Family-friendly benefits and full-time working mothers’ labor force persistence

ABSTRACT

Family-friendly benefits are intended to help mothers balance rather than juggle work and family. Prior research assumes that family-friendly benefits have a similar effect on mothers’ persistence in full-time work across parity. However, there is evidence that the transitions to first-time and second-time motherhood are qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different experiences. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we investigate women’s labor force status (full-time, part-time, and not working) after both parity transitions among women who were working in the labor force full-time prior to the birth of their first child. We find that mothers often persist in the same labor force status after the birth of their second child that they held after the birth of their first child, but there is wide variability in labor force and parity pathways. In addition, a wider array of family-friendly benefits is associated with second-time mothers’ full-time work than first-time mothers.

RÉSUMÉ

Avantages favorables à la famille sont destinées à aider les mères à équilibre plutôt qu'à concilier travail et famille. Des recherches antérieures sur l'hypothèse que les avantages favorables à la famille ont un effet similaire sur la persistance dans le travail à temps plein sur la parité. Cependant, il existe des preuves que les transitions d'une première et deuxième maternité sont qualitativement, quantitativement, de même que des expériences différentes. À l'aide de la National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), nous examinons le statut des femmes dans le marché du travail (temps plein, temps partiel, et ne fonctionne pas) après la parité entre les femmes qui travaillent dans le marché du travail à temps plein avant la naissance de leur premier enfant. Nous constatons que les mères persistent souvent dans la même situation d'après la naissance de leur deuxième enfant qu'ils ont eu lieu après la naissance de leur premier enfant, mais il existe une grande variabilité dans la population active et les voies de la parité. En outre, un plus grand éventail d'avantages favorables à la famille est associé à la deuxième mère à plein temps de mères pour la première fois.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• family-friendly benefits
• labor force persistence

MOTS-CLÉS:

• La maternité
• prestations à l'ambiance familiale
• la persistance de la population active

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank John Reynolds, Paula England, Phyllis Moen, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Chardie L. Baird is an Associate Professor of Sociology, the Executive Director of the K-State Office for the Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering (KAWSE), and Spainhour Family Chair. Her research and teaching interests lie in the areas of youth and the life course, gender inequality, work and family, and social policy on gender, work and families. Her work appears in top sociological journals including American Sociological Review, The Sociological Quarterly, Sex Roles, Sociological Forum, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, and Sociology Compass. Her position as Executive Director of KAWSE allows her to apply her research expertise to enrich the everyday lives of women. KAWSE is charged with increasing the participation, retention, and advancement of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields at K-State and offers events for middle school students, high school students, undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty.

Stephanie W. Burge is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on two general themes. The first centers on the transition to adulthood, with an emphasis on gender differences in adolescents’ educational and career plans and their link to eventual attainments in young adulthood. The second area of Burge’s research focuses on long-term care for frail elders, with an emphasis on assisted living. She has examined factors that promote elders’ successful transition into assisted living and enhance residents’ subjective wellbeing, as well as investigated how admission and discharge policies in assisted living differentially impact residents with various care needs.

Notes

1 In line with past research, we used the label family-friendly benefits throughout the paper. We decided to do so because the focus of our paper is women’s parity transitions and the effects those transitions may have on their employment statuses. However, we want to be clear that mothers are not the only people who need these “work/life” policies. Women without children also have families. Many Americans are overworked (Schieman, Glavin, & Milkie, 2009) and the label “family-friendly” implicitly reinforces the notion that work organizations are entitled to “ideal workers” that are available to the job 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The label family-friendly benefits may also subtly imply that family is a “legitimate” reason for needing time off from paid work, perhaps more so for women than men, while other types of pursuits, such as leisure, are not legitimate.