Womens Labor Market Involvement And Family Income Mobility When Marriages End

Examines three decades of data on the relationship between women¿s labor market activity and the income mobility of families that lose a spouse through death, divorce, or separation. Wives¿ labor market activity acts as partial insurance for women and their families against the negative economic consequences of marital dissolution. However, while women who lose their husbands increase their earnings significantly, the number of upwardly mobile families is quite small, and a majority of families actually move down. In addition, they do less well in successive decades. These findings imply that U.S. social and economic policies currently leave considerable gaps in ¿insurance¿ for families in the event of marital dissolution. Tables and graphs.

Married women in the United States are increasingly integral to their families' economic well-being. With two-earner families becoming the norm, little research investigates the role of wives in family income mobility. How much does a wife's labor market activity matter in her family's ability to gain or hold its place in the income distribution of all families? Are women's contributions to mobility weaker when children are present? Do more-educated wives make bigger contributions than wives with less education? Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to observe families at the beginning and end of three 10- year periods spanning the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, we find that married-couple families moving up the income distribution saw larger increases in wives' employment, annual work hours, and earnings than downwardly mobile married couples. These data confirm the popular perception that families needed to work more hours to move ahead or hold their own in the income distribution. In upwardly mobile families, wives' work hours increased substantially, while husbands' hours increased only modestly. Wives with children living at home were less likely to work and averaged fewer work hours; however, wives in upwardly mobile families with children increased their work hours more than those in upwardly mobile families without children. Less-educated wives' earnings gains were critically important to their families' advancement. More-educated wives also helped their families move up, but their contributions were surpassed by the earnings gains of their husbands.

This open access book assembles landmark studies on divorce and separation in European countries, and how this affects the life of parents and children. It focuses on four major areas of post-separation lives, namely (1) economic conditions, (2) parent-child relationships, (3) parent and child well-being, and (4) health. Through studies from several European countries, the book showcases how legal regulations and social policies influence parental and child well-being after divorce and separation. It also illustrates how social policies are interwoven with the normative fabric of a country. For example, it is shown that father-child contact after separation is more intense in those countries which have adopted policies that encourage shared parenting. Correspondingly, countries that have adopted these regulations are at the forefront of more egalitarian gender role attitudes. Apart from a strong emphasis on the legal and social policy context, the studies in this volume adopt a longitudinal perspective and situate post-separation behaviour and well-being in the life course. The longitudinal perspective opens up new avenues for research to understand how behaviour and conditions prior or at divorce and separation affect later behaviour and well-being. As such this book is of special appeal to scholars of family research as well as to anyone interested in the role of divorce and separation in Europe in the 21st century.

InBalancing Act, authors Daphne Spain and Suzanne Bianchi draw upon multiple census and survey sources to detail the shifting conditions under which women manage their roles as mothers, wives, and breadwinners. They chronicle the progress made in education where female college enrollment now exceeds that of males and the workforce, where women have entered a wider variety of occupations and are staying on the job longer, even after becoming wives and mothers. But despite progress, lower-paying service and clerical positions remain predominantly female, and although the salary gap between men and women has shrunk, women are still paid less. As women continue to establish a greater presence outside the home, many have delayed marriage and motherhood. Marked jumps in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth have given rise to significant numbers of female-headed households. Married women who work contribute more significantly than ever to the financial well-being of their families, yet evidence shows that they continue to perform most household chores. Balancing Act focuses on how American women juggle the simultaneous demands of caregiving and wage earning, and compares their options to those of women in other countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation without policies to support working mothers and their families most tellingly in the absence of subsidized childcare services. Many women are forced to work in less rewarding part-time or traditionally female jobs that allow easy exit and re-entry, and as a consequence poverty is the single greatest danger facing American women. As the authors show, the risk of poverty varies significantly by race and ethnicity, with African Americans most of whose children live in mother-only families the most adversely affected."

increases in the labor force participation of married women.