Working Moms Really Good for Daughters, Less So for Sons?

I had to take a break from blogging after last week's blow out. But, I am back today with something worth debating or, better yet, speculating about. First some background about how I came to discover an interesting study on the effect of working mothers on the the socioeconomic attainment of daughters and sons. Alessia called me up Friday to let me know that she rediscovered an old friend from graduate school. She read to me a passage that he had written about her--discussing the complicated relationship between race, ethnicity and class. The author's name was Dalton Conley. I thought I recognized that name--maybe I taught one of his articles in Intro. to WS?--and so Alessia and I googled him. This led me to his very impressive home page at NYU.

Here is where I discovered one of his working papers, co-authored with Karen Albright from UC Berkeley, entitled "The Effect of Maternal Labor Market Participation on Adult Sibling's Outcomes: Does Having a Working Mother Lead to Increased Gender Equality in the Family." You can access the paper here (I don't know how to link a Pdf file to a blog post, anyone?) I couldn't resist talking about this paper here since of course I am not only intellectually interested in the effect of working mothers on their children's socioeconomic outcomes, but I am personally interested.

The abstract reads as follows:

This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of maternal labor market participation by examining the impact of having a working mother on sons’ and daughters’ educational and occupational attainment as adults. Our data suggest that brothers and sisters are more likely to experience equal educational and occupational attainment if they come from families with mothers who were employed outside the home, rather than mothers who were homemakers. Further, daughters of working mothers are more likely to achieve greater educational and occupational success than are daughters of homemakers. However, the pattern is more complex for sons of working mothers, who are less likely than sons of homemakers to achieve certain measures of educational and occupational attainment. These results are discussed in light of the effects of differential gender investment and of differential gender role expectations. (my emphasis).

I read through the paper--I won't admit to having studied it thoroughly--but enough to get a sense of why sons are less likely to achieve "certain measures of educational and occupational attainment." When the authors discuss their findings they explain:

While approximately the same percentage of sons in both types of families failed to earn a bachelors degree (45.2 percent in families with working mothers, compared to 47.8 percent in families with homemaker mothers), the college attainment of sons of working mothers was almost double that of sons of homemakers (35.5 percent to 17.4 percent). However, this pattern was reversed for postgraduate27 education: the attainment of a postgraduate degree of working mothers’ sons was 19.3 percent, compared to 34.8 percent of homemaker mothers’ sons . . .Similar to the patterns observed in siblings’ educational attainment, sons of working mothers in our sample experienced less occupational success than did the male offspring of homemaker mothers, according to the measure we employ here. (my emphasis)

Daughters of working mothers, however, were often the most educated sibling in the family. So, what's going on here? Earlier in their paper, the authors mention many studies that show a preference for sons, that fathers spend more time with sons, that families spend more money if they have sons, so you would think that sons might have greater professional and educational success than daughters even in families where mothers work.

One of the explanations put forward was that while resources (financial, educational and emotional) were distributed evenly between siblings, nonetheless, the mother encouraged their daughters' success even more than their sons. The idea is that mothers wanted to prepare their daughters for the unfair gender biases in favor of men once they enter the workforce.

Secondly, the authors find that while both children are expected to carry out chores in families with working mothers, that the division of labor was gendered so women did "inside" chores, while men did "outside" chores.

"Dividing the spheres of boys’ and girls’ expertise in this way sometimes had the unintended result of encouraging behavior in girls that was less rambunctious, and more easily translatable to scholarly pursuits (e.g., reading, etc.), while boys’ physical responsibility sometimes placed them in a sphere far removed from activities that might encourage educational achievement."

Thirdly, in families where the mother stayed at home, resources were lavished more on sons at the expense of daughters. This differential investment might be explained as follows: the sons will have to be the sole breadwinner in their families when they grow up. Hence, what you have here is the transmission of very traditional gender roles in families with a stay-at-home mother.


The second explanation for the findings seems the most interesting and perhaps controversial. I can imagine that this paper, if it makes it into the public debates about why boys are falling behind educationally, will (a) lead to greater outcries against women working outside the home, i.e. feminist bashing and (b) lead to more condemnations of the institutional expectations of education, i.e. quiet and less rambunctious behavior.

What I am curious about then is whether or not boys in families with stay-at-home mothers are expected to do any chores? If not, how does that help them develop more scholarly habits?

In any case, this paper is quite interesting and much of it confirms my unscientific intuitions that working outside the home will have positive benefits for my daughter. What do you think?

