Gender Gaps in Care Work: Evidences from Argentina,Chile, Spain and Uruguay

This paper is a comparative analysis of the gender gaps in the non-paid domestic and care work (NPDCW) undertaken in homes in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Uruguay. The explanatory factors of this gap in two-income households and their magnitude and impact on the distribution of NPDCW are analyzed using data from national time use surveys. The weakness of micro-sociological approaches and the variables related to relative resources and time availability is demonstrated using the estimation of a regression model, while the importance of approximations of gender roles and analyses that incorporate macro-sociological factors is shown. Furthermore, the findings show that NPDCW is done by women in 70% of cases with women’s incomes and time availability among the individual variables that drive change within the couple. The results show that the equalizing effects of time availability and gender ideology are stronger for women in more egalitarian countries; women in less egalitarian countries benefit less from their individual-level assets. Additional comparative analysis shows that other macro-level factors (economic development, female labor-force participation, gender norms and welfare systems) may also influence the division of this work. The results suggest that changes in individual-level factors alone may not be enough to achieve an equal division of labor in the household without a parallel reduction in macro-level gender inequality.

     

The use of public transportation in urban areas: Toward a causal model

In this study, using the statistical models recently introduced by Goodman, we analyze the reasons why individuals choose the car or public transportation for the journey to work and draw out some of the implications of our analysis for public policy. Building on the work of Schnore, we develop a model in which both structural and individual variables are interrelated and show that the structural contexts within which individuals make decisions about their choice are crucial. We also show that, while status differentials are largely accounted for by income differences, male preferences for the automobile tend not to be due either to the structural variables or to income differences. Our findings suggest that present policies designed to induce people to shift to public transportation for the journey to work are not likely to be effective, since they do nothing to alter present cost differentials between the two modes.     

The labour division of Italian couples after a birth: assessing the effect of unobserved heterogeneity

The results of previous studies on the effect of childbearing on both parents’ paid and unpaid work suffer from the difficulty related to the specification of latent variables that influence the relationship between reproductive behaviour of the couple and working activity. The aim of this study is to estimate the effect of transition to parenthood on the partners’ division of labour by accounting for latent variables, such as the bargaining process between partners and endogenous fertility decisions. In particular, this is the first time that our specific estimation strategy has been applied to determine the impact of childbearing on the division of household labour between partners taking into account the reverse causality effect between labour and fertility decisions. We use longitudinal data on married or cohabiting Italian couples provided by the Italian panel survey of the Generation and Gender Program. Our results are consistent with previous studies, and show that the birth of a child affects a woman’s unpaid labour strongly and positively and her paid labour negatively, while men’s work is mostly unaffected. Moreover, when partners hold traditional attitudes regarding gender roles and the family, the female partner is even more strongly affected by childbearing in terms of total amount of labour (paid plus unpaid). However, our sensitivity analysis shows that these results appear only when our correction strategy for the misspecification of latent variables is applied.

     

The Effect of a First Born Child on Work and Childcare Time Allocation: Pre-post Analysis of Australian Couples

This paper uses Australian data from a national representative sample of Australian couples having their first child. Using data from before and after the birth of the child on a range of variables, including economic resources, gender attitudes, workplace flexibility, and availability of non-parental childcare, we first model the factors are associated with the decision to remain in work or not after the birth of the first child. The main finding here is that childbirth has a major impact on mothers’ paid work-time, whereas for fathers it has very little impact. Factors that are related to a mother’s decision to remain in work or not include the absolute (but not relative) pay of each parent, the father’s workplace flexibility, and paid parental leave available to the mother. We then model the factors that govern, for those mothers remaining in paid work, how much paid work they undertake. We find that changing employers is related to mothers’ work hours, as are absolute post-birth salaries, as is the relative pay of each partner. As with the decision to work or not, the availability of paid parental leave to the mother is significantly related to the amount of work-time for those mothers that do continue to work. Similarly, the use of external childcare is positively associated with maternal work hours. Finally, we model the factors that determine childcare time allocation and find that for neither parent do pre-birth economic resources significantly affect childcare time, once a decision about basic work patterns has been made. Gender role attitudes affect childcare time decisions, unlike work time decisions.     

