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FERNS 21.1Feminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Volume 21, Issue 1, 2015

If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers and Fathers in the US Really Feel about Caring For TheirChildren?

Women's Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Tanzania

Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry into Paid Work: Recent Evidence from Norway

Sexual Prejudice and Labor Market Outcomes for Gay and Lesbians: Evidence from Sweden

Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality of Opportunity or Equality of Outcomes?

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When Gender Matters

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If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers and Fathers in theUS Really Feel about Caring For Their Children?Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel

There is a commonly held view that mothers enjoy taking care of children more than fathers. This“difference in preferences” hypothesis is often used as a justification for why mothers continue to do moreof…

Read

Women's Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights fromTanzaniaSeema Vyas, Jessie Mbwambo, and Lori Heise

Both theory and empirical research provide conflicting views on whether paid work reduces women’s risk ofviolence by an intimate partner. Economic household bargaining models propose that…

Read

Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry into Paid Work:Recent Evidence from NorwayMarit Rønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød

Universal parental leaves with job protection and earnings compensation increase women’s attachment tothe labor market, but very long leaves may have negative consequences both at the individual and at…

Read



Sexual Prejudice and Labor Market Outcomes for Gay and Lesbians:Evidence from SwedenMats Hammarstedt, Ali M. Ahmed, and Lina Andersson

There is a large literature on differentials in economic outcomes as a result of sexual orientation. Severalstudies have focused on earnings differentials due to sexual orientation in the…

Read

Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality of Opportunity orEquality of Outcomes?Aniruddha Mitra, James T. Bang, and Arnab Biswas

Does gender equality in a society promote economic growth? Over the last two decades, a considerablevolume of evidence has shown that gender equality, particularly equality in educational…

Read

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When Gender MattersRobert Rudolf and Sung-Jin Kang

A growing body of academic literature shows that individuals return to their inherent baseline level ofhappiness after most major life events (for instance, works by Andrew Clark and colleagues). This…

Read

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If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers and Fathers in the US Really Feel about Caring For Their Children? | Explore Taylor & Francis Online

http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/bes/rfec-research-notes/21.1/art-1[29/01/2019 10:13:08]



If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers andFathers in the US Really Feel about Caring For Their Children?Feminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel

There is a commonly held view that mothers enjoy taking care ofchildren more than fathers. This “difference in preferences”hypothesis is often used as a justification for why motherscontinue to do more of the child caregiving than fathers, despitemothers’ increased involvement in the labor market. RachelConnelly and Jean Kimmel test the validity of this assertion usingdata from the 2010 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), whichincludes a set of subjective well-being questions for threerandomly chosen activities per day for each respondent. Theauthors explore gender differences in how mothers and fathersfeel in terms of happiness, sadness, pain, tiredness, stress, and asense of meaningfulness when engaged in a set of common dailyactivities.

Key findings. The analyses provide strong evidence against the“difference in preferences” hypothesis. Connelly and Kimmel findno evidence that mothers enjoy their time in child caregiving

more than fathers. Mothers and fathers both report high levels of happiness and meaningfulness whenengaged in child caregiving, substantially higher than the average for all activities, but there is no statisticaldifference between mothers’ and fathers’ answers on the happiness and meaningfulness of caregiving.Caregiving is also a mostly low-stress activity (lower than the average level of stress in all activities), butmothers report statistically significantly higher levels of stress than fathers when engaged in caregiving.Mothers are also statistically significantly more tired when engaged in caregiving, both overall and







mailto:?Subject=If%20You%27re%20Happy%20and%20You%20Know%20It%3A%20How%20Do%20Mothers%20and%20Fathers%20in%20the%20US%20Really%20Feel%20about%20Caring%20For%20Their%20Children%3F&Body=If%20You%27re%20Happy%20and%20You%20Know%20It%3A%20How%20Do%20Mothers%20and%20Fathers%20in%20the%20US%20Really%20Feel%20about%20Caring%20For%20Their%20Children%3F%0Ahttp://explore.tandfonline.com/page/bes/rfec-research-notes/21.1/art-1/

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controlling for time of day, day of the week, and amount of time spent in the activity. When combining allfive emotions into an unpleasantness index, Connelly and Kimmel find that for all nineteen includedactivities, 22.5 percent of fathers’ time and 24.6 percent of mothers’ time can be characterized asunpleasant. For the six child caregiving activities, the percentages are lower, but the difference betweenmothers and fathers is much more substantial. For fathers, 9.9 percent of their child caregiving time isunpleasant compared to 18.8 percent of mothers’ caregiving time.

