Mothers are shown to receive lower wages than childless women across industrial countries. Although research on mothers’ wage disadvantage has noted that the extent of this disadvantage is not universal among mothers, it has paid relatively little attention to how the structural characteristics of jobs moderate the price women pay for motherhood. Using data from 16 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that began in 1997, we examine how the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers varies by occupational characteristics. Deriving hypotheses from three prominent explanations for the motherhood wage penalty—stressing work-family conflict and job performance, compensating differentials, and employer discrimination, respectively—we test whether this penalty changes with an occupation’s exposure to hazardous conditions, schedule regularity, required on-the-job training, competitiveness, level of autonomy, and emphasis on teamwork. Results from fixed-effects models show that the wage reduction for each child is less in occupations with greater autonomy and lower teamwork requirements. Moreover, mothers encounter a smaller penalty when their occupations impose less competitive pressure. On the whole, these findings are consistent with the model focusing on job strain and work-family conflict, adding evidence to the importance of improving job conditions to alleviate work-family conflict.

Research on female labor-force participation has not fully explained why economic development has different effects on married women's employment continuity across societies. I use life-history data from nationally representative samples of women in Japan and Taiwan to examine the divergence in women's patterns of labor-force exit in these two countries during the postwar period. The findings reveal that the effects of family demands, occupation, firm size, and employment sector on women's exit rates differed substantially between Japan and Taiwan. Taken together, these factors account for the different trends in married women's employment during this period. I argue that the cross-national differences in the predictors of women's labor-force withdrawal reflect the extent of incompatibility between work and family responsibilities for married women in these two societies.

Cross-national comparisons constitute a valuable strategy to assess how broader cultural, political, and institutional contexts shape family outcomes. One typical approach of cross-national family research is to use comparable data from a limited number of countries, fit similar regression models for each country, and compare results across country-specific models. Increasingly, researchers are adopting a second approach, which requires merging data from many more societies and testing multilevel models using the pooled sample. Although the second approach has the advantage of allowing direct estimates of the effects of nation-level characteristics, it is more likely to suffer from the problems of omitted-variable bias, influential cases, and measurement and construct nonequivalence. I discuss ways to improve the first approach's ability to infer macrolevel influences, as well as how to deal with challenges associated with the second one. I also suggest choosing analytical strategies according to whether the data meet multilevel models’ assumptions.

Sociological research has been generally critical of the effects of economic globalization on developing countries. However, greater worldwide economic integration may have created new employment opportunities for women. In this article, we examine the effect of foreign investment and export production on gender inequality in Mexico, a country that epitomizes the global shift to an open-market economic strategy. Using data from nationally representative surveys of manufacturing firms between 1992 and 2001, we find that foreign and export-oriented firms employ significantly more women at every occupational level than do nationally-owned firms producing goods for sale in the domestic market. The greater employment of women in foreign and export firms cannot be explained by these firms' higher demand for workers of lower skill levels, their size, capital intensity, production technology, wage level, use of temporary workers, or industry. Using managers' responses to survey questions regarding gender preferences in hiring, we find that managers in foreign-owned export firms have a preference for hiring women that cannot be explained by firm-level factors. This preference may account for the observed differences in female employment. Finally, using firms' payroll information to analyze the gender wage gap in manufacturing firms, we find that foreign-owned export firms discriminate against women less in terms of wages.

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