Three competing hypotheses are tested regarding determinants of husband's (vs. wife's) participation in 12 selected household/child-care activities. The research utilizes interview responses of husbands, although it compares responses of both husbands and wives in a proportionate stratified area-probability sample from adjacent midwestern cities. The socialization-ideology hypothesis receives the strongest, albeit modest, support of the three hypotheses. Only marginal support is found for the relative husband/wife resources hypothesis, emphasizing professional employment of wives. No support is found for the time-availability hypothesis. Implications for the further integration of work and family roles for men are considered.
Data from the New Beneficiary Study for currently married men who began receiving social security benefits in 1980-1981 indicate that the racial earnings gap is greater in retirement than it was in employment. Racial differences in employment and pension earnings are specified by education and employment status. There is, however, a significant net racial effect in predicting social security earnings. Furthermore, education interacts with race in predicting asset earnings, which constitute the major source of racial inequality in retirement. This analysis highlights not only the enduring problem of poverty for African Americans and Latinos who are "working off the books," without social security benefits, but also the possibility of a "glass ceiling" that limits access to assets for highly educated nonwhites.As policy makers debate the future of the Great Society programs that were intended to reduce racial inequality, sociologists debate the extent to which the black-white earnings gap has narrowed. A. Silvia Cancio, T. David Evans, and David J. Maume Jr. (1996) argue that employment discrimination increased with deregulation in the 1980s. George Farkas and Keven Vicknair (1996, p. 559) suggest that the apparent increase is due to the failure of Title I compensatory education programs. Above and beyond the problems of education and employment discrimination, however, African Americans and Latinos continue to suffer from the burden of inherited poverty. While not denying the effects of education and employment discrimination, we suggest that the racial earnings gap might have increased in the 1980s, in part, because of increased racial inequality among retirees-the parents and grandparents of the new employment earnings cohort.Much recent research has focused on increased gender inequality in retirement, using a lifecourse perspective (
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