Methodology. Connelly and Kimmel push beyond aggregate time-use categories, analyzing differencesbetween mothers and fathers in six detailed child caregiving activities and thirteen non-child caregivingactivities. In addition, Connelly and Kimmel examine the data on who is in the room during each reportedactivity to determine if emotional responses differ depending on whether children are present in the room.Finally, Connelly and Kimmel aggregate all five or six emotions (depending on whether meaningfulness iscategorized as an emotion) into a single unpleasantness index in order to evaluate the percent of a givenday that mothers and fathers report higher negative emotions scores.

Research and policy implications. Connelly and Kimmel’s research is important because it providesbroader-based and more objective information than has been available in past studies on how parents feelwhile engaged in caring for their children compared to how they feel when engaged in a host of otheractivities. They argue that mistaken assumptions about gendered preferences falsely ameliorate concernsabout persistent gender wage gaps, which tend to worsen during mothers’ childbearing years. In addition,to the extent that men also enjoy time spent with their young children (and the authors find that they do, asmuch or even more so than women), then mothers and fathers would benefit from institutional and policychanges that allow both parents to take active roles in parenting, while maintaining their strong continuouslabor force commitment.

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Women's Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Tanzania | Explore Taylor & Francis Online




Women's Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insightsfrom TanzaniaFeminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Seema Vyas, Jessie Mbwambo, and Lori Heise

Both theory and empirical research provide conflicting views onwhether paid work reduces women’s risk of violence by anintimate partner. Economic household bargaining modelspropose that increased access to monetary resources willenhance women’s “agency” and hence their bargaining powerwithin the household. This power in turn reduces theirvulnerability to violence. Feminist theorists, however, argue thatculture, context, and social norms can impede women’s ability toaccess and benefit from the fruits of employment, and if menperceive women’s paid work as a challenge to their traditionalrole as household breadwinners, this may increase women’svulnerability to violence.

In Tanzania, women’s productive roles have steadily shifted fromtraditional unpaid/paid-in-kind work to paid work. Using insightsfrom economic models on household bargaining and feministtheory, Seema Vyas, Jessie Mbwambo, and Lori Heise examined

semi-structured interview data from 2009 for twenty women engaged in market trading activities in twosites – Dar es Salaam and Mbeya. The researchers asked women about: why they entered into employment;good and bad things about paid work; household financial management, control over income; decisionmaking on matters concerning the household generally and related to sex; husband’s reaction to their paidwork; and experiences of partner violence. The findings from this study highlight the complexity ofunderstanding the relationship between women’s paid work and partner violence.







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Different patterns of intimate partner violence exist. In Tanzanian society, violence is a normal part offamily life, and men are allowed to hit their wives as long as it is for an infraction that is seen as legitimateand with a severity that does not cross the line into abuse. Some women, however, do recognize theinjustice of partner violence against women but acknowledge that they are powerless against it. This studyfound heterogeneity in how women described their experiences of partner violence. The authors classifiedand termed these as:

Moderate physical: infrequent incidents of physical violence with no reports of resulting injury, and whereviolence is often justified as a corrective measure if the woman had done something wrong

Physical and sexual: physical violence that is occasionally accompanied by sexual coercion

Severe abuse: frequent beatings resulting in debilitating injuries or psychological consequences and wherewomen live in fear.

Conflict arena. A major source of conflict in households, reported by both abused and non-abusedwomen, was negotiating money from their partners. Tanzanian men and women believe that it is a man’sresponsibility to provide financially for the family. The assumption among women whose partner does notprovide financially is that he spends money on alcohol or other women. Women, therefore, entered intopaid work out of necessity. Among women who experienced moderate physical violence or no violence,their engagement in paid work generally involved quiet negotiation with their partner, or negotiation tookthe form of calm persistence. Women who experienced severe abuse were actively engaged in employmentand did so regardless of their partner’s wishes. These women expressed the opinion that whether or notthey earned money conflict in the household would continue, so why not earn an income!

Reduced aggravation. This study did not find women’s paid work directly leading to increased episodes ofviolence. Nor were there cases of women’s earnings being appropriated by their partner as has been foundin several South Asian settings. Income among abused women, however, did not necessarily strengthentheir fallback position in terms of being able to negotiate for the violence to stop or even to leave the violentrelationship. Instead, women who experienced severe abuse lived autonomously from their partner.Despite paid work not resulting in greater household decision making or women’s sexual empowerment,their access to money did have a positive effect on their lives and reduced one major source of conflict andtrigger for violence – that of negotiating money from men.













