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Over the past 50 years, women's roles have changed dramatically—a reality captured by substantial increases in employment and reductions in fertility. Yet, the social organization of work and family life has not changed much, leading to pervasive work-family conflict. Observing these strains, some scholars wonder whether U.S. women's high employment levels are sustainable. Women's employment in professional and managerial occupations—the core of the analyses offered in this article—merits particular interest because of the material and symbolic implications for gender equality. In a cohort analysis of working-age women born between 1906 and 1975, I show that employment levels among college-educated women in professional and managerial occupations have increased across cohorts. Full-time, year-round employment rates continue to rise across cohorts, even among women in historically male professions and mothers of young children. Although labor force participation rates have stopped rising, they have stalled at a very high rate, with less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 out of the labor force for a year or more during their prime childbearing years. Moreover, the difference in employment rates between mothers and childless women—the "child penalty"—is shrinking across cohorts.

Rising income inequality from the mid-1990s to the present was characterized by rapid income growth among top earners and new patterns of employment and income pooling across families and households. Research on economic inequality expanded from a more narrow focus on wage inequalities and labor markets to other domains including incentive pay, corporate governance, income pooling and family formation, social and economic policy, and political institutions. We review and provide a critical discussion of recent research in these new domains and suggest areas where sociological research may provide new insight into the character and causes of contemporary income inequality.

Over the past four decades, income inequality has increased and family structures have diversified. We argue that family structure has become an important mechanism for the reproduction of class, race, and gender inequalities. We review studies of income inequality and family structure changes and find a wide range of estimates of the correlation. We discuss how increases in income inequality may lead to increases in single motherhood, particularly among less educated women. Single motherhood in turn decreases intergenerational economic mobility by affecting children's material resources and the parenting they experience. Because of the unequal distribution of family structure by race and the negative effects of single motherhood, family structure changes exacerbate racial inequalities. Gender inequalities also increase as mothers incur more child-related costs and fewer fathers experience family life with children.

Objectives. This article considers how becoming a father affects men's employment levels and tests whether the effects of fatherhood differ by the relationship of the father to the child's mother at the time of the birth.Methods. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to fit growth curve models of new fathers' employment trajectories for the first five years after they become fathers.Results. Prior to becoming a father, married men worked more hours per week and more weeks per year than cohabiting and nonresident fathers. By five years after the birth, differences in employment between unmarried and married fathers had diminished.Conclusions. The transition to fatherhood is associated with an increase in employment for unmarried fathers but is not associated with significant changes in employment for married fathers.

From 1975 to 2005, the variance in incomes of American families with children increased by two-thirds. In attempting to explain this trend, labor market studies emphasize the rising pay of college graduates, while demographers typically highlight the implications of family structural changes across time. In this article, we join these lines of research by conceiving of income inequality as the joint product of the distribution of earnings in the labor market and the pooling of incomes in families. We develop this framework with a decomposition of family income inequality using annual data from the March Current Population Survey. Our analysis shows that disparities in education and single parenthood contributed to income inequality, but rising educational attainment and women's employment offset these effects. Most of the increase in family income inequality was due to increasing within-group inequality, which was widely shared across family types and levels of schooling.