A longitudinal analysis of family migration and the gender gap in earnings in the united states and great britain

This article uses longitudinal data for the United States and Great Britain to examine the impact of residential mobility and childbirth on the earnings of women, their family earnings, and the related division of earnings by gender. This project is the _ rst to compare explicitly the impact of childbirth and family migration on women’s earnings, and it extends prior cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on isolated countries by providing a direct contrast between two major industrialized nations, using comparable measures. The results indicate that families respond in similar ways in both countries to migration and childbirth. In response to both migration and childbirth, women’s earnings fall at the time of the event and recover slowly afterward, but the magnitude of the impact is roughly twice as large for childbirth as for migration. However, migration but not the birth of a child is also associated with a significant increase in total family earnings because of increased husbands’ earnings. As a result, the effect of migration on the relative earnings of wives to husbands is similar to the effect of childbirth. These results suggest that family migration should be given consideration in the literature on the gender earnings gap.     

Demographic change and response: Social context and the practice of birth control in six countries

This paper expands on Kingsley Davis’s demographic thesis of change and response. Specifically, we consider the social context that accounts for the primacy of particular birth control methods that bring about fertility change during specific time periods. We examine the relevance of state policy (including national family planning programs), the international population establishment, the medical profession, organized religion, and women’s groups using case studies from Japan, Russia, Puerto Rico, China, India, and Cameroon. Some of these countries are undergoing the second demographic transition, others the first. Despite variations in context, heavy reliance on sterilization and/or, abortion as a means of birth control is a major response in most of these countries. The key roles of the medical profession and state policy are discussed, along with the general lack of influence of religion and of women’s groups in these countries.     

A critical disjuncture? The culmination of post-World War II socio-demographic and economic trends in the United States

This essay examines the consequences of major social, demographic and economic trends in the United States since World War II. These include rising women’s employment, the ‘Baby Boom’, the outlines of the so-called ‘new’ immigration, the increasing racial and ethnic diversity deriving from that immigration, the economic contexts in which recent US immigration has occurred, and recent technologically-induced features of global work flows that will condition immigration’s future reception and effects. Women’s wartime work experiences, together with their economic opportunities in the ensuing decades, boosted married women’s autonomy and domestic leverage. Rising economic prosperity encouraged marriage and family formation even as growing employment among married women of childbearing age made having and taking care of large families more difficult. World War II also spawned the expansion of migration to the United States, which in turn converted the country from a largely biracial society with a sizable white majority and a small black minority into a multiracial, multiethnic society with greater racial and ethnic boundary crossing and increasingly blurred colour lines. A major issue is whether currently changing economic conditions and social institutions will support and strengthen such tendencies or instead weaken them. Without robust job growth, the demographic legacy of the baby boom, which now involves ever-rising numbers of retired people, will be more difficult to support, especially given the country’s current fiscal deficits. Greater earnings inequality and weak job growth may also poison the climate for further immigration to the US, thus diminishing the chance that newcomers can continue contributing to the dissolution of fault lines among racial-ethnic groups and to the resolution of periodic labour shortages.     

Unseemly and unwomanly behaviour: Comparing women’s control of their fertility in Australia and England from 1890 to 1970

From 1890 to 1970 Australian women’s use of female-controlled birth control methods was higher than that of English women. The latter primarily depended upon withdrawal and condoms. Use of these male-controlled methods of contraception is associated with low levels of female sexual pleasure, and the belief that husbands should initiate sexual activity and should control their wives’ fertility. I argue that higher use of female methods gave white Australian women greater sexual and reproductive autonomy throughout this period. The view that they were in a less desirable position than women in other Anglo cultures needs to be examined more closely.     