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Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry into Paid Work: Recent Evidence from Norway | Explore Taylor & Francis Online




Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry intoPaid Work: Recent Evidence from NorwayFeminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Marit Rønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød

Universal parental leaves with job protection and earningscompensation increase women’s attachment to the labormarket, but very long leaves may have negative consequencesboth at the individual and at the societal level. Some scholarshave therefore argued that generous family-friendly policies maybe counterproductive in achieving one of their main goals,gender equality. Based on recent Norwegian experience, MaritRønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød ask whether it is possible tooffset the potential negative effects of long parental leaves onwomen’s employment by targeting policies at fathers and makingformal daycare cheaper and more easily available.

Norwegian family policies. In Norway, parents have beenentitled to a full year’s parental leave with 80 percent wagecompensation or forty-two weeks with full pay since the early1990s. Even though parents have had the opportunity to sharethe major part of the parental leave since the late 1970s, very

few fathers used the leave. To encourage more fathers’ involvement, a father’s quota, reserving four weeksfor the father, was introduced when the parental leave was extended to forty-two (fifty-two) weeks with 100(80) percent pay in 1993. If not used by the father, these four weeks would be forfeited. Most additionalextensions, starting in 2005, have been designated as for fathers, resulting in a father’s quota of fourteenweeks in 2013. In 2014, the quota was reduced to ten weeks. During the 1990s, and particularly in the2000s, daycare availability has increased, and daycare prices have been reduced. Both reforms may have







mailto:?Subject=Gender-Equalizing%20Family%20Policies%20and%20Mothers%27%20Entry%20into%20Paid%20Work%3A%20Recent%20Evidence%20from%20Norway&Body=Gender-Equalizing%20Family%20Policies%20and%20Mothers%27%20Entry%20into%20Paid%20Work%3A%20Recent%20Evidence%20from%20Norway%0Ahttp://explore.tandfonline.com/page/bes/rfec-research-notes/21.1/art-3/

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encouraged mothers to start paid work faster after childbirth. However, another reform in the late 1990s,granting a cash benefit to parents who did not use subsidized care, may have worked in the oppositedirection.

Faster entry into paid work in the late 2000s. Rønsen and Kitterød investigate whether the trends inmothers’ after-birth employment reflect these policy developments using panel data from the NorwegianLabor Force Survey 1996–2010. This data makes it possible to follow the labor market adaptations ofindividual mothers over a period of up to eight quarters. Interestingly, they find that there was a turnaroundin entry rates in the mid 2000s when the new parental-leave and childcare initiatives gained momentum.Toward the end of the study period, mothers’ spells at home were significantly shorter than they had beenin the late 1990s and early 2000s. The results further show that the positive shift was primarily linked to full-time entries among mothers who were on parental leave, indicating that increased fathers’ involvement andeasier access to formal daycare facilitated a faster return to full-time work. Also, mothers not on leave, whohad probably not worked enough before the child’s birth to be entitled to paid parental leave including thefathers’ quota, seemed to respond to daycare becoming cheaper and more easily available by a faster entryinto full-time paid work.

Limitation and application. While the study cannot firmly establish whether the shortening of women’stime away from work is a causal effect of the latest Norwegian policy expansions, Rønsen and Kitterødargue that the joint initiatives of reserving a significant portion of the parental leave for fathers and makingdaycare cheaper and more easily available have been vital ingredients in the trend toward a faster take-upof paid work following childbirth. For policy initiatives to be accompanied by such attitudinal and behavioralchanges, it may be a prerequisite that the society be “ready for it.” When the father’s quota was firstintroduced, it was probably too short to lead to a major role reversal between mothers and fathers, but itmay have influenced how mothers and fathers, employers, and the general public thought aboutparenthood and equal sharing. Later, when the quota was extended, the society may have been moreready for a greater change in the gender division of paid and unpaid work. In addition to changing thestructural constraints for parents’ employment and childcare choices, the new emphasis on daycare for allchildren and more fathers’ involvement has also influenced public opinion and led to more favorableattitudes toward working mothers and nonparental care even for very young children.




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Sexual Prejudice and Labor Market Outcomes for Gay and Lesbians: Evidence from Sweden | Explore Taylor & Francis Online




Sexual Prejudice and Labor Market Outcomes for Gay andLesbians: Evidence from SwedenFeminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Mats Hammarstedt, Ali M. Ahmed, and Lina Andersson

There is a large literature on differentials in economic outcomesas a result of sexual orientation. Several studies have focused onearnings differentials due to sexual orientation in the US,Canada, and different European countries, and the results inthese studies are remarkably consistent. Gay men earn less thanheterosexual men while lesbians earn about the same, or evenmore, as heterosexual women. The same pattern also occurs instudies regarding employment.

