Inductivist

This Time columnist thinks that homemakers are so unhappy (and angry), social change is called for. What does the GSS say about their level of unhappiness?

I included mothers since the 2000 survey to maximize sample size. Respondents were asked how happy they are these days. Answers range from "very happy" (1) to "pretty happy" (2) to "not too happy" (3). I calculated means for mothers of all work statuses. Higher means indicate more sadness (sample size = 5,286).


Mean sadness score

Full-time 1.82
Part-time 1.78
Temporarily not working 1.90
Laid off 2.05*
Retired 1.82
School 1.83
Keeping house 1.83

*significantly sadder than full-timers


According to GSS data, there is no difference in mean level of happiness between mothers working full-time and homemakers.

It's my impression that religious women are more oriented toward family than irreligious women. Traditional religion focuses on the importance of motherhood over worldly ambition.

How do we measure occupational ambition? Let's look at occupational prestige and number of hours worked per week. I'll throw in IQ as a control:

Standardized OLS Coefficients, DV = Job prestige (sample size = 7,841)

Church attendance .08*
IQ .32*

Standardized OLS Coefficients, DV = Hours worked last week (sample size = 7,208)

Church attendance -.07*
IQ .00

* statistically significant

Interesting. Religious women work more prestigious jobs, but they tend to work fewer hours. They work smarter, not harder.

While it is not easy to find good ideas in sociology, it's not impossible. One useful concept is called "exposure" (I'm not sure a discipline really invented it. It's common sense). It's simple: behavior depends a lot on ease and opportunity. Why am I good friends with the professor next door, and not the guy down the hall? Simply because I bump into my neighbor all the time. Why are children often beaten by women--the less aggressive sex? One reason is because men are around kids less.

This truth has conservative implications. For example, it suggests that if you want to reduce the frequency of marital infidelity, reduce the number of men and women who work together.

The GSS asked: 1) have you ever cheated? and 2) what is your work status?  Here are the percentages who have ever been unfaithful:

Percent ever unfaithful (sample size = 7,890 white women--married or previously married)

Works full-time 16.9*
Part-time 13.0*
Homemaker  8.3
Retired 8.5

*significantly higher than homemaker

Full-time working women are twice as likely as those keeping house to cheat. In this respect, sex desegregation in the workplace is anti-family.

General Social Survey participants were asked: "Do you approve or disapprove of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?"

I looked for factors that would predict disapproval of women working (sample size = 6,600):

Logistic regression coefficients (odds)

Age 1.02*
Conservatism 1.03
Female .92
IQ .98*
Education .96*
Job prestige .99*
Church attendance 1.05*

* p < .05, two-tailed

The coefficients are displayed in terms of odds. For example, each year of age raises the odds that one will disapprove of a woman working by a factor of 1.02, or 2 percent. An odds of 1.00 indicates that the factor is unrelated to the outcome variable.

Older, lower status, and religious folks are more likely to disapprove of married women working. Gender and political orientation have no significant effect, so men and women, and conservatives and liberals do not differ in their attitudes.

The listed groups have been slower to give up on the breadwinner model of family life. This is odd for the lower status groups since they could use a second income more than better off groups. Lower- and working-class folks--women as well as men--are more likely to "cling" to traditional notions of manhood (e.g., the leader, the provider) while elites have abandoned such ideas as outdated and misogynistic. 

Most poor, married women work, but they still have the ideal of a strong man who will take care of them. Simpler people are not quite as giddy as the educated class about an androgynous world with female ultimate fighters and men in aprons.       

We saw in a recent post that Hispanics in high school skip classes more than others. Well, it's because they're working, right, which might not be ideal, but hey, at least it's not hanging out on the street corner or something. The only problem is that Hispanic teens attending school are less likely to have a job than whites.

The graph (N = 11,758, 2008 Monitoring the Future) shows that 73 percent of white seniors have some kind of part-time work. This is compared to only 61 percent of Latinos (and 62 percent of blacks). Whites get better grades, even though they spend more time working.

As a follow-up to the last post, let's look at the relationship between working and fertility for smart women only. While overall fertility is a concern of much of Europe, the American TFR is over 2. Since we don't have to worry at the moment about the country shrinking, we can concern ourselves with the eugenics question. Following the same rules as last time, I simply limited the sample to married women with scores 8 through 10 on the Wordsum vocabulary test.

Married women who work part-time or not at all have more kids. The differences are more glaring here than for women of all levels of IQ. (Differences, however, are not significant since the sample is small). To be specific, smart stay-at-home moms have 1 1/2 times as many babies. Now that's eugenic.  

FeministX has done a couple of interesting analyses of the relationship between employment and fertility. Her approach is macrolevel: she estimates the correlation across 23 countries, and over time in the U.S. The problem is that, more often than not, you use macrolevel data when you don't have relevant individual-level data available. With microlevel data, you can avoid the problems of small samples, country differences in data collection, and the danger of making the ecological fallacy (e.g., claiming that it is working women, as opposed to homemakers, who are having all the kids when the data can't tell you that). Plus, you have to use whatever macrolevel measures that happen to be available, while with GSS data you can custom-design your age group, period, race, etc. The typical weakness of individual-level survey data is whether respondents can be trusted. Fortunately, a solid argument can be made that women in the GSS are accurate in their answers concerning work status and number of offspring.

To answer the question, does working lead to more children, it seems to me that we should look at women who are old enough to have shown their fertility tendencies but are not so old that their kids are grown and consequently have entered the workforce. How about 35 to 44? (Feel free to do your own data crunching if you prefer another approach). And let's look at only this decade so we observe recent behavior.  Also--I suppose we want to look at married women since no one would want to see single motherhood encouraged. Here are the results:

* p < .05, two-tail test, compared with full-time status.

Married women who work part-time or who keep house average significantly more offspring than those who work full-time.

I looked up the demographic literature, and the general story--whether from microlevel or macrolevel studies--is that working reduces fertility. The one expection I found was that after 1985 the relationship across OECD countries switched from a negative to a positive. Some demographers have explained it in terms of factors like wider availability of day care centers, flexible hours at work, maternity leave--basically more social support for working mothers. Other demographers point to the negative relationship in each of these countries over time (FemX shows the opposite in the U.S.) and use fancy models to explain away the positive cross-sectional correlation (I don't have time at the moment to figure them out).  So the conventional wisdom of the discipline (most clearly seen in the microlevel research) is that working reduces fertility--and fertility also reduces work--but work and babies are becoming less incompatible as societies adjust to the new realities. FemX's point that more income can help a couple afford additional babies seems reasonable, but mom takes on a much heavier load, and not everyone is so industrious.

I agree with the reader who wrote that talented adults need to get the message that parents have little influence on their kids' personalities, and that this old idea that children have to be doted on 24/7 to turn out normal is bogus. Send the tots to day care. Hell, for all I know, they'll be fine at boading school.

Let me add, however, that there are other serious consequences of female employment to worry about. It has probably been the driving force behind the decline of the American family. Now that women are working outside the home, marriage is no longer an economic necessity--it's a choice. So women are waiting longer to get married, delaying children, having illegitimate kids, and walking away from their marriages. And men realize that now a woman can take care of herself, so he's freer to not marry the mother of his children, to divorce his wife, and to fail to support the kids. It seems pretty clear that, overall, the breadwinner model is superior.