A Cross-National Look at Married Women's Economic Dependency

Using the LIS data, the authors examine married women's dependency on their husbands' earnings in nine Western industrialized countries: Australia; Belgium; Canada; Finland; Germany; Netherlands; Norway; Sweden; and the United States. When we examine the level and degree of dependency, and the labor force participation of married women, the nine countries cluster in three groups along the lines of the Esping-Anderson welfare state typology. But when we examine the determinants of the dependency within each country, the clustering disappears. Wives' dependency increases with age, the presence of young children, and the number of children. It is reduced when wives' labor force participation and education are high relative to their husbands and in families which rely more on unearned sources of income. The similarity of patterns across countries suggests that gender differences in the work-family nexus are deeply entrenched in all countries and continue even in the face of very active social policy to minimize their effects

The Gender Poverty Gap: What Can We Learn From Other Countries?

Examines gender differences in poverty in eight industrialized countries: US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. Results suggest that gender differences in human capital factors and family factors, as well as religion, culture, and policy, all play a role in accounting for gender poverty gaps within and across countries

The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

Childhood in Sociology and Society: The US Perspective

The field of childhood studies in the US is comprised of cross-disciplinary researchers who theorize and conduct research on both children and youth. US sociologists who study childhood largely draw on the childhood literature published in English. This article focuses on American sociological contributions, but notes relevant contributions from non-American scholars published in English that have shaped and fueled American research. This article also profiles the institutional support of childhood research in the US, specifically outlining the activities of the ‘Children and Youth’ Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and assesses the contributions of this area of study for sociology as well as the implications for an interdisciplinary field.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Time Use of Married and Cohabiting Parents during the Great Recession

Using data from the 2003-14 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), this paper examines the relationship between the state unemployment rate and the time that opposite-sex couples with children spend on childcare activities, and how this varies by the socioeconomic status (SES), race, and ethnicity of the mothers and fathers. The time that mothers and fathers spend providing primary and secondary child caregiving, solo time with children, and any time spent as a family are considered. To explore the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the amount of time parents spend with children, the time-use data are combined with the state unemployment rate data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The analysis finds that the time parents spend on child-caregiving activities or with their children varies with the unemployment rate in low-SES households, African-American households, and Hispanic households. Given that job losses were disproportionately high for workers with no college degree, African-Americans, and Hispanics during the Great Recession, the results suggest that the burden of household adjustment during the crisis fell disproportionately on the households most affected by the recession

Determinants of Minority-White Differentials in Child Poverty

This paper uses data from the 1993-2001 March Current Population Survey to estimate the extent to which child living arrangements, parental work patterns, and immigration attributes shape racial and ethnic variation in child poverty. Results from multivariate analyses and a standardization technique reveal that parental work patterns as well as child living arrangements are especially consequential for black and Puerto-Rican economic circumstances. Child immigration generation and parental length of residence seem to play a detrimental role in shaping poverty among Asian, Mexican, and Central/South American children. We also found that the extent to which differences in the composition of and returns to parental resources determine white-minority economic gaps varies substantially across racial and ethnic lines. The social and economic implications of the findings for understanding racial and ethnic inequality are discussed in the final section of the article

Dispelling the Myths Self-care, Class, and Race

We use 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine how race and class are related to self-care among children 5 to 13 years old. We find that contrary to popular belief, self-care is less common among minority and lower-class children. We also find that factors such as income and neighborhood safety are related to self-care and can attenuate the relationships observed between race, class, and self-care. Our analyses also indicate that variations in self-care by race, class, income level, and neighborhood safety are dependent on the age of the child, with a major transition in self-care occurring between the ages of 8 and 10

Self-care: Why do parents leave their children unsupervised?

We used a preferences-and-constraints model to develop four hypotheses to explain why parents may choose self-care (an unsupervised arrangement) as the primary child care arrangement for their children over supervised alternatives and tested them in a multivariate framework using 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We found that the choice of self-care over supervised care alternatives is linked to the availability of parents’ time to care for children, the child’s level of responsibility and maturity, and the neighborhood context. However, we found no evidence that parents’ ability to pay for child care is related to the choice of self-care. The results also suggest that parents use different decision-making processes, depending on their children’s ages