For What It's Worth: Some Notes on the Never-Ending Debate between Working Moms and Stay at Home Moms

I can't seem to shake the what-happens-to-your-identity-as-a-parent theme. I casually referred to the stay at home vs. working mum debate in my birthday post and invited some comment on what I might or might not regret about being a working mum. I have been thinking about this for a couple of days, discussing this with my other feminista working mum friends, and have a few more things to say . . .

First of all, it strikes me as odd that in the framing of the stay at home vs. working mum debate, the choice is always either/or. Either you choose your career and make that a priority or you choose your child(ren). You can't have more than one top priority and "choice"--the buzzword of liberalism--entails that you must choose against something else. This all-or-nothing framework is bizarre. It seems to me that having children entails, in part, forming a community and relationships that do not involve erasing one person in the equation. To relate to another human being does not, nor should not, entail total self-sacrifice or annihilation. Relating is fundamentally about intersubjectivity, which means that the child is both cherished, but also learns that the whole world does not revolve around her needs, but that she shares the world with others and everyone has needs; sometimes she needs to give others time and space to pursue their bliss.

Secondly, one of the important insights that feminism taught me was that women, and in particular, mothers are more than merely the suppliers of emotional and nutritional needs. Mothers are not merely their bodies, offered up for infants or spouses. Mothers are complex subjects, already enmeshed in relationships with the world. Many of those relationships and duties must be reshuffled and reprioritized at different periods of your child(ren)'s life (lives). Obviously, the demands of a newborn have led me to put most of my obligations, professional life, and friendships way on the back burner. As my daughter grows in independence, I will add more and more of those things back, but never again will my life be exactly the same. It now involves a family--a husband and a daughter--who are my community and who orient me in the world. But, to totally give your life over to either your children or your husband seems to spell disaster for not only the caregiver, but the children. If you aren't taking care of yourself, then you aren't going to be a good caretaker of others. Furthermore, why would you want to teach your children that being a mother or a parent means total self-abnegation?

Thirdly, how the working day is structured is the real problem, the real enemy--not the selfish working moms. I have a lot more flexibility than most people thanks to my career. I can spend time at home with my daughter during the day and not just the weekends. I spent a lot of time working to get such a career that would make it easier to balance work and life, but many people don't have that choice, nor does their career ambitions accomodate their need to sometimes work from home, or work at unusual hours to get things done so they can be there for their children. A lot of the working mom vs. stay at home mom debate would dissipate, I believe, if our institutions of work were structured to accomodate parents of children, rather than unencumbered selves.

Finally, why is it that in the venues I have visited where this debate is ranging on, no one guilts out the father for 'missing' all the precious moments of their child's life. When I see that the conversation is mostly women talking to women and not parents talking to parents, I have a problem. It suggests to me that what is being assumed in the conversation is that women are the best nurturers of their children, and fathers should provide the financial support to enable them to do their nurturing. This very outdated patriarchal notion does not sit well with this feminista. If we are going to be sad about missing special moments of our child's lives due to the difficulty of balancing our work and home life, then we should extend that concern to our husbands/partners.

Ok, that's what I got . . . now, what do you all think?

Remuneration for Moms

I remember when I was studying French (years ago at Middlebury), a debate that broke out in one of my courses over the issue of whether or not stay-at-home moms (or even working moms) should earn a salary for their work. I believe it was a bill facing the parliament in France? The idea is that the state would pay women for for their labor.

While I don't envisage such legislation ever having half a chance in the U.S. Congress (perhaps others have smarter things to say?), it is food for thought to consider how much unpaid labor women do as mothers. CNN reports today what, on average, women could earn for their work:

(Reuters) -- When Tricia Himawan was a financial analyst, she worked 50 hours a week and earned about $75,000 a year. Now, she works, by her estimation, about 119 hours a week doing 11 different jobs, and, for 10 of them, she makes ... nothing.

"I work nonstop as a mother," says Himawan, of West Orange, New Jersey, as she breast-feeds her nine-month-old son Jonas and watches over 4-year-old Juliana.

If she were paid for her work as a mother, she would be earning almost $140,000 a year.

That is the conclusion of research conducted by Salary.com, a firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts, that specializes in determining compensation. Himawan was one of 40,000 mothers who responded online to Salary.com explaining what their job entailed and how many hours they worked. (Book urges mothers to stay in work force)

The typical mother puts in a 92-hour work week, the company concluded, and works at least 10 jobs. In order of hours spent on them per week, these are: housekeeper, day-care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive officer and psychologist. By figuring out the median salaries for each position, and calculating the average number of hours worked at each, the firm came up with $138,095 -- three percent higher than last year's results. (Audio Slide Show: Evolution of motherhood)

Even mothers who work full-time jobs outside the home put in $85,939 worth of work as mothers, according to Salary.com.

