Work and Family Disadvantage: Determinants of Gender Gaps in Paid Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the increase in gender inequality in paid work during the pandemic to unpack the relative relevance of labor market and work-family conflict processes. Using panel data from the United States Current Population Survey, we examine four mechanisms in an integrated analysis that explicitly includes single-parent households and assesses the moderating role of women's economic position relative to their partners. The results indicate that increases in gender inequality during the pandemic were heavily concentrated in households with children but also partly connected to gender differences in prepandemic labor market positions and to the higher prevalence of women in lower earner position relative to their partners. Single parents were more negatively impacted than partnered parents, but the disproportionate concentration of this impact on women does not contribute much to increases in overall gender inequality due to the relatively smaller size of this group.

CHANGE AND VARIATION IN U.S. COUPLES' EARNINGS EQUALITY FOLLOWING PARENTHOOD.

In the context of broad increases in gender equality and growing socioeconomic disparities along multiple dimensions of family life, we examine changes in within-family earnings equality following parenthood and the extent to which they have played out differently by education. Our analysis relies on links between rich surveys and administrative tax records that provide high quality earnings data for husbands and wives spanning two years before and up to 10 years following first births from the 1980s to the 2000s in the United States (Survey of Income and Program Participation Synthetic Beta files; N=21,300 couples and 194,100 couple-years). Accounting for time-invariant couple characteristics and year and age fixed effects, we find that wives' share of total couple earnings declines substantially after parenthood and remains lower over the observation window. Cohort changes in within-family earnings equality are modest and concentrated among the earliest cohort of parents, and data provide little evidence of differential change by education. Wives' financial dependence on their husbands increases substantially after parenthood, irrespective of education and cohort. These findings have implications for women's vulnerability, particularly in the U.S. where divorce remains common and public support for families is weak.

Marriage and Masculinity: Male-Breadwinner Culture, Unemployment, and Separation Risk in 29 Countries.

Scholars argue that gender culture, understood as a set of beliefs, norms, and social expectations defining masculinities and femininities, plays an important role in shaping when romantic relationships end. However, the relevance of gender culture is often underappreciated, in part because its empirical identification remains elusive. This study leverages cross-country variation in gender norms to test the hypothesis that gender culture conditions which heterosexual romantic relationships end and when. We analyze the extent to which male-breadwinning norms determine the association between men's unemployment and couple separation. Using harmonized household panel data for married and cohabiting heterosexual couples in 29 countries from 2004 to 2014, our results provide robust evidence that male-breadwinner norms are a key driver of the association between men's unemployment and the risk of separation. The magnitude of this mechanism is sizeable; an increase of one standard deviation in male-breadwinner norms increases the odds of separation associated with men's unemployment by 32 percent. Analyses also show that the importance of male-breadwinner norms is strongest among couples for whom the male-breadwinner identity is most salient, namely married couples. By directly measuring and leveraging variation in the key explanatory of interest, gender culture, our study offers novel and robust evidence reinforcing the importance of gender norms to understand when romantic relationships end.

Changes in Couples' Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality.

The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women's employment and spouses' division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples' division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. nationally representative surveys, we examine the role of parenthood in spouses' earnings correlations between 1968 and 2015. We examine the extent to which changes in spouses' earnings correlations are due to (1) changes upon entry into marriage (assortative mating), (2) changes between marriage and parenthood, (3) changes following parenthood, and (4) changes in women's employment. Our findings show that increases in the correlation between spouses' earnings prior to 1990 came largely from changes between marriage and first birth, but increases after 1990 came almost entirely from changes following parenthood. In both instances, changes in women's employment are key to increasing earnings correlations. Changes in assortative mating played little role in either period. An assessment of the aggregate-level implications points to the growing significance of earnings similarity after parenthood for rising income inequality across families.

Women's employment and fertility in a global perspective (1960-2015).

BACKGROUND: Scant research explores the association between women's employment and fertility on a truly global scale due to limited cross-national comparative standardized information across contexts. METHODS: This paper compiles a unique dataset that combines nationally representative country-level data on women's wage employment from the International Labor Organization with fertility and reproductive health measures from the United Nations and additional information from UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank. This dataset is used to explore the linear association between women's employment and fertility/reproductive health around the world between 1960 and 2015. RESULTS: Women's wage employment is negatively correlated with total fertility rates and unmet need for family planning and positively correlated with modern contraceptive use in every major world region. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that these findings hold for nonagricultural employment only. CONTRIBUTION: Our analysis documents the linear association between women's employment and fertility on a global scale and widens the discussion to include reproductive health outcomes as well. Better understanding of these empirical associations on a global scale is important for understanding the mechanisms behind global fertility change.

Trends in Economic Homogamy: Changes in Assortative Mating or the Division of Labor in Marriage?

The growing economic resemblance of spouses has contributed to rising inequality by increasing the number of couples in which there are two high- or two low-earning partners. The dominant explanation for this trend is increased assortative mating. Previous research has primarily relied on cross-sectional data and thus has been unable to disentangle changes in assortative mating from changes in the division of spouses' paid labor-a potentially key mechanism given the dramatic rise in wives' labor supply. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to decompose the increase in the correlation between spouses' earnings and its contribution to inequality between 1970 and 2013 into parts due to (a) changes in assortative mating, and (b) changes in the division of paid labor. Contrary to what has often been assumed, the rise of economic homogamy and its contribution to inequality is largely attributable to changes in the division of paid labor rather than changes in sorting on earnings or earnings potential. Our findings indicate that the rise of economic homogamy cannot be explained by hypotheses centered on meeting and matching opportunities, and they show where in this process inequality is generated and where it is not.

Trends in Relative Earnings and Marital Dissolution: Are Wives Who Outearn Their Husbands Still More Likely to Divorce?

As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings and marital dissolution using data from the 1968-2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that wives' relative earnings were positively associated with the risk of divorce among couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that this was especially true for wives who outearned their husbands, but this was no longer the case for couples married in the 1990s. Change was concentrated among middle-earning husbands and those without college degrees, a finding consistent with the economic squeeze of the middle class over this period.

Migration, Household Tasks, and Gender: Evidence from the Republic of Georgia.

We examine whether migration affects the gender division of household tasks and participation in leisure within origin-country households using survey data from the Republic of Georgia. Our theoretical framework identifies two sets of mechanisms whereby migration might influence gender differences in home activities: migrant experience effects and migrant absence effects. We test for both types of effects on the probability that men and women perform gender atypical household tasks and engage in leisure activities by comparing households with and without currently absent and return migrants using probit regressions. We find evidence for both migration absence and migration experience effects on gender differences in housework and leisure. However, these effects are complex and contradictory: generally, male migration tends to exacerbate gender differences in the sending household while female migration tends to ameliorate them.

Gender and class housework inequalities in the era of outsourcing hiring domestic work in Spain.

Many households regularly outsource unpaid domestic labor by purchasing services and products to help with cleaning, cooking, ironing, and other chores. Despite the prevalence of this practice, scholars know little about how it affects inequalities in the time spent on housework. Drawing on data on 3540 dual-earner households in Spain, this article examines the relationship between hiring domestic work and both the within-household gender gap in housework and the class gap in housework among women. I find that women who hire do about 30min less housework per day than non-hiring women, but in relation to their partners these women continue to do the same share of housework. Using counterfactual analysis, I find that the absence of paid domestic work is associated with a 20% decline in the class gap in housework among Spanish women.