The changing impact of marriage and children on women's labor force participation

Tabulations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that the steady increase in U.S. women’s labor force participation that characterized the post-World War II period has largely subsided. For most groups of women (all women, married women, and women with children), the trend line in the labor force participation rate flattened out in the earlyto mid-1990s after nearly four decades of steady increases.1 But as with many aggregate trends, substantial complexity and controversy lie just beneath the surface. Recent work by Heather Boushey and by Sharon R. Cohany and Emy Sok suggests two apparently inconsistent trends.2 On the one hand, responding to anecdotal evidence in the popular press about a declining commitment to work on the part of women with children, Boushey showed that the negative impact of children on work by women aged 25–44 years declined, rather than increased, in the two decades between 1984 and 2004. On the other hand, Cohany and Sok showed that the labor force participation rate of married women with children, and especially married women with very young children, declined between 1997 and 2005, which implies that the negative impact of children on work has increased, at least for this group of women. Who is right? Actually, they both are. An The changing impact of marriage and children on women’s labor force participation