Marriage, children, and women's employment: what do we know?

One of the well-known economic trends of the past several decades is an increase in women’s labor force participation, particularly among married women with children. Although the trend is well established, there is no consensus as to its causes or consequences. With regard to causes, some argue that constraints such as low male earnings have propelled women into the marketplace, while others highlight expanding opportunities for women. Consequences are also contested, and the changing economic role of women is central both to debates about fairness and gender equity and to debates about family values and children’s wellbeing. In this article, we reexamine the extent of involvement in paid work for women in general and married women in particular, for both substantive and methodological reasons. Our substantive interest grows out of a renewed focus on paid work and child care that is related to welfare reform. Although welfare reform has concentrated attention on single women with children, we argue that married mothers’ allocations of time to paid work also are central to the welfare debate, as these women often appear as a de facto comparison group. Hence, it is important to have a clear picture of both how much married mothers currently work for pay and how much that has changed over time. We develop our argument about the interrelationship of married women’s labor market activity and welfare reform in the next section. The data we use, from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS), constitute the main source of information on trends in women’s paid work. After briefly describing the data and our measures, we discuss variability in estimates of full-time paid work. Two complexities arise in assessing the extent of women’s market work: the CPS data (1) offer multiple reference periods for examining labor force activity and (2) allow trends to be constructed for more than one universe. We describe changes in hours and weeks of paid employment, focusing on trends for all women, for married women, and for married mothers of young children. We show that, depending on the universe and reference period one uses, widely different estimates of married women’s “attachment” to the labor force may be calculated. The range of estimates creates ambiguity and complicates assessments of competing claims about women’s “commitment” to market work. Finally, to address the question of whether women’s market involvement has responded more to constraints or to opportunities, we model the relationship between the extent of a woman’s employment (as measured by annual hours of paid work), on the one hand, and marriage, young children, the woman’s level of educational attainarriage, Children, and Women's Employment