Mothers' Long-Term Employment Patterns

Abstract

Previous research on maternal employment has disproportionately focused on married, college-educated mothers and examined either current employment status or postpartum return to employment. Following the life course perspective, we instead conceptualize maternal careers as long-term life course patterns. Using data from the NLSY79 and optimal matching, we document four common employment patterns of American mothers over the first 18 years of maternity. About two-thirds follow steady patterns, either full-time employment (38 percent) or steady nonemployment (24 percent). The rest experience "mixed" patterns: long-term part-time employment (20 percent), or a multiyear period of nonemployment following maternity, then a return to employment (18 percent). Consistent employment following maternity, either full-time or part-time, is characteristic of women with more economic advantages. Women who experience consistent nonemployment disproportionately lack a high school degree, while women with return to employment following a long break tend to be younger with lower wages prior to maternity. Race is one of the few predictors of whether a mother is consistently employed full time versus part time: consistent part-time labor is distinctive to white women. Our results support studying maternal employment across the economic spectrum, considering motherhood as a long-term characteristic, and employing research approaches that reveal the qualitative distinctness of particular employment patterns. JEL Classification Codes: D13, J13, J22

Changes in Couples' Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality

“…The decline in the role of women’s employment as a mechanism of increases in post-birth homogamy (or conversely, the increasing role of the residual—weeks and hours worked, men’s earnings, or assortative mating) indicates that complete detachment from the labor market played a smaller role in recent years, consistent with prior studies ( Killewald and Zhuo 2015 ). This result does not imply that all changes in women’s labor supply played a smaller role.…”

Machine Learning in Sociology

“…Frye & Trinitapoli (2015) use sequence analysis to discover five distinct event sequences that characterize women's experienced prelude to sex in Malawi. Killewald & Zhuo (2018) employ the same method to identify four maternal employment patterns of American mothers. Garip (2012Garip ( , 2016 uses cluster analysis to identify four distinct groups among first-time Mexico-U.S. migrants.…”

“…Unlike prediction problems, there is often no 'ground truth' in UML, therefore, model checking is an important step. Researchers use statistical validation techniques that involve some heuristic measure to capture whether, for example, 'clusters' (Garip, 2012;Killewald & Zhuo, 2018), 'latent classes' (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016), or 'topics' are well separated (DiMaggio et al, 2013). Scholars employ substantive validation to see if the produced partitions cohere with existing typologies, or more generally, with human judgement.…”