In this paper, we draw from gender perspectives on the division of labor and emerging research on structural sexism and health to conceptualize and operationalize state-level gender inequality and how it shapes within-couple inequality in earnings following the transition to parenthood.
We use successive couple-level panels over four decades from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and merge the earnings changes of both partners’ around the time of first birth to state-level measures that tap the devaluation of work done by women. These include motherhood wage and employment penalties, lower pay for female-dominated occupations, disapproval of working mothers, and weaker political representation of women.
Results from fixed effect models show that state-level gender inequality shapes couples’ responses to birth, with steeper declines in wives’ relative earnings among new parents living in states that place lower value on women’s work. We find little evidence of variation in this process across more or less advantaged subgroups of the population, by child age, or over time. Wives’ relative earnings decline after childbirth, and structural sexism exacerbates earnings inequality among parents, with implications for mothers’ economic vulnerability and well-being.
Partner's Long Work Hours and Changes in New Parent's Employment over Forty Years
(Kelly Musick & Wonjeong Jeong, under review)
We build on recent research emphasizing the role of long and inflexible work hours in constraining women’s employment and exacerbating gender inequalities in employment and earnings.
Our analysis draws on a couple perspective and focuses on how partners’ long work hours shape employment following the transition to parenthood. Results from fixed-effect models show that partners’ pre-birth work hours moderate wives’ employment and work hours changes following first birth, with new mothers pulling back from work to a greater extent when their partners work long hours. Husbands’ employment and work hours, by contrast, are not sensitive to partners’ long work hours. We find little evidence of change over 40 years in the moderating role of partners’ long hours on own employment following birth.
Our results are consistent with earlier findings about the importance of husbands’ work hours for wives’ employment. They shed new light on couple dynamics at the critical transition to parenthood and document persistence in husbands’ work hour patterns and associations with wives’ employment over time.