The explanations for these results have been widely debated.One plausible explanation is that the employment and earningsof gays and lesbians are affected negatively by discrimination,but while researchers have been able to documentdiscrimination against homosexuals in the hiring process, little isknown about its role in the employment and earnings of gaysand lesbians. Mats Hammarstedt, Ali M. Ahmed, and LinaAndersson explore the extent to which employment

and earnings differentials due to sexual orientation can be attributed to sexual prejudice in Sweden.

Methodology. Homosexuals in Sweden were allowed to enter into civil unions in 1995. Homosexualindividuals who enter civil union and heterosexual individuals who enter marriage are registered byStatistics Sweden. Hammarstedt, Ahmed, and Andersson exploit this fact and define homosexuals asindividuals who are living in civil unions in Sweden. Heterosexual individuals are defined as married







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individuals. The authors have access to data from Statistics Sweden for all individuals living in civilunions and all married individuals in Sweden for the year 2007. They combined data from Statistics Sweden,which contain detailed information about demographic and human capital variables for all individuals in thesample, with information from a survey administered by the Swedish Institute for Public Health. Thesurvey documented public attitudes toward homosexuals in a nation-wide study conducted in twenty-oneSwedish counties in the late 1990s.

In their empirical analysis, Hammarstedt, Ahmed, and Andersson investigate the extent to which sexualprejudice is correlated with the employment and the earnings gap due to sexual orientation previouslydocumented in research from Sweden. They estimate linear probability models of the propensity of beingemployed. They also estimate earnings equations by ordinary least squares. The dependent variables arewhether an individual is registered as employed and yearly earnings. All estimations are carried out for menand women separately.

Findings. Hammarstedt, Ahmed, and Andersson arrive at the following conclusions: In line with previousresearch, they find that gay men are at an employment as well as at an earnings disadvantage compared toheterosexual men while lesbians do relatively well compared to heterosexual women. Looking at the impactof public attitudes on employment and earnings differentials due to sexual orientation, the authors findthat gay men are affected negatively by negative public attitudes toward homosexuals with regard to bothrelative employment and relative earnings. Lesbians are affected negatively by negative public attitudestoward homosexuals regarding employment propensities.

Research implications. Hammarstedt, Ahmed, and Andersson’s results provide new information about thepuzzle of labor market outcomes as a result of sexual orientation. Gay men are at a disadvantage comparedto heterosexual males in employment and earnings. Much of the evidence shows that thesedisadvantages are to at least some extent driven by discrimination. Thus, the authors’ results provideadditional support to the literature that has documented the existence of sexual orientation discriminationin the labor market. This calls for additional research in new areas such as discrimination against gay andlesbian employees and disparities in workplace satisfaction due to sexual orientation.













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Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality of Opportunity or Equality of Outcomes? | Explore Taylor & Francis Online




Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality ofOpportunity or Equality of Outcomes?Feminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Aniruddha Mitra, James T. Bang, and Arnab Biswas

Does gender equality in a society promote economic growth?Over the last two decades, a considerable volume of evidencehas shown that gender equality, particularly equality ineducational opportunities, employment, and politicalparticipation, has enhanced growth. However, when it comes toother outcomes, such as the fertility rate, the evidencesupporting a positive role for equality becomes murky. Thissuggests that measures that capture equality in opportunity maydiffer in their overall economic impacts from those that captureequality in outcomes. Aniruddha Mitra, James Bang, and ArnabBiswas explore the hypothesis that gender equality is indeedmulti-faceted. Then, using a sample of 101 countries for the five-year periods ending in 1990, 1995, and 2000, and controlling forother factors known to impact economic growth, they test theeffect of each aspect of equality on economic growth.

Two dimensions of gender equality: opportunities andoutcomes. Mitra, Bang, and Biswas focus on five commonly used measures of gender equality, namely, thelabor force participation gap, the percentage of women in parliament, the literacy rate gap, the secondaryenrollment gap, and the fertility rate. (Lack of reliable cross-national data rules out the use of the commonlyused gender wage gap.) Using an exploratory factor analysis that isolates the common variation in a groupof observed variables that can be explained by a smaller set of underlying factors, they find that thevariables can be summarized by two common factors: (1) equality in opportunities, which correlates highly







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with secondary enrollment rates and the inverse of the fertility rate; and (2) equality in outcomes, whichcorrelates with the percentage of women in parliament and the labor force participation gap. Thisdistinction is important because our analysis reveals that countries such as Bulgaria that rank highly in theopportunity dimension may not rank as highly in the outcomes dimension and vice-versa, Malawi being acase in point for the latter. This result shows that progress on the path of gender equality has not beenuniform on all fronts.

