First comes love, then comes marriage, then come flex-time and a baby carriage." -Statement of a supervisor, Velez v. Novartis lawsuit (Wilson, 2010)

No abstract

We attempt to integrate, elaborate, and test competing theories of why religious participation increases with age during young adulthood. We reconceptualize age and family formation as interacting causes of religious participation rather than competing explanations of it. We expand the concept offamily formation to include divorce, cohabitation, and dissolution of cohabitational relationships. We distinguish attitudes toward the family from family formation behavior. We analyze data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, which traces church membership to age 32. Our results show that the effect of children on church membership varies with the combination of the children's and parent's ages. We find separate effects of family formation behavior and attitudes toward the family. Cohabitation, divorce, and dissolution of cohabitational unions all affect membership probability, but these effects vary with age and are often differentfor men and women. n most religious traditions practiced in the United States, religious values and participation in religious organizations are deeply intertwined with values and attitudes that encourage marriage and parenthood. Most formal religious dogmas promote the establishment and maintenance of family relationships. Organized religions offer institutionalized moral support for love, intimacy, and childbearing in the context of religiously sanctioned marriage (D'Antonio 1983, 1985;

The gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields has remained constant for decades and increases the farther up the STEM career pipeline one looks. Why does the underrepresentation of women endure? This study investigated the role of parenthood as a mechanism of gender-differentiated attrition from STEM employment. Using a nationally representative 8-year longitudinal sample of US STEM professionals, we examined the career trajectories of new parents after the birth or adoption of their first child. We found substantial attrition of new mothers: 43% of women leave full-time STEM employment after their first child. New mothers are more likely than new fathers to leave STEM, to switch to part-time work, and to exit the labor force. These gender differences hold irrespective of variation by discipline, race, and other demographic factors. However, parenthood is not just a “mother’s problem”; 23% of new fathers also leave STEM after their first child. Suggesting the difficulty of combining STEM work with caregiving responsibilities generally, new parents are more likely to leave full-time STEM jobs than otherwise similar childless peers and even new parents who remain employed full time are more likely than their childless peers to exit STEM for work elsewhere. These results have implications for policymakers and STEM workforce scholars; whereas parenthood is an important mechanism of women’s attrition, both women and men leave at surprisingly high rates after having children. Given that most people become parents during their working lives, STEM fields must do more to retain professionals with children.

Flexibility stigma, the devaluation of workers who seek or are presumed to need flexible work arrangements, fosters a mismatch between workplace demands and the needs of professionals. The authors survey “ideal workers”—science, technology, engineering, and math faculty at a top research university—to determine the consequences of working in an environment with flexibility stigma. Those who report this stigma have lower intentions to persist, worse work–life balance, and lower job satisfaction. These consequences are net of gender and parenthood, suggesting that flexibility stigma fosters a problematic environment for many faculty, even those not personally at risk of stigmatization.