We provide experimental evidence that enabling access to universal early child care increases maternal
labor supply and promotes gender equality among families with lower socioeconomic status (SES). Our
intervention offers customized help with child care applications, aiming to increase enrollment among
lower-SES families. 18 months after the intervention, we find substantial increases in full-time maternal
employment (160%), maternal earnings (22%), and household income (10%). We show that a substantial
share of the treatment effect on maternal full-time employment can be explained by increased child care
enrollment and specifically more hours in child care. We also investigate treatment effects on the division
of working hours, care hours, and earnings between mothers and fathers. The treatment improves a
combined index of the gender-equality outcomes by 0.4 standard deviations, with significant increases in
each dimension. Consistently across outcomes, we observe no significant effects for higher-SES families.

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