On the Compatibility of Islam and Gender Equality

Although the Muslim world is sometimes depicted as a homogeneous civilization lacking democracy and gender equality, Muslim countries show tremendous economic, political and cultural variation. In this paper, this variation is used to gain insight into the determinants of women’s labor market participation (LMP) in the Muslim world. We use data on 45 Muslim countries and apply SEM models to determine effects of modernization, democracy, cultural background, and state Islamization on women’s participation in the formal economy (absolute LMP) and on the share of women in the labor force (relative LMP). Women’s absolute LMP is higher in Muslim countries with higher levels of economic development and in the oil-exporting countries. For women’s relative LMP, practical democracy (the degree to which people actively participate in the system) takes in a key position. It has a strong positive effect on women’s relative LMP and mediates the effects of economic development (positive), formal democratic structures (positive) and state Islamization (negative) on women’s relative LMP. Results indicate that in these countries modernization may lead to empowerment of women by increasing their absolute LMP, but that for attaining gender equality the political opportunity structures is most important.     

Does family policy affect fertility?

From the mid-1960s to around 1980, Sweden extended its family policies that provide financial and in-kind support to families with children very quickly. The benefits were closely tied to previous work experience. Thus, women born in the 1950s faced markedly different incentives when making fertility choices compared to women born only 15–20 years earlier. This paper examines the evolution of completed fertility patterns for Swedish women born in 1925–1958 and makes comparisons to women in neighbouring countries where the policies were not extended as much as in Sweden. The results suggest that the extension of the policy raised the level of fertility, shortened the spacing of births, and induced fluctuations in the period fertility rates, but it did not change the negative relationship between women’s educational level and completed fertility.     

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.     

Power and negotiation: Young women’s choices about sex and contraception

This paper explores issues of power and negotiation for two decisions affecting young women’s sexual lives: die decision to have sexual intercourse and the decision to contracept. Using data from two recent Australian surveys the paper explores the complexity of these decisions and the way in which gender relations between young people can influence dieir reproductive outcomes; young women experience a high rate of sexual coercion and violence and current data collections do not allow analysis of their cause.     

‘Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the World’: Population policies and gender in twentieth-century Australia

This paper considers several policy responses to declining birth rates in Australia over the twentieth century, revealing key continuities in the ‘administration of population’. Early in the century pronatalist policies to enhance fertility predominated. In spite of evidence in the 1890s, 1920s and 1940s that economics shaped family sizes and that women’s lives included paid work, little acknowledgment of this occurred outside wartime. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration largely replaced pronatalism as a desired means of building population numbers. Century’s end brought new concerns about fertility decline, an ageing population, immigration and increased asylum seeking. These concerns revitalized the call for a population policy and raised unresolved questions for women. This expression comes from Mr Ozanne, speaker in the Commonwealth House of Representatives debate on the Maternity Allowance Bill, 1912, Australia, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3412. He spoke of ‘women doing their duty to Australia by bringing the unclothed immigrant into the world’.     

Relatively Different? How do Gender Differences in Well-Being Depend on Paid and Unpaid Work in Europe?

Absolute as well as relative hours of paid and unpaid work may influence well-being. This study investigates whether absolute hours spent on paid work and housework account for the lower well-being among women as compared to men in Europe, and whether the associations between well-being and hours of paid work and housework differ by gender attitudes and social context. Attitudes towards women’s and men’s paid work and housework obligations may influence how beneficial or detrimental it is to spend time on these activities, as may social comparison of one’s own hours to the number of hours commonly spent among similar others. A group of 13,425 women and men from 25 European countries are analysed using country fixed-effects models. The results suggest that while men’s well-being appears to be unaffected by hours of paid work and housework, women’s well-being increases with increased paid working hours and decreases with increasing housework hours. Gender differences in time spent on paid work and housework account for a third of the European gender difference in well-being and are thus one reason that women have lower well-being than men have. Gender attitudes do not appear to modify the associations between hours and well-being, but there is a tendency for women’s well-being to be higher the less housework they do compared to other women in the same family situation and country. However, absolute hours of paid work and housework appear to be more important to women’s well-being than relative hours.