Women–Family in Quality Perspective

Bringing together women and family in quality perspective bring about interesting discussions in this paper. By integrating previous studies and considering expert opinions, we determinate the variables and dimensions with respect to women’s existence regarding their roles both in the family and at work. Many activities carried out by women represent the consumer aspects of their role. Women undertake these activities to fulfill their needs, which can be classified in the order of preference using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need. Women success can be measured based on their ability to perform their roles successfully. We identify women’s performance by using quality approach of Personal Quality Maintenance (PQM), which is widely applied in many organizations in order to maintain the service delivery, which meets the customer satisfaction. The effort to enhance women’s satisfaction for their success in playing the multirole in the family and at work is our main consideration. This study may contribute a new point of view regarding for the women’s welfare and existence.     

Two Approaches to Measuring Women's Work in Developing Countries: A Comparison of Survey Data from Egypt

Keyword and activities list approaches to measuring women's work are compared. The two approaches were applied to the same population of women in Egypt in two consecutive surveys. The widely used keyword approach underestimates women's work rates, disproportionately excluding poor and poorly educated women, particularly those working in nonformal jobs. The activities list approach captures these missed economic activities and also the multiple jobs women hold simultaneously. Survey measurement of women's work must be improved to fully account for women's contributions to economic life and to better understand the relationship of work to such other important variables and processes as reproductive change, child welfare, and economic development.     

Attitudes toward items of time budgets as predictors of time uses: The case of men-v-women

This study explores the impact of attitudes that men-v-women hold toward work and leisure activities on time spent on these activities in order to determine whether which sex shows a higher level of relationship. An empirical data survey using mail questionnaires was undertaken in Montréal and in Toronto with five socio-economic strata. Results show that women's attitudes are better predictors of time spent on leisure than men's attitudes, that women's time spent at work and home chore is higher than men's counterpart and that gender explain significantly more variance in time spent at work and on leisure than attitudes. In order to assess the sole effects of gender, the variance attributable to other socio-demographic variables (age, culture, education, profession and income) was cancelled through regressions on these variables and further statistics of the residuals of these regressions. It is concluded that the deterministic view that exogenous variables explain time budgets is more adequate than the voluntaristic views; that women work more and attribute more value to leisure than men.     

“That's So Gay!” Exploring College Students' Attitudes Toward the LGBT Population

Traditional students are often introduced to unfamiliar subcultures for the first time on the college campus. Recent high school graduates find themselves transitioning from an atmosphere in which homophobia is likely to be tolerated and possibly even expected to an educational setting in which diversity is promoted. Research shows that the college years are influential in the re-socialization of core values, yet very little work focuses on the ideological shifts that may take place in attitudes toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) population. The research presented in this study includes a modified version of LaMar and Kite's Component Measure, which has been broken down into 6 distinctive components of tolerance. In addition to examining religion, gender, and race—factors that have been correlated in past research with differing levels of tolerance toward the LGBT community—this study adds politics, sexual orientation, academic class standing, and college of major—variables that have received little or no attention in this literature. Higher levels of LGBT tolerance are consistently observed across the indexes among women, more liberal Christian traditions, non-Christian faiths, the non-religious, and those who self-identify as LGBT. The distinctive contribution of this study is that students in the College of Arts and Sciences and students further along in their college careers are also more tolerant. Based on these findings, recommendations are made for inter-college curriculum changes that integrate students in all disciplines and students of all classifications.     