Cross-country dynamic panel regression analysis of these factors on economic growth rates shows that thetwo dimensions of gender equality differ in their impacts on economic growth. Improving the equality ofopportunity by one standard deviation increases growth by 1.30 percentage points, while improving theequality of outcomes by a similar amount improves growth by 1.19 percentage points. The impacts of equalopportunities and equal outcomes also depend on a country’s stage of economic and institutionaldevelopment. While greater equality in economic opportunities improves growth for developing economies,greater equality in economic and political outcomes improves growth for developed ones.

Policy should be contingent on a society’s stage of development. An important policy implication of theauthors’ results is that the focus of policy intervention to address the problem of gender inequality shouldbe contingent on the stage of development of a society. A developing nation will benefit more from policiesdirected at improving women’s economic opportunities early in life. Examples may include universal publiceducation and greater access to information about issues related to women’s health and fertility choices.Only once a country achieves a certain threshold level of development will policies that aim to ensure equaloutcomes boost growth. Further research in this area will investigate the role of formal institutions, such asdemocracy, and informal institutions, such as gender norms, in determining the differential impacts ofopportunity and outcomes in gender equality on overall economic performance.













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Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When Gender Matters | Explore Taylor & Francis Online




Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When GenderMattersFeminist Economics Print Email Tweet Share

Robert Rudolf and Sung-Jin Kang

A growing body of academic literature shows that individualsreturn to their inherent baseline level of happiness after mostmajor life events (for instance, works by Andrew Clark andcolleagues). This phenomenon is suggested to work throughchanges in aspirations and shifts in preferences and issometimes referred to as (hedonic) adaptation or the hedonictreadmill. Robert Rudolf and Sung-Jin Kang combine genderstudies with happiness economics to examine the question ofadaptation to major life and labor market events in South Korea(hereafter, Korea), a rather gender-unequal society. Korea waschosen for the study because although the country has shownspectacular economic development over the past decades,gender roles have shown themselves more resistant to change,placing Korea at the bottom of many international gender gaprankings.

Rudolf and Kang address three questions: First, does Koreanpeople’s happiness adapt to life and labor market events over time? Here the events studied are marriage,divorce, death of spouse, birth of first child, unemployment, and first job entry. Second, do women and menshow comparable happiness responses to these events? And third, does adaptation differ across gender?

Methodology. Rudolf and Kang use eleven survey years of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study(KLIPS), from 1998 to 2008. KLIPS is an ongoing longitudinal, nationally representative survey that tracks







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5,000 Korean households over time. By using panel data regression techniques (fixed effects) andcontrolling for a large number of potentially confounding factors, the authors are able to trace out theintertemporal happiness gains and losses from the aforementioned events. In an extension to the mainanalysis, the authors examine the importance of controlling for multiple simultaneous or near-simultaneousevents in the same regression model.

Main findings. Rudolf and Kang find significant gender differences in impacts as well as adaptationpatterns to major life and labor market events in Korea. Both women and men experience a boost inhappiness when getting married. Men remain on a higher happiness level throughout marriage, indicatingno or only partial adaptation. Women, on the other hand, return to their baseline level of happiness withinonly two years. Thus, the long-run happiness gains from marriage are unequally distributed across gender.This marital gender happiness gap is equivalent to an increase of annual per capita household income ofapproximately US$17,800 for men.

In line with the results found for marriage, men are found to suffer more from divorce and the death of aspouse. When a marriage breaks up, women experience a short negative effect in the first year after divorcebut quickly recover. Men, in contrast, experience a twice as strong negative initial effect and, whencontinuing divorced, never return to their wedlock level of happiness within the observed time frame(maximum ten years). Results on death of spouse also differ between women and men: While widowersshow statistically significant and negative effects until three years post-death of spouse and gradualadaptation thereafter, widows on average show no negative effects after their spouses pass away.

Rudolf and Kang further find that men suffer more from unemployment than women. They find nosignificant effects for birth of first child and first job entry. Results from the extension suggest that theinclusion or non-inclusion of multiple simultaneous events (such as marriage and childbirth, which oftentake place around similar phases of life) into the regression model matters; that is, a non-inclusion mightlead to biased results.

Research implications. This is the first study to show that the benefits from marriage can be largelyunequally distributed by gender, and more likely so in a gender-unequal society. Providing a betterunderstanding of the gains from marriage and divorce can help individuals in making better marriage-related decisions. Gendered norms and institutions prevalent in Korean society at the start of the twenty-first century are most likely the drivers behind Rudolf and Kang’s findings. Identifying the channels throughwhich particular norms and institutions impede equal benefits from marriage for women and men willrequire further research.











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