Gender, work and family (1)

Consanguinity is still common in the Middle East. This paper examines the relation between consanguinity and intimate partner violence (IPV). The Demographic and Health Surveys in Egypt (2005; n=5,240) and Jordan (2007; n=3,444) and binary logistic regression models were used to assess this association. IPV, namely physical, emotional and sexual violence, during the past year was fairly similar in both countries. Physical violence was 18% in Egypt and 12% in Jordan; emotional violence was 10% in both countries; while sexual violence was lower at 6% in Jordan and 4% in Egypt. Jordan was having a higher rate of consanguinity (39%) as compared to Egypt (33%). Findings show significant association between consanguinity and experience of emotional , but not physical or sexual, IPV during past year in both countries. Duration of marriage, education, and wealth were also found to be important determinants. Policy implications of the findings will be discussed.

This article contributes to the literature on work-family conflicts by examining the role of self-employment in marital stability. The aggregate trends show that the rise in divorce rate was particularly sharp in the 1960s and 1970s and then the divorce rate has stalled or declined slightly, while the trend in self-employment followed the opposite pattern: the proportion of the labor force self-employed ceased its downward trend in the 1970s and has been rising ever since. It is hypothesized that self-employment might reduce the work-family conflict through several pathways: First, the self-employed work for themselves and so can regulate and adjust their workload. Second, self-employment gives an opportunity of flexible work schedule, and thus can increase marital interaction time. Finally, owning and running a joint business can have a “binding” effect in the sense that spouses who jointly own and run a business share both emotional and financial ties. On the other hand, self-employment can actually increase the work-family conflict by mixing the domains of work with the household. The first and second hypotheses are tested using the National Survey of Families and Households, and data for the third hypothesis comes from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics-2.

While previous research has focused on the gender division of housework, this article extends the notion of unpaid work done in households to care work. Using the National Survey of Families and Households and the American Time Use Survey, the author explores the gendered nature of both child care and care after the elderly. Literature on gender division of household work is used to as a point of departure in the analysis. In particular, the exchange-bargaining and gender performance are evaluated using relative earnings as a measure of gender deviance. As care work differs from household work because it often involves the emotional component, the possibility that care work is not as gendered as housework is also tested. Implications for gender inequality are discussed.

Two decades after reunification, the contrast between eastern and western Germany offers a natural experiment for studying the change in the employment patterns of parents. Historically both parts of Germany had different family and labor market policies: East Germany supported high female labor force participation whereas in West Germany the male breadwinner model was the norm. Hence, the question is: To what degree are these patterns of employment behavior persistent to this day? And beyond this, how do the changes in parental employment in Germany compare to international developments?
A second aim of this paper is to examine the impact of employment patterns on parents well being. In West Germany labor force participation and the responsibility for the family were usually seen as a “double burden“ for women whereas in East Germany parents became accustomed to full time employment of both partners. In light of different cultural and infrastructural backgrounds, how comfortable do parents feel with their working arrangements and their family life in both parts of Germany?
Data from the German Microcenses 1991 to 2009 and from the representative survey AID:A (Growing up in Germany) conducted in 2009 are used.

contact:
toelke@dji.de
heike.wirth@gesis.org

Households with all adults employed will increase and women continue to reach more prestigious and higher-paying industrial jobs. This paper addresses the relationship between work of dual-earner couples and the way they feel about it given different family situations. We examine the impact of occupational prestige that is assumed to reflect women’s progress in reaching high-level positions, and the divergence or convergence of the partners’ prestige levels supposed to alleviate or cause tensions and, thus, well-being effects. Models will be designed focusing on the smallest available unit, the household, and account for different family situations. We estimate the relationship between partner’s occupational prestige levels and a) the couple satisfaction (i.e. partner satisfaction added up), and b) the relative satisfaction as the difference between the partner satisfaction scores. We expect occupational prestige of couples to increase couple and relative subjective well-being to the extent that it confirms existing gender roles. The higher women’s occupational prestige compared to their husbands the more they are likely to report high levels of satisfaction relative to their partners/husbands. However, we also expect that in couples where a female partner becomes professionally empowered, couple satisfaction will decrease.

