Jennifer Glass

Blessing or Curse? Work-Family Policies and Mother’s Wage Growth Over Time

Little empirical study has been devoted to the impact of employer-sponsored work-family policies on women’s wages. These policies include flexible scheduling, telecommuting, reduced hours of work, and child care assistance. Although these work innovations may make family caregiving easier, many women fear that lower wage growth and blocked mobility will result from the use of these policies. This project followed a midwestern cohort of employed women for 7 years after childbirth, using detailed information about coverage and use of family responsive policies across all jobs held during that period. Results show consistent negative effects of policy use on wage growth after controlling for many productivity-related characteristics, though the effects vary in size depending on the specific policy used, workers’ job mobility, and the respondent’s managerial or professional status.

Gender, Parenthood, and Job-Family Compatibility'

This article explores the contention that the concentration of women in certain jobs that accommodate parenting can help explain both occupational gender segregation and the lower wages received by women employed full time. Evidence from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey shows that the combination of both schedule flexibility and ease of job performance most clearly reduces job-family conflict for parents. However, mothers employed over 30 hours a week are not more likely to be in jobs with those characteristics, nor are predominantly female jobs in general likely to possess that cluster of characteristics shown to reduce job-family conflict.

Coverage and effectiveness of family-responsive workplace policies

Abstract In this article, we review what is and what is not known about “family-responsive” employment practices. What is claimed about the benefits of these practices? What evidence is available to evaluate the effectiveness of new employment practices in fostering increased employee productivity or lowered business costs? What do we still need to know, and what is the best way to obtain good evaluative information? This essay is divided into three parts: The first covers the market-based model for accommodating employee family responsibilities and available information on unmet employee needs, the second covers the literature on the types of new employment practices and their effectiveness in fostering organizational productivity, and the third provides a framework for future evaluation research that might better provide us with the information that we need to effectively fashion family-responsive workplaces that best meet the needs of employees and employers.

Childhood Religious Conservatism and Adult Attainment among Black and White Women

The resurgence of conservative religious groups over the past several decades raises interesting questions about its effects on womens life chances. Conservative religious institutions promote a traditional understanding of gender within families. Womens beliefs about appropriate family roles, in turn, influence their preparation for market work and the timing and extent of their labor force participation. Using retrospective data from the National Survey of Households and Families, this paper examines the effect of childhood religious affiliation on American womens acquisition and use of marketable skills, focusing on womens educational investments, family formation behavior, labor force participation and wage attainment. Results show that childhood religious conservatism is associated with diminished human capital acquisition and earlier family formation for White women with more muted results for Black women.

Do Workplace Flexibility Policies Influence Time Spent in Domestic Labor

Using data from a U.S. midwestern sample of mothers and fathers, the authors examine whether using workplace flexibility policies alters time spent in housework and child care. They hypothesize that an individual’s policy use will lead to more time in domestic labor and that his or her spouse’s policy use will lead to less time in domestic labor. Several results support their hypotheses. Mothers who work part-time spend more time in housework and their husbands spend less time in housework. Also, mothers who work at home spend more time in child care. One policy has the opposite of the predicted effect: Wives with flexible work schedules do less housework, and their husbands do more. Overall, mothers’ policy use has counterbalancing effects on their own and their spouses’ domestic labor time, implying that policy use has little net impact on total domestic labor time within dual-earner families.

Explaining Changes in Mothers' Job Satisfaction Following Childbirth.

This study examines the determinants of changes in job satisfaction for childbearing women who return to their jobs following childbirth. By using longitudinal data, this research is able to determine the direction and causes of changes in satisfaction that accompany the return to work. We find first that declines in job satisfaction routinely accompany the birth of a child. However, several family and workplace characteristics help to alleviate the decline in job satisfaction. In addition, we find that the determinants of job satisfaction appear to change following childbirth, which will be key in future research examining this issue.

The Impact of Religious Conservatism On Men's Work and Family Involvement

The social conservatism of evangelical and fundamentalist groups includes their support for premarital sexual restraint, husband leadership, and father involvement. The authors explore whether religious conservatism affects work–family outcomes of men using the National Survey of Families and Households, 1988 and 1993 waves. The authors hypothesize that men from conservative households will make earlier transitions to adulthood, work fewer hours, and earn less money. Moreover, the belief in strong paternal involvement should lead religiously conservative men to spend more time in housework and child care. Results show that conservative religious affiliation does not hasten the transition to adulthood among men. Current religious conservatism results in lower wages but not reduced work hours, and religious affiliation does not affect housework or child care.

Workplace Support, Child Care, and Turnover Intentions among Employed Mothers of Infants

This article looks at the determinants of job turnover among mothers of infants, using intentions to change jobs or exit the labor force assessed at 1 year postpartum among a sample of 246 employed mothers. Hypotheses were that exit intentions should be more influenced by household factors determining labor supply and other personal characteristics indicating job attachment. Additionally, whereas both types of turnover intentions should decrease as workplace supports for mothers increase, child care satisfaction should affect exit intentions more than intentions to change jobs. Results showed support for the notion that labor force exits are more strongly influenced by child care problems and measures of job attachment than are job changes, though models correcting for selectivity reveal that the child care problems are not directly influencing exit intentions. Supervisor and co-worker support impede intentions to both exit the labor force and change jobs. However, other dimensions of workplace support affected intentions to exit and intentions to change jobs differently.

A Method and Metric for Assessing Similarity among Dyads

Ascertaining substantive similarities between members of dyads is often difficult to accomplish. Assessments of similarity between dyad members are frequently made with statistical tools that are inappropriate for that purpose. In this article, problems in defining and measuring similarity with dyadic data are reviewed and a simple alternative is proposed. The method of planned comparisons between related and random dyads is illustrated with the use of sociopolitical attitude data from three-generation families. Results show both greater and less intergenerational attitude similarity in certain domains than would have been discerned on the basis of correlations or difference scores alone.

Red states, blue states, and divorce: understanding the impact of conservative Protestantism on regional variation in divorce rates.

Why do states with larger proportions of religious conservatives have higher divorce rates than states with lower proportions of religious conservatives? This project examines whether earlier transitions to marriage and parenthood among conservative Protestants (known risk factors for divorce) contribute to this paradox while attending to other plausible explanations. County-level demographic information from all 50 states is combined from a variety of public data sources and merged with individual records from the National Surveys of Family Growth to estimate both aggregated county and multilevel individual models of divorce. Results show that individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk, solely through the earlier transitions to adulthood and lower incomes of conservative Protestants. However, the proportion of conservative Protestants in a county is also independently and positively associated with both the divorce rate in that county and an individual’s likelihood of divorcing. The earlier family formation and lower levels of educational attainment and income in counties with a higher proportion of conservative Protestants can explain a substantial portion of this association. Little support is found for alternative explanations of the association between religious conservatism and divorce rates, including the relative popularity of marriage versus cohabitation across counties.