Abstract
Because of social constraint and personal preference, cutting back and dropping out of the workforce remain common responses to the problem of balancing work and motherhood. To understand whether this phenomenon will continue, adolescents from middle-class, dual-earner families (N = 194) were asked how much they expected that they (for girls) or their future partners (for boys) would work while raising children. Nearly all expected new mothers to quit their jobs or reduce their hours temporarily, which signifies either acceptance of, or ignorance of, the penalties of career interruption among girls with high occupational aspirations. Adolescents’ expectations were associated with their mothers’ employment histories and support for gender egalitarianism, as well as the level of challenge in the home environment.
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Notes
Although part-time work is conventionally defined as fewer than 35 h, 38 h was the cutoff here because respondents were asked to select their weekly hours of work from a categorical list of ranges, including 26–37 and 38–45 h.
The Support/Challenge Questionnaire included 32 questions: 16 designed to measure support, and 16 intended to measure challenge. For this study, I used only the positively worded items because the negative items formed a distinct factor of their own in an exploratory factor model. “Family members can’t be counted on,” is a typical negatively worded support item. An example of a negative challenge item is, “Family members lack ambition and self-discipline.”
A control for the father’s relationship to the child (married biological father vs. other) was included in early models but was dropped due to its lack of impact on the results.
Adolescents were also asked about expected employment for fathers. As most respondents expected the father to work full-time at all points, the responses are not analyzed here.
Models were also fit to the data where one parent’s egalitarianism score was omitted. The resulting regression coefficients for the other parent’s attitude were very similar to Model 2.
I also tested interactions between family challenge and fathers’ egalitarianism. These interactions did not improve model fit, and the results did not suggest that fathers’ attitudes shaped the ways adolescents responded to challenge. For brevity, the results are not reported.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work at the University of Chicago. The author would like to thank Julia McQuillan, Robert Petrin, Barbara Schneider, Linda Waite, and Kazuo Yamaguchi, as well as all participants at the Workshop on Working Families at the University of Chicago.
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Weinshenker, M.N. Adolescents’ Expectations About Mothers’ Employment: Life Course Patterns and Parental Influence. Sex Roles 54, 845–857 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9052-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9052-9