Lynne M. Casper

The Gender Poverty Gap: What Can We Learn From Other Countries?

Examines gender differences in poverty in eight industrialized countries: US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. Results suggest that gender differences in human capital factors and family factors, as well as religion, culture, and policy, all play a role in accounting for gender poverty gaps within and across countries.

Changing work and work-family conflict: Evidence from the work, family, and health network

Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made it difficult to conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work practices, interactions, and expectations by (1) training supervisors on the value of demonstrating support for employees’ personal lives and (2) prompting employees to reconsider when and where they work. We find statistically significant, although modest, improvements in employees’ work-family conflict and family time adequacy, and larger changes in schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life. We find no evidence that this intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands, as might have happened with increased permeability of work across time and space. Subgroup analyses suggest the intervention brought greater benefits to employees more vulnerable to work-family conflict. This study uses a rigorous design to investigate deliberate organizational changes and their effects on work resources and the work-family interface, advancing our understanding of the impact of social structures on individual lives.

Work, income, the economy, and married fathers as child-care providers

Previous research on fathers as child-care providers indicates a need to study the father’s role in child care in the context of different economic cycles. Using data from the 1988, 1991, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine whether father’ availability and the couple’s economic resources are differentially related to child care by fathers over time. We focus on the differences between 1991—a recession year—and 1988 and 1993—two nonrecession years. Increased availability of fathers is significantly related to higher levels of fathers’ participation in child care in all three years. Relative economic resources between husbands and wives help explain care by fathers only during the recession year, whereas family income is important only in the nonrecession years. These results suggest that in the future, researchers should acknowledge fluctuations in the economy when studying husbands’ participation in traditional female tasks, as macroeconomic shifts appear to impact the likelihood of married fathers caring for their preschoolers during mothers’ working hours.

Work–Family Balance Issues and Work–Leave Policies

Unhealthy work environments are not only the consequence of physical characteristics. Psychosocial aspects of the environment, including control and social support, are also consequential factors. While holding multiple roles as both worker and family member can have positive implications for health, chronic stress experienced from lack of work–family balance has negative effects. This chapter describes an interdisciplinary model of how work–family strains impact the health and well being of employees, their families, and the organizations in which they work. We argue that both structure and culture count at the workplace: work–family conflict increases with both a lack of supervisor support for family obligations and ineffective workplace policies and programs regarding employees’ control over the time and timing of work. We then describe an ongoing randomized field experiment to implement and evaluate a workplace-based prevention program to improve work–family balance. We conclude with the implications of this model for future research.

Parents' Daily Time With Their Children: A Workplace Intervention

OBJECTIVES: In the context of a group randomized field trial, we evaluated whether parents who participated in a workplace intervention, designed to increase supervisor support for personal and family life and schedule control, reported significantly more daily time with their children at the 12-month follow-up compared with parents assigned to the Usual Practice group. We also tested whether the intervention effect was moderated by parent gender, child gender, or child age. METHODS: The Support-Transform-Achieve-Results Intervention was delivered in an information technology division of a US Fortune 500 company. Participants included 93 parents (45% mothers) of a randomly selected focal child aged 9 to 17 years (49% daughters) who completed daily telephone diaries at baseline and 12 months after intervention. During evening telephone calls on 8 consecutive days, parents reported how much time they spent with their child that day. RESULTS: Parents in the intervention group exhibited a significant increase in parent-child shared time, 39 minutes per day on average, between baseline and the 12-month follow-up. By contrast, parents in the Usual Practice group averaged 24 fewer minutes with their child per day at the 12-month follow-up. Intervention effects were evident for mothers but not for fathers and for daughters but not sons. CONCLUSIONS: The hypothesis that the intervention would improve parents’ daily time with their children was supported. Future studies should examine how redesigning work can change the quality of parent-child interactions and activities known to be important for youth health and development.

The Stalled Revolution: Gender and Time Allocation in the United States

Families have long faced a “work and family” time allocation: who will earn money to support the family financially and who will provide the caregiving children require and the support that the family earner(s) need? In mid-20th-century America, providing economically for a family largely took place within a two-parent context and macroeconomic conditions were such that (white) men could usually provide sufficient income from their one job alone to support a wife and children. Material aspirations were also lower, following a decade and a half of the lowered consumption during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s. In addition, discrimination against women in the workplace was legal and widespread and hence, opportunities for women outside the home were limited (Casper and Bianchi 2002).

Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use: Childcare, Housework, Leisure, and Sleep

Assumptions that single mothers are “time poor” compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003–2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.