Why Do(n't) they leave?: Motherhood and women's job mobility

Although the relationship between motherhood and women's labor market exits has received a great deal of popular and empirical attention in recent years, far less is known about the relationship between motherhood and women's job changes. In this paper, I use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) (NLSY79) and Cox regression models to examine how motherhood influences the types of job changes and employment exits women make and how this varies by racial-ethnic group. I find preschool-age children are largely immobilizing for white women, as they discourage these women from making the types of voluntary job changes that are often associated with wage growth. No such effects were found for Black or Hispanic women.     

“Making it work: Migration,motherhood and employment in Australia”

The transition into motherhood is often associated with a reduction in women's labor force participation, reinforcing gender employment hierarchies. Our study compares women's employment status and paid work time prior to and following birth among immigrants and native-borns in Australia. We also consider how these outcomes differ by generation status and racial and ethnic background. Australia provides a valuable context to understand these outcomes given its skilled migration policy, racial and ethnic diversity, limited childcare and family leave policies, and high rates of part-time work among mothers. We examine longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) for women from 2001 to 2016. We find that migrant women show lower employment levels and commensurate work hours than native-borns prior to childbirth. After childbirth, migrant mothers maintain lower employment levels, but higher work hours than native-born mothers. Overall, we find that relative to native-borns, migrant women typically experience a smaller reduction in employment and work hours following childbirth, but some of this is likely due to their lower starting position prior to childbirth. Our findings have implications for skilled immigration policies and highlights the unique work-family pressures facing immigrant and native-born women.     

Women's employment trajectories during early adulthood in urban China: A cohort comparison

This study uses retrospective work history data from CGSS 2008 and employs group-based trajectory analysis to model the diverse employment trajectories of cohorts of urban Chinese women (born in the 1940s–1970s) during young adulthood (age 20–35). We identify ideal-types of urban women's employment trajectories and explore traits associated with each group type. In particular, we examine whether and how the timing of marriage and fertility as well as socioeconomic background help to distinguish patterns of women's labor force attachment in young adulthood. We also examine how these patterns change across cohorts given China's rapid social transformations in the past few decades. We find that delaying family formation is generally associated with more consistent work attachment, but this relationship is also largely associated with one's socioeconomic background. Our results reveal significant cohort variations in the shape of women's employment trajectories and we discuss how institutional and cultural contexts of different historical periods could have shaped family formation and employment processes differently. Our findings highlight the heterogeneity of urban women's work and family formation patterns in the context of rising gender inequalities and rapid socioeconomic transformation over time.     

When children affect parents: Children’s academic performance and parental investment

Sociologists have extensively documented the ways that parent resources predict children’s achievement. However, less is known about whether and how children’s academic performance shapes parental investment behaviors. I use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and longitudinal fixed effects models to examine how changes in teacher assessments are related to changes in the conferral of various parent resources. Overall, I find that the relationship between achievement and investment varies based on the directionality in children’s achievement and the type of resource at hand. Children whose performance improves receive a broad range of enrichment resources, while declines in performance are met with corrective educational resources. Results are largely consistent whether language or math assessments are used to predict investment, and also among children whose achievement does not change over time. I discuss these patterns, along with implications for the use of parent resources in education and family research.     

Measuring students' school context exposures: A trajectory-based approach

Studies of school effects on children's outcomes usually use single time-point measures. I argue that this approach fails to account for (1) age-based variation in children's sensitivity to their surroundings; (2) differential effects stemming from differences in the length of young people's exposures; and (3) moves between contexts and endogenous changes over time within them. To evaluate the merits of this argument, I specify and test a longitudinal model of school effects on children's academic performance. Drawing on recent advances in finite mixture modeling, I identify a series of distinct school context trajectories that extend across a substantial portion of respondents' elementary and secondary school years. I find that these trajectories vary significantly with respect to shape, with some students experiencing significant changes in their environments over time. I then show that students' trajectories of exposure are related to their 8th grade achievement, even after controlling for point-in-time measures of school context.     