"My work is my family right now, and my backbone is about to break," says Himawan, who now also works at home as a real-estate broker."My baby is on my hip 24 hours a day."

Find out how much salary you should be earning with the Mom's Salary Wizard at Salary.com.

UPDATE: See Jessica from feministing on this issue.

Houdini Oneself Out of That Straight Jacket: Do it For Your Daughters

You really ought to go read SteveG's post today on Clinton's total failure to reject General Pace's warped worldview. (Pam at Pandagon makes clear the Obama dropped the ball too and only John Edwards got it right).

I am going to blog about something else: the straight-jacket of gender roles on career women who also happen to be mothers. I happened upon this article in the Boston Globe via Amanda. Kris Frieswick, the author of this piece, deserves applause for a no nonsense look at why women, who outearn their husbands, still do the majority of housework and child duties in marriages. Rather than toe the "opt-out" revolution line or other sexist arguments that women "choose" to earn less than men to devote more time with their children, Frieswick makes plain that what is at work is gender roles. That's right. It's not mother nature (the classic explanation of the patriarchy) that draws women out of the workforce and back into the home. Nope. It's deeply entrenched gender roles, passed down by one's parents and social institutions, that lead to an internalization of patriarchy.

This article is not about women who opt out. This article is about women who work long hours, earn more than their husbands, and still let their husbands crash on the couch watching ESPN after work, while they run the vacuum cleaner. My Dad was just telling me that he witnesses this in his new partner, who is the breadwinner and still has to pick up the children, make dinner, and handle all domestic duties, while her husband heads out to the movies.

Frieswick argues:

Some experts attribute this phenomenon to what they call "gender deviation neutralization." By "deviating" from established gender roles by outearning the husband, the wife believes she is emasculating him. Men largely define their maleness by rejecting femaleness, so he refuses to be further de-maled by doing housework. The wife, meanwhile, feels so guilty for emasculating her husband that she overcompensates by taking on even more of the traditional female roles to act more "feminine" so her husband will feel more "masculine." Et voila! We've got a female CEO cleaning her toilets at 2 a.m. because she feels too guilty to hire a housekeeper or demand that her husband do it.

Witness gender deviation neutralization theory in action. Marney (who asked that her last name not be used) is a sales operation manager in New Hampshire. She is the primary breadwinner in her family. Her husband, who earns half of what she does, handles the after-work child care for their young daughter because he gets home hours earlier than his wife. But when it comes to housework, she still does it all. She says she'd like him to contribute more, but "that's a conversation that hasn't happened because it's just understood because of how tired he is after a day at work and time with our daughter that he's just too tired to do the housework, so I do it." Isn't she tired, too, after a 12-hour day at work? "Yeah, but I still manage to get things done around the house."

But there's more to the story, and it explains why Marney's voice is taut, controlled, and flat, yet on the verge of tears as we speak. "My husband is from a family of stay-at-home moms with husband breadwinners," she says. "They don't understand what my life is like." She says her mother-in-law has "called me selfish to my face" for working so many hours, and the entire family is highly critical of the amount of child care her husband does, especially when she travels for work. I ask why they don't respect the fact she's the primary breadwinner. Turns out her husband's family has no idea she's the breadwinner because neither she nor her husband has told them. "I promised my husband we would never have that conversation with his family," she says. (Hence her request not to use her last name.) "I don't want to embarrass him. He doesn't want that information to get out."

Here's a woman willing to put her sanity in jeopardy to protect her husband's ego. She is convinced she is setting a good example for her daughter by working so hard and because her husband feeds her dinner every night. It doesn't occur to her that she's also teaching her daughter that protecting a man's ego is more important than defending her own right to pursue a satisfying career and, oh yeah, support the family. This is how gender roles get perpetuated.

I read and reread this passage. Brilliant! I want all my female and male students to pay attention to this phenomena. More importantly, I don't want my female students perpetuating these roles by modeling them for their daughters and sons. I am not saying this is easy stuff. An internalized gender role, perpetuated at all levels of society, is not easy to shrug off. I have always been somewhat taken by Peter Kramer's wacky (perhaps disturbing) argument that Prozac, taken as an enhancement drug, might be one way to help women rebel against this role. Therapy could work too. Whatever it takes.