Work-family and work-life issues

Using data from the China General Social Survey and Japan General Social Survey, this paper examines: (1) differences in gender inequality in labor force participation and earnings between China and Japan; (2) if family characteristics, such as marriage and presence of preschool children and children under 18 years old, have larger negative effects on women’s employment and earnings in Japan than in China; (3) factors accounting for the differences, if any. The results indicate that whereas marital status and spouse’s education and earnings have significant negative effects on women’s labor force participation in Japan, these factors have smaller effects on women’s labor force participation in China. Motherhood earnings penalty is only significant in the non-public sector, not in the public sector in Japan. In China, motherhood earnings penalty is not significant in both the public and the non-public sectors. While married men earn significantly more than single men in Japan and marital status has no significant effect on men’s earnings in China, marriage earnings penalty for women in both countries exists. I discuss the effects of state policies, labor market structures, family system, and individual characteristics on men and women’s labor force participation and earnings from a comparative gender stratification perspective.

Unlike in more developed regions where increased female labor force participation has in part been driven by a reduction in fertility, sub-Saharan Africa displays a positive cross-national correlation between fertility and female labor force participation. This paper tests the relationship between childbearing and work at the individual level among young women in rural Malawi. Using longitudinal data from the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, we investigate whether (i) having a child influences the probability of paid and unpaid work, (ii) the effects of childbearing on work differ by parity, (iii) increasing spacing between births affects the probability of working, and (iv) the effects of limiting and spacing fertility on work vary by marital status. Descriptive results show that although a majority of women performed non-household work in the past year, only a small minority receive remuneration. Higher parity is indeed associated with higher rates of paid work. However, parsing out women’s labor market activity by marital status reveals that young unmarried women with no children had the highest rate of paid work of any other group. This paper contributes to the literature on whether enabling women to postpone transitions into marriage and motherhood facilitates greater participation in remunerative work.

From the 6.3 Million informal entreprepeneurs in Perú, 56.2% are women. Two of three jobs are generated within family businesses or in the independent work. This study aims to find out in how far time use at home may have an impact on the net income of female urban entrepreneurs in the informal sector. The Peruvian Time Use Survey (2010) is analized and in-depth interviews are conducted with young female entrepreuneurs in Lima. Our main results suggest that with higher income, regardless of age, women dedicate less time to three main duties: care of children, cooking and house cleaning. Nevertheless, compared to their partners, they keep on working significantly more hours at home. In depth-interviews corroborate this finding and bring out the importance of family networks within this context.

The gender gap in earnings in the Brazilian labor market have been declining steadily for 40 years, but there is a remaining difference which is usually associated with discrimination against women. This paper examines the extent to which familiar characteristics of women and men explain the documented gender gap in earnings in Brazil. The hypothesis is that overcommitment of women with paid work and housework is the fundamental constraint for equity in earnings. I found no maternity or marriage penalty for women. On the other hand, there is a substantial penalty for household work for both men and women, but it is considerably more severe among women, not only because they do four times more hours of housework than men, but also because the negative effect over female earnings is larger. I added the familiar characteristics and the mean number of weekly hours of housework to the conventional model of decomposition of the difference in earnings and it increased the explained component of the difference between women and men.

The rising cost of children is considered a reason for declining fertility. This paper assess the incremental time cost of children for Italian and French couples’, according to children’s number and age. Using the Italian Time Use Survey (2002-03) and the French one (1998-99) we select a subsample of respectively 4,827 and 2,417 either married or cohabiting couples: 22% of them are childless, while the others have at least a child under 13 years old. As an increase in parents’ total work means a corresponding compression of both pure leisure and time for personal care, the marginal time cost of children is calculated by comparing the total daily workload (paid and unpaid work) of couples with and without children. Each cost is measured first on the couple and secondly on each partner in a gender perspective. We run three separate OLS models on time dedicated to childcare, to unpaid work and to total work. Controlling for a plurality of covariates, results seem to corroborate the hypothesis that Italian children are more time-intensive than the French ones ( especially if they are infant and higher parities) and that Italian women bear a higher part of these costs than the French ones.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2008, this paper examines the extent to which job quality and the unequal distribution of “bad jobs” (i.e., those that offer low wages and do not provide access to health insurance and pension benefits) across different sub-groups are associated with union formation during a time of deteriorating job quality. Results from discrete-time hazard models show that failure to secure a high-quality job delays first marriage among men. Also, job quality partially explains educational differences in first marriage for both men and women, especially those with less education. This study represents one of the first empirical tests of the hypothesis that job quality in the context of labor market uncertainty is a key factor for understanding marriage behaviors. Beyond theory, this study can also inform policy debates surrounding the relationship between marriage and well-being and increasing inequality in the U.S.