Growing educational differentials in the retreat from marriage among Korean men

Applying discrete-time hazard models to person-year data constructed from 1% microdata sample of 2010 Korean Census, we explore how men's education affects their transition to first marriage, and how the relationship between education and marriage has changed across three 10-year birth cohorts of Korean men born from 1946 to 1975. Drawing on Oppenheimer's theory of marriage and review of changing educational and economic contexts of Korean men, we develop a hypothesis on growing educational differentials in marriage. We find that the high educated delay marriage until later ages but catch up to the extent to which they are eventually more likely to marry than the low educated. There is a continued trend across cohorts toward the delay and avoidance of marriage at all educational levels. However, the trend of retreat from marriage has been more substantial for men with high school or less education compared to men with a university degree, leading to growing educational gaps over time in marriage. Among the three cohorts, the youngest cohort, among which low educated men's economic prospects have particularly deteriorated due to rapid educational expansion and economic crisis, shows most pronounced decline in marriage.     

Tethered lives: A couple-based perspective on the consequences of parenthood for time use,occupation, and wages

Prior research on parenthood effects has typically used single-sex models and estimated average effects. By contrast, we estimate population-level variability in partners' changes in housework hours, paid work hours, occupation traits, and wages after becoming parents, and we explore whether one partner's adjustment offsets or supplements the other's. We find tradeoffs between spouses on paid work adjustments to parenthood, but complementarity in adjustments to housework hours, occupation traits, and wages. The effect of parenthood on wives' behaviors is larger and more variable than on husbands' behaviors in every domain. The modest variation between husbands in work responses to parenthood explains little of the variation in the motherhood penalty, while variation in wives' own behaviors plays a larger role. We refer to this pattern as tethered autonomy: variation across American couples in work responses to parenthood is shaped primarily by variation in wives' adjustments, while husbands' work acts largely as a fixed point.     

Intergenerational effects of shifts in women’s educational distribution in South Korea: Transmission, differential fertility, and assortative mating

This study examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women’s education in South Korea. We define intergenerational effects as changes in the distribution of educational attainment in an offspring generation associated with the changes in a parental generation. Departing from the previous approach in research on social mobility that has focused on intergenerational association, we examine the changes in the distribution of educational attainment across generations. Using a simulation method based on Mare and Maralani’s recursive population renewal model, we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. The results point to the following conclusions. First, we find a positive intergenerational effect: improvement in women’s education leads to improvement in daughter’s education. Second, we find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on assortative marriage and differential fertility: assortative mating amplifies and differential fertility dampens the intergenerational effects. Third, intergenerational effects become bigger for the less educated and smaller for the better educated over time, which is a consequence of educational expansion. We compare our results with Mare and Maralani’s original Indonesian study to illustrate how the model of intergenerational effects works in different socioeconomic circumstances.     

Working to protect rights: Women's civil liberties in cross-cultural perspective

Using data for a majority of the world's countries over a 25- to 55-year period, this paper analyzes cross-cultural heterogeneity in women's civil liberties independently of and relative to men. Civil liberties include the freedoms of discussion and movement, freedom from forced labor, property rights, and access to justice. Regression analyses show that women's civil liberties vary considerably across cultural zones defined by the intersection of religious traditions and geographical regions. These patterns persist even when controlling for factors such as democracy and development. Accounting for women's political representation and educational attainment often reduces but never eliminates these cross-cultural differences; the same is true for embeddedness in world society. In contrast, women's labor force participation all but erases negative cultural effects, and instrumental-variables analyses suggest that this factor is a causal determinant of women's civil liberties. Efforts to improve women's rights should therefore focus on overcoming cultural barriers to their workforce participation.     

Female labor force participation in the US: How is immigration shaping recent trends?