Women’s Agency and the Quality of Family Relationships in India

The role of family context in determining women’s agency has been addressed through kinship patterns, household structure, and domestic violence. This study suggests that another aspect of family context—family relationship quality—can also influence women’s agency. Data from the Women’s Reproductive Histories Survey, collected in Madhya Pradesh, India, are used to examine whether family relationship quality is a determinant of women’s agency. Results show that women with higher quality relationships with husbands and parents-in-law do have greater agency. Further, family relationship quality is just as influential as other well known determinants of agency, including education and employment.     

To have or not to have? Australian women’s childbearing desires,expectations and outcomes

Australia’s low fertility rate is commonly attributed to deliberate decisions by women to avoid having children. Existing theoretical explanations of fertility decision-making mostly view childbearing as a rational, voluntary process and focus on the ‘costs’ to women of having children. Although this may help explain why women do not have children, it contributes very little to understanding why women do have children. This study describes childbearing desires, expectations and outcomes in a population-based sample of 569 30–34-years-old Australian women recruited from the Australian Electoral Roll in 2005. Most women surveyed wanted to have children, and their childbearing outcomes were associated with biological, psychological and social factors including the lack of a partner and adverse health conditions. The factors and their relative importance varied by parity. Most women had fewer children than they desired, and many would have children, or more children, if their circumstances were different. These data challenge prevailing assumptions about women’s childbearing behaviour that women are able to choose when and if they have a child. Based on the findings, a conceptual framework of childbearing behaviour is proposed which builds on existing theoretical explanations to explain why women do and do not have children, differences by parity, and the role of circumstances in women’s childbearing behaviour. The findings and conceptual framework have implications for public policies, and indicate that multiple approaches are required which are sensitive to and address the barriers women face in family formation.     

Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework

Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women’s housework more strongly than men’s. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in the United States, by race-ethnicity because of how race-ethnicity conditions access to resources and influences gender relations within marriages. Housework levels and gender differences may be lower in Black married couples compared to other couples because of Black women’s higher historical levels of employment and consequently long-standing need to balance work and family responsibilities. Race-ethnicity also likely conditions the symbolic meaning and thus association of economic resources and housework. We use pooled time diary data from the 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Study from 26,795 married women and men to investigate how and why race-ethnicity influences housework. Our results indicate Hispanic and Asian women do more cooking and cleaning compared with White and Black women and the inverse relationship between women’s earnings and housework is steeper for Hispanic women compared with other women. We find no evidence that married Black men devote more time to housework than White men, either core or occasional, unlike earlier studies.     

Dilemma and Conflicts in Taiwanese Women’s Leisure Participation

This article analyses the gender relationship of men and women in Taiwan. Firstly, it employs power relation to explore what the gender relationship is and how this gender relationship has produced. Secondly, it describes how this gender relationship has influenced Taiwanese society. It also explains the gender inequality of both sexes in Taiwan and Taiwanese women’s resistance to traditional and Western culture. Thirdly, it analyses how this gender relationship has reflected on Taiwanese women’s leisure. The analysis is designed to indicate the roles held by women and men in Taiwanese society in this research.     

The Impact of Having a Baby on the Level and Content of Women’s Well-Being

The primary objective of this study was to more fully understand the impact of having a baby on women’s well-being by attending to both the level and the content of well-being. To cover the judgemental and affective aspects of well-being we included global measures of life satisfaction and well-being and affective experience measures derived from the day reconstruction method. In a sample of 19 first-time mothers no differences between pre and postnatal reports of general life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, and experienced positive and negative affect were found, suggesting that the arrival of the newborn baby does not universally impact on women’s level of well-being. Changes in the content of well-being were studied by examining changes in the way women experience specific activities and interactions with various social partners. There appeared to be an upward shift in experienced positive affect during active leisure and a slight decrease in negative affect during time spent with relatives. The results are discussed in light of previously documented changes across the transition to motherhood in negative mood states, time use, women’s evaluation of various aspects of daily life, and relational satisfaction.     

