination has been widely assumed to be the case by those in academia and in government, and among certain ideological movements, but the empirical evidence is weak and the more robust the research, the weaker is the evidence.  

In addition, I have always pointed out that there is an irony - the policies advocated vociferously by ideological feminists are, at root, pro-natalist.  American feminists want policies that European women receive, believing that this will help American women compete in the labor force.  Meantime, in Europe, they have passed these policies as much to encourage higher birth rates as they have for any notion of feminist gender market equality (though that is definitely in the mix to a degree).  But you are still left with the irony.  One groups wants more women fulfilling traditional motherhood roles more easily and another group wants women to be freed from their gender constraints and competitive in the labor market - AND THEY ARE BOTH USING THE SAME POLICIES!

I am not surprised by Kleven, et. al's finding.  I just never thought about it in terms of policy failure and I never anticipated that the effect would be so strong.  There is always noise in research data, but here we have "virtually no impact on gender convergence."

I am left with the question; was it all a waste of time and resources?  Would love to hear a discussion with these guys.  Was there any value to these policies in terms of easing impact of women's labor market performance during a transition from manufacturing to a professional services knowledge economy?

I have seen a lot of research with similar indications from both the Netherlands and Sweden as well.

But no effect?  Still surprised.  Does that mean we could effectively remove those policies and their costs?  I would think not but somehow that seems a natural conclusion.

And the trends in gender labor force policy are or a piece with K-12 and Tertiary education policies.  We have similarly had a multiple doubling down of what we invest in these sectors since WWII and yet the outcomes seem indifferent.

Could we get rid of all the education policies and costs and quickly revert to a market set of outcomes that look very similar but at a dramatically lower cost?

I hope this study get a lot of attention because there are some fascinating implications.  

Since it so contradicts the preferred Mandarin Class narrative though, it is probably at risk of being swept under the rug just as so much else is during this era of information control and free speech suppression.