Determinants of Natural Fertility in Rural Bangladesh reconsidered

Recent work by Sandra L. Huffman and her colleagues on the determinants of the length of amenorrhoea in Bangladesh is examined. It is shown that the data on which their work is based are contaminated by an important period effect: the 1974–75 famine in Bangladesh. The famine is described and its possible effects on Huffman's results examined. Huffman argues that breastfeeding behaviour is a more important factor in prolonging amenorrhoea among lactating women than is the mother's nutritional status. It is shown, however, that measures for the key variables used by Huffman - nutritional status, breastfeeding behaviour, and length of amenorrhoea - were all affected by the famine, and that the famine effects may have biased her findings. This does not necessarily mean that her hypothesis is wrong, but does suggest that it must be tested in unbiased data.     

Veblen in Reverse: Evidence from the Multinational Time-Use Archive

This paper explores the historical change in the work-leisure balance using time-diary evidence. Much of the recent discussion of this balance in the developed world has focused on paid work alone. What follows takes a different approach, considering the balance of all work time (paid plus unpaid) against leisure time and observes a tendency over recent decades for leisure to decline relative to work in this broad sense. Much is changing, in employment, family and consumption terms over this period. One possibility is that the relative increase in work time reflects the reversal of the status/leisure gradient: the financially privileged classes, which once had more leisure than others, now have less. But the paper closes with the speculation that this increase in work time for both men and women may be indirectly connected with the phenomenon of the women’s “dual burden”, via an unconsidered but nevertheless important principle of fairness in the distribution of work within households.     

Siblings, child labor, and schooling in Nicaragua and Guatemala

This paper explores empirically within-household gender and sibling differences in child labor, domestic work, and schooling of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan children. The main results show that older boys spend more time engaged in market and domestic work, whereas older girls spend more time in domestic work than their younger siblings. These results are independent of whether the younger sibling is a boy or a girl, which suggests that there is no substitution within the household of younger for older siblings in market and domestic work. This paper’s findings show the relevance of domestic work and gender differentials in children’s allocation of time in developing countries.     

Social indicators: A statistician's view

In the following we consider the problem areas of social indicator research which are of concern to the statistician and in which he can prove helpful. Among these are the purposes of social indicators, what social variables should be considered as conceivable variables related to quality of life, what data should be collected taking in account the difficulty of not being able to directly measure variables of interest, how does one collect the data (which is usually in the form of a time series) guarding against multicollinearity, and how should the collected data be handled and analyzed. We discuss why in social indicator research the secular trends, cyclical movements, seasonal variations and irregular fluctuations must be taken into account. Techniques are discussed for relating lead indicators in one time period to coincident indicators in another period. Finally we present a select bibliography in canonical correlation, forecasting, indicators and index numbers, path analysis, regression analysis, simulation techniques, time series analysis and other areas useful in analyzing social indicator data.     

Coresidence With Husband’s Parents,Labor Supply,and Duration to First Birth

This article investigates the time to first birth, treating coresidence with husband’s parents and labor supply as endogenous and using representative data on Taiwanese married women born during 1933–1968. We use a full-information maximum likelihood estimator for a duration model with endogenous binary variables. Results controlling for endogeneity suggest that both coresidence and working are associated with a delay in childbearing, reversing the effect of coresidence on the timing of first birth but not that of working. Women in earlier cohorts tend to choose coresidency and not working, and an increasing number of women from later cohorts choose to do both or to work only.     

Is money the main reason mothers return to work after childbearing?

Women’s reasons for returning to work after childbearing are complex, often including a mix of financial and other reasons related to their preferences, choices and constraints regarding employment; various qualitative studies have explored this decision-making process. This paper also considers how these decisions about returning to work are made, but uses quantitative techniques to analyse how reasons for return to work vary with factors such as women’s timing of return to work, what types of jobs they had previously worked in, or returned to, and what type of leave they used. This enables an examination of which women feel more constrained in their labour market options by returning to work sooner than preferred, and also their reasons for returning. Analysis is based on the 2005 Parental Leave in Australia Survey, a survey nested in the Wave 1.5 collection of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Mothers had children aged between 15 and 29 months at this time, and 56 per cent of these mothers had returned to work.     

