Investigating Religion and Inequality through Women's Work‐Family Pathways

Abstract

This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work‐family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work‐family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work‐family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work‐family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work‐family experiences.

Women’s Configurations of Family, Work, and Education: Mapping Diverse Pathways Throughout Adulthood

“…In another comparative study, Aisenbrey and Fasang (2017) examine work-family trajectories among adults in the United States and Germany; their findings suggest that workfamily patterns across the life course differ not only by gender, but even more so by social class in the U.S. context. Generally, we find that these and other demographic studies tend to include education as an antecedent or a background characteristic of women's work patterns (Gilliland 2020;Killewald and Zhuo 2019), focusing more specifically on trajectories of work at the population level. In our present study, we expand the scope of women's pathways to consider how the diverse and unequal experiences of work are directly interconnected with changes in family and education statuses, often as simultaneous processes, throughout adulthood.…”