Socioeconomic resources and division of breadwinning responsibilities in the early stages of childrearing.

The analysis is based on register data comprising all Norwegian married and cohabiting couples whose first common child was born in the period 1987 – 2001. We analyze the sharing of breadwinning responsibilities at three stages of the family cycle: the year the first common child was born, two years after and six years after. We define the following groups of breadwinning models: I Traditional (mother’s income amounts to 35 percent or less of father’s income), II “Equality light” (mother’s income amounts to between 35 and 80 percent of father’s income), III Equal (mother’s income amounts to between 80 and 120 percent of father’s income) and IV Untraditional (mother’s income amounts to more than 120 percent of father’s income, including couples where father’s income = 0). We investigate to what extent the couples’ distribution on breadwinning models are influenced by socioeconomic resources, defined as couple’s education (combined classification) and father’s income, marital status (married or cohabiting), as well as family changes after the initial year – like additional children born and transition to marriage for cohabitants. We also include several demographic variables as control variables.

Differences in men’s and women’s work journey patterns are well documented in the literature. Women are known to commute shorter distances to and from work, but exhibit more complex travel patterns that involve child and household-related tasks. In Canada, a country known for extensive temporary and permanent geographic labour mobility among individuals and households, delving further into the gender mobility gap is necessary. This presentation will focus on the effect of gender dynamics within the household on individual work-commuting patterns using the 2006 Canadian Census masterfile. We examine the impact of several household demographic (age, number of children, income, etc.) and socio-economic (education, industry) characteristics, and find a large, unexplained, gap between men and women in the average distances traveled to work. We propose that this gap persists despite women's increased participation in all aspects of the labour force because gendered social reproduction at the household level remains relatively unchanged and because gendered occupational structures continue to impact occupational choice and therefore dictate work journeys.

We investigate how partnered individuals spend their time, comparing the allocations spent alone, as a couple or together with children as a family, focusing on family life cycle, work status and education as primary determinants of time use. The analyses use data from the Swedish Time Use Surveys (1990/1991, 2000/2001, and 2010/2011) covering over 5,500 partnered individuals aged 20-55. Multivariate techniques are used to address: how the family life cycle affects who individuals spend their time with; the impact of education on the time couples spend together; whether these relationships have changed in recent decades. Results suggest that parents spend less time together as a couple than non-parents, but when we factor in family time, one-child parents spend similar quantities of time together as non-parents. Having two children impacts partner time negatively, but there seems little difference between having 2 or 3+ children concerning time with one’s partner or as a family, indicating returns to scale or some kind of specialization among parents with more than two children. Education is not a strong determinant of how much time couples spend together, but educational gradients exist in activities performed. Over time, we uncover a shift towards more family togetherness at the expense of time alone with one’s partner.

This paper examines fertility and earnings development of recent immigrants in Sweden as a response to Swedish family policy changes. The child-care reform of 2002 is studied. Differences in earnings and fertility behavior between immigrant families and “native” homogenous families are estimated to study the hypothesis that increased accessibility to child-care might be particularly beneficial to the immigrant groups. Data for the period 1997-2009 are employed in the study.
The results of the empirical study argue the presence of a certain life pattern among “native” families having unemployment experience. It seems that this group gains more from combination of childbearing, getting child allowances and unemployment insurance. Nevertheless, all groups increased family labor supply after the reform 2002. There is a slight difference in male and female labor supply between the groups of immigrants, but this is unlikely related to the Swedish family policy and more likely corresponds to ethnic traditions and male and female roles in family.