Women entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers during the 20th century. Yet recent years have been witness to a creeping reversal in women's labor force participation. Why did the revolution stall? In response to debates over a “natural” limit to women's employment, or a cultural backlash against the dual-breadwinner household, we consider an alternative explanation, namely whether immigration has slowed the growth in female labor force participation. Using CPS data from 1998 to 2018, we show that the increase in the share of immigrants and children of immigrants in the population has reduced overall female labor force participation. However, immigration accounts for relatively little of the retreat from the labor force. Instead, the compositional effect of population change is overshadowed by behavioral shifts that affect both natives and immigrants. Lower participation rates among native-born women accounts for most of the overall decline. Despite persistent differences, we also find substantial convergence in the labor force behavior of native-born and foreign-born women, which bodes well for the long-term economic incorporation of immigrants and their children.     

Girls’ self-efficacy in the context of neighborhood gender stratification

Scholars have linked neighborhood characteristics to self-efficacy, but few have considered how gender factors into this association. We integrate literature on neighborhoods, gender stratification, and self-efficacy to examine the association between women's relative resources among neighborhood residents and adolescents' self-efficacy. We hypothesize that girls report more self-efficacy when they reside in neighborhoods where women have more socioeconomic resources relative to men. We test this hypothesis using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and the 1990 Census. Results from multilevel regression models with gender-interacted effects indicate the neighborhood level of women's relative resources was not associated with boys' self-efficacy. However, girls reported higher self-efficacy when women's relative resources in their neighborhoods were greater. This association persisted after including potential individual- and neighborhood-level confounding variables. Our study underscores the importance of attending to gendered processes when understanding how neighborhoods impact youth.     

The motherhood wage penalty: A meta-analysis

Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This ‘motherhood wage gap’ has been reported in numerous studies. We summarize the existing empirical evidence on this topic using meta-analysis and test for several mechanisms which can be responsible for the persistence of the wage gap. Based on 208 wage effects of having exactly one child and 245 wage effects of the total number of children, we find an average motherhood wage gap of around 3.6–3.8%. While the gaps associated with the total number of children are mostly explained by the loss of mothers' human capital during child-related career breaks, the gaps associated with one child are predominantly driven by mothers' choice of jobs and occupations that pay less. The residual gap is smallest in Nordic countries, where public policies actively support gender equality and reconciliation of work and family, as well as Belgium and France, and largest in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries.     

建国后我国妇女参政的历程及现状

建国以后,我们的党和政府领导人十分重视提高妇女的法律地位,先后颁布了很多法律法规,对妇女的各种权利、义务、利益等都做出了明确规定。我国妇女获得了参与国家事务管理的权利,并分阶段地参与到国家事务管理当中,这是我国妇女参政上的一个突破。介绍了建国后我国妇女参政的历程,分析了当前我国妇女参政的现状及原因。应完善目前相关体制,提高我国女性参政比例及参政能力。     

Preferences,constraints, and the process of sex segregation in college majors: A choice analysis

The persistence of horizontal sex segregation in higher education continues to puzzle social scientists. To help resolve this puzzle, we analyze a sample of college entrants in Germany with a discrete choice design that allows for social learning from the experiences of others. We make at least two contributions to the state of research. First, we test whether essentialist gender stereotypes affect major selection mostly through internalization or rather as external constraints that high school graduates adapt their behavior to. Empirically, we find that internalized vocational interests better explain gendered major choices than conformance with friends' and parents' expectations does. Second, we scrutinize whether segregation results from women's anticipation of gendered family roles or from their anticipation of sex-based discrimination, but we find no evidence for either of these hypotheses. As in most previous studies, differences in mathematics achievement fail to explain gendered patterns of selection into college majors.     

The Dynamic Interdependence of Women′s Employment and Fertility

Research on the causal relationship between women′s fertility and their employment patterns has yielded contradictory findings. In order to shed some light on the confusion that has resulted, hazard models are used to investigate the possibility these two variables are dynamically interdependent. Transition rates among combined states of pregnancy and fertility are analyzed for a data set consisting of joint work and fertility event histories for a national sample of young white and black women. The results lend support to the interdependence thesis. Pregnancy and motherhood increase the rate at which women leave employment and decrease their reentry rate. Furthermore, I find that women′s wages, and for white women, employment status as well, are negatively and significantly related to their rate of becoming pregnant.     