This paper examines the trend in gender inequality in educational attainment and non-agricultural employment in urban China since the 1990s. Based on the analyses of the micro-sample data from the 1982, 1990 and 2000 population censuses and the 2005 mini-census, we found that: (1) the gender gap in education, though still existing, has been substantially reduced; (2) the increase in women’s education in China did not lead to higher rates of labor force participation. Instead, women’s employment rate drops over time; (3) despite the fact that education increases in the likelihood of employment, this effect has declined over time for both men and women; (4) While married men are more likely to hold employment, married women are less likely to do so. The evidence suggests a return to traditional gender roles that used to be shaped by the socialist ideology on gender equality.

Some Asian countries have experienced increasingly surplus of men in the marriageable age cohort. The existing literature on its impacts uses aggregate sex ratio. However, the relevance of skewed sex ratio to family decisions mainly relies on how social interactions in the reference group convey this pressure. This paper adopts a unique social network data, collected from households' long term spontaneous gift exchange records, with a primary census-type household panel data from Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. We focus on comparing families with their first-born child a boy versus a girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect. The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried son and are faced with unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having unmarried son also affect parental risk-taking behavior. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design targeting policy to improve parental well-being.

This paper's purpose is to test whether the less wages wives earn than their husbands, the more chores they do or not from dual income families in South Korea. There are two major hypotheses: One is a comparative advantages hypothesis and another is a gender display hypothesis(Brines, 1994). The latter occurs in a patriarchal society and a Confucianism tradition remains important as a social ethic in South Korea.
Brines(1994) addressed that a gender display hypothesis could be sustained, when males’ squared economic dependency coefficient is negative and females’ squared economic dependency coefficient is positive. However, according to the Korean Time Use Survey 2009, the majority of husbands do not housework. This makes previous researches do not prove a gender display hypothesis perfectly.
The author analyzed data after separating families by husbands’ housework time and tentatively conclude that 1) a squared economic dependency affects on housework time 2) females’ coefficient is positive and males’ coefficient is negative and 3) wives whose husbands do housework spend more time doing housework than wives whose husbands do not participate in housework. This means that males’ doing housing work cannot reduce females’ housework time. Rather, males’ participating in housework covers up a fact that males exploit females.

The relative resources perspective of domestic labor argues that wives’ housework time falls as their share of couple’s income rises. In contrast, the autonomy perspective views wife’s own earnings as a much better predictor of her housework time. However, the extent to which the two perspectives will be supported may depend on social contexts. Capitalizing on comparison of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, I find that the ability of wife’s relative or absolute earnings in reducing housework time depends more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development. In societies with less equal gender ideology, wives’ relative earnings are more influential, because the reduction in their housework time is largely led by bargaining on housework division with the husbands. While in societies with more equal gender ideology, instead of bargaining, wives could autonomously reduce their housework time by purchasing market substitutes as their own income increases. The results reveal not only that wife’s economic bargaining power in housework allocation is context-specific, but that the contextual variation of the bargaining power may depend more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development.

The present research studies the causal relationship between females’ transitions into marriage on the one hand and transitions into nonparticipation on the other hand. Relying on Egyptian and Jordanian panel microdata, we estimate a competing risk model to understand how can work delay marriage and how marriage affects the decision of working and the type of work to engage in. We use an instrumental variables approach to identify the causal relationship. The results of this study are expected to be of great importance to show which policies should be made available to improve women’s economic conditions in the labor market and to make sure that the private sector can be as attractive for female workers as the public sector. Ideally, we might suggest that – with time – a more equal sharing of caring responsibilities among men and women benefits female labor force participation, the economy and society as a whole.