The Impact of College Education on Fertility: Evidence for Heterogeneous Effects

As college-going among women has increased, more women are going to college from backgrounds that previously would have precluded their attendance and completion. This affords us the opportunity and motivation to look at the effects of college on fertility across a range of social backgrounds and levels of early achievement. Despite a substantial literature on the effects of education on women’s fertility, researchers have not assessed variation in effects by selection into college. With data on U.S. women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we examine effects of timely college attendance and completion on women’s fertility by the propensity to attend and complete college using multilevel Poisson and discrete-time event-history models. Disaggregating the effects of college by propensity score strata, we find that the fertility-decreasing college effect is concentrated among women from comparatively disadvantaged social backgrounds and low levels of early achievement. The effects of college on fertility attenuate as we observe women from backgrounds that are more predictive of college attendance and completion.     

The response of Japanese wives’ labor supply to husbands’ job loss

This paper examines how Japanese wives react to their husbands’ involuntary job loss and tests the existence of complementarity of a wife’s labor supply to her husband’s. Utilizing panel data on Japanese households from 1993 to 2004, we found that wives’ labor supply is stimulated when husbands suffer involuntary job loss. The detailed statistics show that not only do working wives raise their labor hours but also nonworking wives begin to participate in the labor market. The added worker effect is evident during the period of job insecurity in Japan following the mid-1990s.     

Mothers’ Marital Status and Type of Delivery Medical Care in Guatemala

The use of modern medical care for child delivery in rural Guatemala is low relative to other Latin American countries. In the previous literature, factors such as a woman’s age, education, ethnicity, religious affiliation and income are found to be important determinants of the type of delivery medical care she receives. This study hypothesizes that a woman’s marital status influences her decision as well. Using a binomial logit framework, the study finds that unmarried women are more likely to see a modern medical provider in delivery than married women, even after controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and husbands’ characteristics. Therefore, unmarried women seem to make more informed decisions in terms of their attitudes in childbearing and maternal health relative to their married counterparts. As a result, both economic as well as social developments seem necessary to induce changes in the high incidence of maternal mortality and morbidity in Guatemala.     

Far above rubies: Bride price and extramarital sexual relations in Uganda

The custom of bride price involves the payment of goods or cash from the groom’s family to the bride’s family at the time of marriage. Data from a household survey in Uganda were used to estimate the relationship between payment of bride price and non-marital sexual relationships. A robust correlation between bride price payment and lower rates of non-marital sexual relationships is found for women but not for men. One interpretation we offer for these findings is that bride price reflects the price of women’s sexual fidelity to men. This interpretation makes sense in light of the refundable nature of bride price in Uganda.     

The effects of status on women’s autonomy in Bolivia,Peru,and Nicaragua

A recent ideological revolution promoting women’s status has raised questions concerning determinants of autonomy and their implications for policy formation. This study seeks to identify objective indicators determinant of autonomy, and then examine their relationship in light of women’s subjective experiences of autonomy. Potential determinants include education, literacy, household size, age at marriage, employment, and socioeconomic status. Analyses are based on these data sets: the 2000 Bolivia Family Interaction and Children’s Well-Being (FICW) Survey, the 2000 Peru Demographic Health Survey and the 1997/1998 Nicaraguan Demographic and Health Survey. Our findings indicate that autonomy is multidimensional. Utilizing Structural equation modeling, we identify two major domains autonomy: decision-making autonomy and personal autonomy in Bolivia, and family autonomy and public autonomy in Nicaragua and Peru. This study shows that each of our specified determinants has some influence on autonomy, with education and socioeconomic status being the most important. We conclude that policies designed to change educational, economic, and familial characteristics of women will only have a modest impact on women’s overall sense of autonomy.