Suchergebnisse

Much demographic research implicitly or explicitly views family changes over the past half century as examples of the "pathology of matriarchy" first raised in Moynihan's 1965 report on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The basis of this perspective is the correlation between female-headed families and negative outcomes for children. Yet the magnitude of family changes and any ill-effects vary across social groups within their cultural, economic, and political contexts. By reviewing the research on family, market, and policy changes over the past half-century with this in mind, I argue that the pattern of group variation does not point to an inherent pathology of matriarchy because the differences in life chances across family types are minimized where institutional arrangements support greater gender (and class) equality. In fact, the gendered responses to the inter-related family, market, and state institutional changes suggest instead it is a growing pathology of patriarchy disproportionately hurting the life chances of boys and men in post-industrial societies. Only with full gender equality in states, markets, and families will the pathology recede.

Selon la thèse de Peter McDonald, une relation négative existe entre l'emploi des femmes et la fécondité. Dans cet article, l'analyse de données macro-et microéconomiques montre que ce n'est pas le conflit en soi mais le renforcement de l'« iniquité » entre les sexes dans les différentes législations qui peut laisser présager un déclin des taux de fécondité. Les différentes législations concernent les droits de l'individu en tant que tel (par exemple, le droit du travail) et le droit qui s'adresse à l'individu en tant que membre d'une famille (les allocations familiales, les congés parentaux). On fait ici l'hypothèse d'une relation croissante selon laquelle une plus grande équité dans l'emploi a pour effet d'encourager une plus grande équité au sein des politiques en faveur de la famille et, in fine, au sein de la famille elle-même. Les données du Panel de démographie familiale de l'Union européenne sont utilisées pour illustrer l'évolution des effets de l'équité des genres sur la probabilité de secondes naissances en Italie et en Espagne. Ces deux États sont caractérisés par la domination d'un modèle de « l'homme gagne-pain » où le père est le seul pourvoyeur financier de la famille. Cependant, l'Italie a fait plus de progrès vers l'équité dans l'emploi des femmes que l'Espagne.

Parenthood contributes substantially to broader gender wage inequality. The intensification of gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work after the birth of a child create unequal constraints and expectations such that, all else equal, mothers earn less than childless women, but fathers earn a wage premium. The fatherhood wage premium, however, varies substantially among men. Analyses of linked workplace-employee data from Canada reveal how organizational context conditions educational, occupational, and family-status variation in fatherhood premiums. More formal employment relations (collective bargaining and human resource departments) reduce both overall fatherhood premiums and group differences in them, while performance pay systems (merit and incentive pay) have mixed effects. Shifting entrenched gendered divisions of household labour is thus not the only pathway to minimizing fathers' wage advantage.

Many hail wives' part-time employment as a work—family balance strategy, but theories offer competing predictions as to the effects of wives' employment on relationship stability. We use panel data to test these competing hypotheses among recent cohorts of first-married couples in Great Britain, West Germany1and the United States. We find effects of wives' employment on marital stability var y across the countries. In West Germany with its high-quality part-time employment, couples where the wife works part time are significantly more stable. In the more liberal British and US labour markets, neither wives' part- nor full-time employment significantly alters divorce risk. In the United States, however, mothers working part time have significantly lower divorce risk. West German and British husbands' unemployment proves more detrimental to marital stability than wives' employment. These results highlight the impor tance of the socioeconomic context in structuring the optimal employment participation of both partners.

We theorize how social policy affects marital stability vis-à-vis macro and micro effects of wives' employment on divorce risk in 11 Western countries. Correlations among 1990s aggregate data on marriage, divorce, and wives' employment rates, along with attitudinal and social policy information, seem to support specialization hypotheses that divorce rates are higher where more wives are employed and where policies support that employment. This is an ecological fallacy, however, because of the nature of the changes in specific countries. At the micro level, we harmonize national longitudinal data on the most recent cohort of wives marrying for the first time and find that the stabilizing effects of a gendered division of labor have ebbed. In the United States with its lack of policy support, a wife's employment still significantly increases the risk of divorce. A wife's employment has no significant effect on divorce risk in Australia, Flanders, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, wives' employment predicts a significantly lower risk of divorce when compared with wives who are out of the labor force. The results indicate that greater policy support for equality reduces and may even reverse the relative divorce risk associated with a wife's employment. ; This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Social Policy following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version "Labor and Love: Wives' Employment and Divorce Risk in Its Socio-political Context / Lynn Prince Cooke, Jani Erola, Marie Evertsson, Michael Gähler, Juho Härkönen, Belinda Hewitt, Marika Jalovaara, Man-Yee Kan, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, Letizia Mencarini, Jean-Francois Mignot, Dimitri Mortelmans, Anne-Rigt Poortman, Christian Schmitt, Heike Trappe. In: Social Politics 20 (2013), 4, pp. 482-509" is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxt016