Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete-time event-history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are…

Australian women make decisions about returning to paid work and care for their child within a policy environment that presents mixed messages about maternal employment and childcare standards. Against this background, an investigation of first-time mothers' decision-making about workforce participation and childcare was undertaken. Four women…

Married couples consisting of female breadwinners and male primary caretakers are increasing in prevalence and visibility. However, little is known about the experiences of these families, particularly about salient challenges and dynamics related to this work-family arrangement. Through inductive qualitative analysis, the current study…

Background: Families of children with disabilities experience extra financial strains, and mothers are frequently unable to participate in paid work because of caregiving obligations. Methods: A mailed survey and follow-up phone calls were used to gather data about mother's health, workforce participation and barriers to inclusion in the workplace…

We examine whether women's rising labor force participation led to increased intergenerational transmission of occupation from fathers to daughters. We develop a model where fathers invest in human capital that is specific to their own occupations. Our model generates an empirical test where we compare the trends in the probabilities that women…

Despite considerable interest in the causes and consequences of work-family conflict, and the frequent suggestion in fertility research that difficulty in balancing work and family is one of the factors leading to low fertility rates in several developed countries, little research uses longitudinal data to examine whether women who report…

Existing scholarship has no examination of attributing the discourse on vocational identity to African American women, which in this study, has been defined as what a woman ought to be and do. African American women have been a subject of scholarly inquiry on having the longest history of paid work. This qualitative dissertation contains their…

This paper empirically examines associations between female labor force participation (FLFP) and democracy. Using a cross-country, time series (1980-2005) data set, we find evidence that FLFP is lower in democracies. One possible explanation is that dictators promote FLFP above what traditional norms would dictate and so a greater freedom to…

Unpaid household labor is still predominantly performed by women, despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation over the past 50 years. For this article, interviews with 76 highly skilled women who had returned to the workforce following the birth of children were analyzed to capture reflexive understandings of the balance of paid…

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In…

Economically disadvantaged mothers face numerous barriers to stable, quality employment opportunities. One barrier that has received limited attention in previous research is having a child with significant psychological or behavioral problems. Using a representative sample of low-income mothers and early adolescent children from the Three-City…

The twenty-first century presents many new challenges in career development and choices in the workforce for men and women. Currently, women comprise nearly half of the United States labor force. United States women are employed in various career areas, ranging from the traditional careers for women, such as education and secretarial, to their…

With women bearing a disproportionate share of economic hardship, their poor representation on training designed to tackle barriers to work is a critical concern. The author asks what can be done to improve women's access to this sort of learning. As the underrecruitment of women to ESF pre-employment programmes demonstrates, the author suggests…

Families across the country are facing hard times. With inflation rising much faster than earnings, unemployment stubbornly high and the government about to embark on the most severe programme of fiscal austerity since the Second World War, living standards are being squeezed and women are on the frontline. With 80 billion British pounds set to be…

The author did not expect to be surprised or disturbed by the data from the latest Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) salary survey; however, she was. CASE has been conducting the survey since 1982, so she assumed the findings would mirror her own salary history and those of her peers. While she suspected that older women…