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

Mothers construct fathers: Destabilized patriarchy in La Leche League

This paper examines changing masculine ideals from the point of view of women homemakers through a case study of La Leche League, a maternalist organization dedicated to breastfeeding and mother primacy. We suggest two reasons for studying the League: first, an emerging literature suggests that changing norms are seeping into many such seemingly conservative groups, and second, the League continues to be highly successful among white, middle-class, married women. The paper looks at two aspects of masculinity, examining changes in the League through fieldwork, interviews, and content analysis, and finds that new norms of increased father involvement and decreased rights over women's bodies have both influenced League philosophy. We conclude that while in some respects a measure of the decline of men's patriarchal privileges, the League's changes also may contribute to a “restabilization” of male dominance in a modified, partial form.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43548/1/11133_2004_Article_BF00990071.pd

HAVING A BABY

This analysis tests the influence of personal, job, and family status characteristics on maternal employment. We use the Merged Child/Mother File from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine employment patterns of mothers who gave birth between 1979 and 1986. Logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities; proportional hazards techniques are used to estimate rates of leaving and return to employment after childbirth. We find that family status factors and the proportion of the family income the mother earns are consistently important in predicting maternal employment. Human capital factors are more significant in predicting employment exits and the rate of exit than the rate of return or employment status one year after a birth.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

National Context, Religiosity and Volunteering: Results From 53 Countries

Contains fulltext : 55660.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)To what extent does the national religious context affect volunteering? Does a religious environment affect the relation between religiosity and volunteering? To answer these questions, this study specifies individual level, contextual level, and cross-level interaction hypotheses. The authors test the hypotheses by simultaneously studying the impact of religiosity of individuals, the national religious context, and their interplay on volunteering while controlling for possible confounding factors both at individual and contextual levels. Based on multilevel analyses on data from 53 countries, frequent churchgoers are more active in volunteer work and a devout national context has an additional positive effect. However, the difference between secular and religious people is substantially smaller in devout countries than in secular countries. Church attendance is hardly relevant for volunteering in devout countries. Furthermore, religious volunteering has a strong spillover effect, implying that religious citizens also volunteer more for secular organizations. This spillover effect is stronger for Catholics than for Protestants, non-Christians and nonreligious individuals.20 p