The Great Convergence: Gender and Unpaid Work in Europe and the United States

Over the past decades, men's and women's time use in industrialized nations has changed dramatically, suggesting a gender revolution. Women increased their time in paid work and reduced time in unpaid activities, while men increased their time in unpaid work, but not enough to compensate for women's retreat. We investigate developments regarding men's and women's unpaid work across Europe and the United States, using time diary data from the mid‐1980s and onward. We find evidence for gender convergence in unpaid work over time, but different trends for housework and childcare. Gender convergence in housework primarily resulted from women reducing their time, whereas childcare time increased for both sexes, resulting in convergence only where men increased more than did women. Decomposition analyses show that trends in housework and childcare are explained by changes in behavior rather than compositional changes in population characteristics. Though level differences in unpaid work persist, our findings regarding trends support gender convergence in that they are general across country contexts that vary regarding policy and social norms about gender, family, and work.     

The effects of time allocation on parental stress

The time allocated to various activities by both husbands and wives influences the stress experienced in life roles. Looking at the division of labor before as well as after the birth of a baby gives an indication of the parents' ability to cope with the stress of parenthood. Here, time allocation variables as well as child characteristics that might explain parental stress are examined based on responses of 117 couples to the Abidin parental stress index 4–7 months after the birth of their first child, measuring stress in 2 domains-parental and child each modeled for both mother and father as a function of personal characteristics of the baby and time allocated to child care, household production, paid work, and leisure. Standardized regression analysis reveals the most important predictor variables to be age and sex of the infant, with older infants and girls predicting lower stress scores, especially in the child domain of the mother. The allocation of time by both parents failed to predict stress scores.     

The Impact of Local Labor Market Conditions on Work and Welfare Decisions: Revisiting an Old Question Using New Data

Using Maryland administrative data between 1996 and 2005, this paper examines the impact of local labor market conditions on work and welfare use among single mothers. Our estimates rely on the new Census Bureau Quarterly Workforce Indicators database, which provides county-level economic indicators filtered by industry, gender, and age-group. We specify a multinomial choice model to estimate the effects of these local labor market variables on the full set of work–welfare combinations. The results indicate that lower unemployment rates and increased new hires and new hires’ earnings in key industries increase the likelihood that women choose alternatives that include work. African American women and those with fewer years of education respond differently to changing economic conditions. Our results are robust to controls for fixed effects, county-specific time trends, and endogenous migration.     

The dimensionality of the urban functional system

This paper suggests that the formulation and testing of hypotheses relating the functional role of cities in a society to other urban structure and process variables might be facilitated by substituting a continuous variable approach to the functional system for the prevailing discrete typologies. Using variables indexing the scope of economic activities in U.S. communities at two points in time, we elaborate a technique for identifying the dimensions underlying an existing typology, and the 56 largest SMSA’s are ranked along these dimensions.     

A dynamic analysis of migration: an assessment of the effects of age,family and career variables

This paper examines the utility of viewing migration in the context of work careers and family life cycles. We do this by studying migration as a discrete state, continuous time process. We find that the inverse relationship between age and migration is due almost completely to the effects of family life cycle and work career variables. Further, we find that job- or locationspecific resources, prestige and wage deter migration.     

An economic model of subjective well-being: Integrating economic and psychological theories

This paper compares theories of well-being/welfare in economics and psychology. It suggests that economists have an appropriate conceptual framework but the wrong variables for explaining well-being, whereas psychologists have a confusing framework but appropriate variables. A framework derived from “the new home economics” (Becker, 1965, 1973, 1977; Lancaster, 1966; Justeret al., 1985; Pollak and Wachter, 1975), and especially from the work of F. Thomas Juster and his colleagues, is proposed for the purpose of integrating economic and psychological variables into an account of human well-being. Essentially the framework calls for investigation of the impact of a household's economic and psychological stocks (capital account) on the psychic income flows (current account) and overall well-being of its members. It is suggested that this framework is valuable for clarifying individual and household decisions as well as for explaining variance in well-being. Empirical assessment of existing frameworks and an illustration of how the proposed framework could be implemented are made with data drawn from a 5-wave Australian Quality of Life Panel Survey.