ABSTRACT
In many OECD countries, women are underrepresented in high status, high paying occupations and overrepresented in lower status work. One reason for this inequity is the "motherhood penalty," where women with children face more roadblocks in hiring and promotions than women without children or men with children. This research focuses on divergent occupational outcomes between men and women with children and analyzes whether parental gender gaps in occupational status are more extreme for immigrant populations. Using data from the Luxembourg Cross-National Data Center, I compare changes in gendered occupational segregation from 2000 to 2016 in Germany and the USA among immigrant and native-born parents. Multinomial logistic regression models and predicted probabilities show that despite instituting policies intended to reduce parental gender inequality in the workforce, Germany fares worse than the USA in gendered occupational outcomes overall. While the gap between mothers' and fathers' probabilities of employment in high status jobs is shrinking over time in Germany, particularly for immigrant mothers, Germany's gender gaps in professional occupations are consistently larger than gaps in the US. Likewise, gender gaps in elementary/labor work participation are also larger in Germany, with immigrant mothers having a much higher likelihood of working in labor/elementary occupations than any other group-including US immigrant women. These findings suggest that work-family policies-at least those implemented in Germany-are not cure-all solutions for entrenched gender inequality. Results also demonstrate the importance of considering the interaction between gender and other demographic characteristics-like immigrant status-when determining the potential effectiveness of proposed work-family policies.
ABSTRACT
In order to gain insights into how the effects of the uneven adoption of Medicaid expansion varies across the rural/urban spectrum and between racial/ethnic groups in the United States, this research used the fertility question in the 2011-2015 American Community Survey to link infants' records to their mothers' household health insurance status. This preliminary exploration of the Medicaid expansion used logistic regression to examine the probability that an infant will be born without health insurance coverage. Overall, the states that adopted Medicaid expansion improved the health insurance coverage for households with infants. However, rural households with infants report lower percentages of coverage than urban households with infants. Furthermore, the rural/urban gap in health insurance coverage is wider in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion. Additionally, Hispanic infants remain significantly less likely to have health insurance coverage compared to Non-Hispanic White infants. Understanding infant health insurance coverage across ethnic/racial groups and the rural/urban spectrum will become increasingly important as the U.S. population transitions to a minority-majority and also becomes more urban. Although not a perfect solution, our findings showed that the Medicaid expansion of health insurance coverage had a mainly overall positive effect on the percentage of U.S. households with infants who have health insurance coverage.
