Career, Children, or Neither?
It’s well known that employment and childbearing are negatively associated for women, reflecting a potential “incompatibility” between these two dimensions of work-family life. Prominent demographers have argued that the continued “gender revolution”—particularly men’s increased participation in household labor—can resolve this tension, primarily by enabling employed mothers to realize their childbearing desires. A key premise of this proposition is that men’s domestic contributions would matter more for facilitating mothers’ additional childbearing, as maternal employment has become a normative expectation less contingent on male partners’ support at home.
My working paper, “Career, Children, or Neither: Fathers’ Housework and Mothers’ Work-Family Arrangements Following First Birth in the United States,” tests this proposition by jointly analyzing the associations of fathers’ housework with first-time mothers’ full-time employment and second childbearing. While most prior research on this topic has focused on European and East Asian contexts, I examine the United States—a country characterized by relatively high fertility and limited policy support for working parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1980–2021 and bivariate probit models, I find that fathers’ time spent on housework does increase the likelihood that mothers combine full-time employment and second childbearing; however, this is primarily driven by an increase in mothers’ full-time employment and not by a greater likelihood of second births.
This pattern diverges from findings in many European and East Asian countries where male partners’ household labor is positively associated with second childbearing. This inconsistency suggests that the two-stage consequence of the gender revolution as theorized by demographers—in which a public-sphere revolution first leads to gender equity in the labor market, accompanied by an initial decline in birth rates far below replacement levels, followed by a rebound due to a subsequent private-sphere revolution—may not universally hold across postindustrial countries. My research thus calls for more comparative studies to theorize alternative trajectories of the gender revolution by examining how the interplay between men’s household labor, women’s paid work, and childbearing unfolds across different institutional and cultural contexts.
Further reading:
Goldscheider, Frances, Eva Bernhardt, and Trude Lappegård. 2015. “The Gender Revolution: A Framework for Understanding Changing Family and Demographic Behavior.” Population and Development Review 41(2):207–39. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2015.00045.x.