精准扶贫视阈下河北省贫困地区妇女多维贫困研究

随着精准扶贫工作进入关键时期,河北省扶贫工作取得了很大的成果。而当前仍然存在着许多妇女贫困的问题,这严重影响了其脱贫工作的快速推进。本文在系统梳理国内外文献的基础上,通过对河北贫困地区妇女进行问卷调查,基于Alkire-Foster多维贫困测度模型,甄选出了导致妇女贫困的主要因素即教育、就业和健康。并在此基础上提出了解决河北贫困地区妇女贫困的路径。     

How does gun violence affect Americans’ trust in each other?

This article examines how Americans' actual experience of gun victimization affects their trust in others and how this further connects to the widely-discussed association between gun crime and trust at the place level. Analyzing data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), I find that, regardless when it occurred in life, Americans who were victimized by guns trust much less in others than those who had no such experience. In terms of the size of the effect, repeated gun victimization has the strongest effect, followed by adulthood victimization, and then childhood victimization. I also find that individuals who later achieve higher socioeconomic status are better able to recover from the psychological effect of childhood gun victimization, lending support for the experiential theory of trust that people can update their trust according to changing experiences later in life. Finally, combing the GSS data with data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I also show that higher percentages of nonfatal and fatal gun violence victims lead to lower levels of trust both across and within the U.S. census divisions over time. Findings of this study demonstrate that America's gun violence affects not only just those killed, injured, or present during gunfire, but it can also sabotage the social and psychological well-being of all Americans.     

从西方女权主义思潮看当代中国女性的教育问题

女权主义是一种影响广泛的西方社会思潮和政治运动.在教育领域,女权主义者把研究内容定为教育中所有与女性有关的问题,核心是性别间的不平等及其对学校教育和整个教育系统的影响.对西方女权主义教育产生的思想基础以及在中国传播情况的分析,探讨西方女权主义思潮对中国女性教育的启示,寻求解决当代中国女性受教育问题的途径,对于提高中国女性的教育水平和整体素质,进而推动整个社会的进步将产生十分重要的意义.     

Institutionalized collective action and the relationship between beliefs about environmental problems and environmental actions: A cross-national analysis

How do institutions affect the relationship between an individual's beliefs and their actions? Institutionalized strategies are routine ways of addressing problems that become taken-for-granted in a society. Environmental problems constitute a collective action problem in that personal consumption often conflicts with collective interests. I test whether beliefs about environmental problems have a different impact on a person's pro-environmental behaviors, depending on how addressing collective action problems is institutionalized in their society. In particular, I use level of welfare targeting as an observable, organizational difference among societies that reflects different institutionalized strategies for addressing a prominent collective action problem. I use multilevel models on data from the 2010 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and measures of welfare targeting from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to answer this question. I find that in societies where the institutionalized strategy for dealing with inequality is highly targeted, individuals' beliefs that these problems are important, real, and whether they can do something about them have a greater impact on their actions. The results suggest individuals generalize taken-for-granted strategies of assuring collective welfare to implement their individual beliefs about the environment, making institutional environments important moderators of the strength of the belief-action relationship.     

Race and Wealth Inequality: The Impact of Racial Differences in Asset Ownership on the Distribution of Household Wealth

What accounts for persistent racial differences in wealth ownership? Previous research has debated the role that differences in asset ownership play in creating and maintaining wealth inequality. I use survey data to model the ownership of seven assets and find that whites are indeed more likely than blacks to buy high-risk, high-return assets. I then use a simulation model to explore the effect that these differences have on the distribution of wealth. I separate the effects of asset ownership from the effects of racial differences in family wealth history, earnings, education, marital behavior, fertility, and other influences on wealth inequality. I find that removing racial differences in asset ownership reduced wealth inequality drastically, but not completely, and that racial differences in educational attainment account for much of the remaining difference. I estimate how changes in historical patterns of portfolio behavior and educational attainment would have reduced inequality, and I explore the implications of these findings for reducing wealth inequality in the future.