The Nexus of Gender Equality and Children’s Participation in Early Childhood Education: A Longitudinal Study in the Italian Provinces

Early childhood education (ECE) is increasingly recognized as a crucial opportunity for children’s development and well-being. However, most studies at a policy level focused on public expenditure for ECE underestimating factors related to actual participation in ECE. We investigated at a local level the relationship between gender employment equality (GEE), gender wage equality (GWE), and children’s participation in ECE using a high-quality national data source collecting official statistics for 103 Italian provinces from 2009 to 2019. We adopted a standardized measure of gender equality, and we estimated mixed-effects linear models and Latent Markov models to disentangle the spatial–temporal pattern of the association. Results indicate that GEE, but not GWE, is associated cross-sectionally with the rate of children’s participation in ECE. We discovered 4 clusters of provinces, characterized by different degrees of estimated participation in ECE, and quite stable longitudinally. We showed that Central Italian provinces are the best performing. On this basis, acting to promote local policies focused on women’s empowerment and participation in the labor market, especially in Southern European countries, may also have beneficial effects in terms of reducing children’s disadvantage by improving participation rates in ECE.