A father whose youngest child is not yet six has a 97.6% probability of being employed in Czechia. Nowhere in the European Union is the figure higher. A mother in the same situation has a 51.5% probability of being in paid work. Only Romania is as low. The 46-percentage-point gap is, according to Eurostat data for 2025, the largest in the entire Union. Italy, in second place, has 35 points; the EU average is 22. Mothers of young children do not work less, though – at home they do work that employment statistics do not capture. But Czech society lets them into paid employment less than any other in the Union.
This figure was the backdrop to a meeting held on Wednesday 23 September 2026 in the Konírna hall of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Czech parliament. The round table Reconciling Work and Family in the Current Economic Situation was convened by MP Václav Pláteník of KDU-ČSL, the Christian Democrats, as part of the series Systemic Support for Families as an Investment in the Future. Around the table sat demographers and sociologists, non-profit organisations, representatives of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, the HR director of a large insurance company and an official from Ostrava City Hall. They quickly agreed on what parents of young children in Czechia lack: nurseries, part-time jobs and fathers who stay at home with the child.
Meanwhile, Andrej Babiš's government has pushed through a different measure. From January 2027 it is raising the parental allowance from CZK 350,000 to CZK 400,000 (in Czech).
What we draw on: we know how the round table unfolded from the Chamber of Deputies' recording and from its machine transcript and summary in Sněmovna Digest (in Czech). We compared the speakers' statements with data from Eurostat, the Czech Statistical Office and the Mumdoo Report 2026. Where a statement differs from the data, we give both.
Reconciling work and family in Czechia and the EU (2025)
51.5%
of mothers of preschoolers are employedThe lowest in the EU, together with Romania. The EU average is 70.1%.
7.9%
of children under three attend a nursery or preschoolIn the EU it is 40.5%. Only Slovakia has fewer.
13.1%
of employed women work part-timeThe EU average is 28.2%; in Germany and Austria it is almost half.
Czechia has Europe's widest gap between mothers and fathers of young children
Jana Paloncyová of the Sirius Foundation summed it up in one sentence at the round table: Czechia is top of the class in employment of men and an outsider in employment of women aged 30 to 34. The data bear her out. Men of that age in Czechia are employed in 95.6% of cases, the highest share in the EU. Women in 66.5%; only Romania and Italy are lower. And it is around the age of thirty that Czech women most often give birth.
The chart shows how far apart mothers and fathers of children under six are in each country.
Fathers' employment across the Union stays roughly between 85% and 98%, and differences between countries are small. It is mothers who decide the ranking. In Slovenia, Portugal and Croatia more than 84% of mothers of preschoolers are in paid work; in Sweden and Denmark more than 80%. Of the post-communist countries, only Romania is in a similar position to Czechia. Slovakia, Bulgaria and Poland are 18 to 22 points higher.
Once the child starts school, Czech mothers overtake Europe
On its own, low employment among mothers might suggest that Czech women are not interested in jobs. The second chart refutes that interpretation. Once the youngest child is six, 93.3% of Czech mothers are employed – fifteen points above the European average. Czech women without children are similarly high.
The Czech gap therefore opens up over a precisely defined period: from birth until the child starts school, and most sharply until the child's third birthday. Paloncyová singled out the years between the child's second and third birthdays as critical. Anyone who wanted to return to work at that point runs into two obstacles at once: too few part-time jobs and too few places for children under three.
What it is called – and what it does not mean
Motherhood penalty.
This is what economists call what a woman loses at work after having a child: her job, her earnings, her career progression. Having a child is, of course, not the penalty.
That is often just a trick in public debates, when part of the public argues against something nobody said or even thought. The "straw man" in the case of motherhood is most often this one: "What are mothers complaining about? They should be glad to have children! What wouldn't women who cannot have children give for that!" Yet joy in children and a loss in professional life are not mutually exclusive.
So what is the motherhood penalty? It is the price that only one of the parents pays on the labour market for caring for a child – and we know that a father with the same child usually loses nothing.
The economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante measured it in 134 countries in their Atlas of the motherhood penalty. Of the European countries they compare in the text, it came out highest in Czechia: after the first child, women's employment relative to men's falls by 50% on average, while in Denmark, for example, it falls by only 14%. In the first years of care the drop in Czechia is almost total; after ten years, roughly one in five mothers still does not return to the labour market.
Familialism. Family policy that entrusts the care of young children to the family – in practice almost always to the mother. The state pays for long parental leave but does not develop nurseries or part-time work. In 2003 the sociologist Sigrid Leitner called this type explicit familialism. Czechia moved towards it after 1989, when nurseries rapidly disappeared and parental leave grew longer. The sociologists Steven Saxonberg and Tomáš Sirovátka call this refamilialisation.
It affects pensions too. A shorter and lower-paid career means a lower pension. The Czech pension formula favours low incomes, so the gap is smaller than elsewhere: women aged 65–74 have, according to Eurostat, a pension 8% lower than men on average, compared with 23% in the EU. The often-heard argument that women make up for it by living longer works the other way round. A 65-year-old Czech woman has on average 20.6 years of life ahead of her, a man 16.9. The lower pension must therefore last for more years, and after widowhood it is often the household's only income. That is why 11.1% of Czech women over 65 live below the poverty line, compared with 4.6% of men.
The state pays for care at home; nurseries barely exist
The parental allowance is set up so that parents draw it until the child is three at the latest. The entitlement to a place in a kindergarten also starts at three – municipalities must provide it, a representative of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs reminded the meeting. No such obligation applies to younger children.
The result shows in the European comparison. In Czechia, 7.9% of children under three attend nurseries, children's groups (a Czech form of small-scale childcare) or kindergartens. In Denmark 67%, in France and Sweden 60%, in Hungary and Poland 21%.
In 2022 the European Union set itself the target that by 2030 45% of children under three should attend some form of early childhood care. Czechia is more than five times short of it. At the round table, the Ministry of Labour emphasised the expansion of children's groups, of which there are around 2,400 according to its representative. So far they have not shown up significantly in the European statistics: in 2024, 7.3% of Czech children under three attended some form of care, a year later 7.9%.
The government adds money; research recommends nurseries
The round table took place at a time when fewer children are being born in Czechia than at any point since records began. Last year there were 77,636 live births (in Czech), and the total fertility rate fell to 1.28 children per woman. In the first half of 2026, 36,500 children were born (in Czech), 5% fewer than a year earlier. The birth rate is falling for the fifth year in a row.
During the election campaign, Andrej Babiš promised a return of fertility to 2.1 children per woman. We calculated (in Czech) that this would require almost twice the largest increase Sweden has ever achieved. The figure of 2.1 did not make it into the government's policy statement. So far, the government's main family measure is a higher parental allowance: CZK 400,000 for children born from 1 January 2027. According to the Ministry of Labour, the amendment changes only the amount of the benefit (in Czech) – it leaves the conditions, the period of entitlement and the method of payment unchanged.
International research points elsewhere. A systematic review of 57 studies of family policies since 1970, by Janna Bergsvik, Agnes Fauske and Rannveig Kaldager Hart, found the most consistent positive effect on fertility for accessible childcare. One-off cash incentives, according to the review, tend to shift the timing of births rather than increase the number of children. We analysed what Czech parties promise in this respect in the piece Kindergartens, flats, benefits (in Czech).
The demographer Anna Šťastná of the Faculty of Science at Charles University told us for our series on demography (in Czech) that young people still mostly want two children and that the birth rate is being pushed down by the real barriers they encounter along the way. The same thesis was voiced at the round table by Andrea Bohačíková of the organisation M.arter: in her view, the birth rate is falling because of insecurity in housing, finances and work. She described flexible work as "necessary infrastructure" for the birth rate in Czechia and refused to treat it as a company perk. Employers, however, mostly do treat it as a perk – the Labour Code leaves it to agreement with the employee.
The data do not directly prove that flexible work is the main lever on the birth rate. Sociologists have studied the link for decades and there is no consensus on it. What is documented is that countries with accessible care for the youngest children have markedly higher employment among mothers. They also have higher fertility, but only slightly: for 2024 Eurostat gives France 1.61, Slovenia 1.52, Denmark 1.47 and Czechia 1.36. Why even the Swedish model has not brought fertility back to 2.1 is explained in our piece The Scandinavian trap (in Czech).
Marie Oujezdská of the Family Union of the Czech Republic (Rodinný svaz ČR) proposed changing the parental allowance from a fixed sum to compensation for lost wages, as in Germany or the Nordic countries. The family would then receive more money over a shorter period, and the return to work could be planned better.
13% of Czech women work part-time; in the EU, 28%
The second missing piece is part-time and flexible jobs. According to Eurostat, 13.1% of employed Czech women work part-time. The EU average is 28.2%; in Germany it is 48.6% and in Austria 49.2%.
At the meeting, Kristýna Cejnarová of the Mumdoo platform presented the new Mumdoo Report 2026 (in Czech), based on a survey of around 18,000 parents and 323 companies. According to the report, 84% of parents of children under eight want to work fewer than 40 hours a week; fewer than half manage to. During parental leave, 45% of parents (in Czech) – roughly 158,000 people – have no contact with their employer at all. Two years ago it was 37%. Cejnarová spoke of them as parents "in the dark": after they go on parental leave, the company does not get in touch with them even once.
The report also estimates that if parents of preschoolers could work as much as they wish, CZK 16 billion a year would flow into public budgets. This is a model calculation that depends on assumptions about wages, taxation and parents' willingness to take up work. For comparison: increasing the parental allowance by CZK 50,000 per child means, with around 75,000 births a year and by our rough calculation, spending of around CZK 3.75 billion per annual cohort of children, spread over the years in which the allowance is drawn.
Two employers showed at the meeting what it looks like when it works. Katarína Andrašovská, HR director of Generali Česká pojišťovna, an insurance company, described keeping in touch with people on parental leave and working hours that change according to life circumstances. Ostrava City Hall runs a workplace kindergarten and adapts work for employees at different stages of life. Irena Přibylová, director of Network for the Family (Síť pro rodinu), which awards the Family-Friendly Company (in Czech) certificate, added that a family-friendly company needs written and transparent rules. The goodwill of a single manager ends when that manager leaves.
Paternity leave lasts two weeks; 3% of mothers take turns on parental leave with their partner
Lenka Formánková of Charles University identified fathers as the key. She proposed longer paternity leave, paid at 80% to 100% of wages and non-transferable to the mother. Since 2022, Czech paternity leave has lasted fourteen days. Sweden reserves three months of paid parental leave for each parent that cannot be transferred to the other. The demographers Ann-Zofie Duvander and Gunnar Andersson found that Swedish couples who share care more evenly are statistically more likely to have another child.
MP Pláteník pointed to a similar link: families in which the father is involved in care are more willing to have another child. For Czechia this has a concrete meaning. Women here have their first child around the age of thirty and have fewer years left for a second – we analysed this in detail (in Czech). Every year a mother spends out of work without any certainty of returning raises the cost of another child.
The Mumdoo Report 2026 also asked how parents would like to share care. 54% of mothers would like to take turns with their partner on parental leave. 3% manage to.
