Does full time work affect childhood development?

Over the last generation, there have been an increasing number of working parents---a phenomenon that’s enabled more couples to be more financially comfortable, on the whole. But it’s come with the healthily and effectively raise children the way parents would like.

The last few decades have produced research on the effects of full time maternal employment on the behavior and achievement of children---but the conclusions of this research have been mixed, and largely reflected the prevailing ‘wisdom’ of the moment.

Understanding the perceptions of these effects, however, can tell us multitudes about the decisions that women are making today. In her seminar on “Stereotype Accuracy: Do College Women Miss the Mark when Estimating the Impact of Maternal Employment on Children’s Development?,” Professor Wendy Goldberg of UC Irvine discussed how college women frame the issue---and how accurate those stereotypes are.

She and her team found that most women overestimate the negative effects of motherhood on their children---i.e. they’d assume that working mothers would raise children with worse behavioral problems like aggression and depression, and that perform worse academically---and that women underestimate the positive effects: that having a working mother would provide a roll model as well as greater financial opportunities for her children, among others.

Accordingly, many mothers may seek to adjust their work lives accordingly, with part-time work or opting out entirely. The effect of this might be either a greater inclusion of mothers into the workforce, or a gender-segregation by jobs---particularly those who seek to advance after a break for childcare. Moreover, steady work reportedly offers the greatest mental and physical health benefits to women. Stereotypes regarding the negative effects of working mothers must thus be dispelled.

Of course, full time work is not a choice for many women and parents. Not all women have equal access to long-term, full time work, while women of disadvantaged economic backgrounds have even less flexibility. Thus more attention to paid parental leaves and subsidized childcare would help us get to a better place for all mothers, fathers, and children throughout society.

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How can mothers win? Ending the bias against caretakers.

As we’ve seen, both women and men face challenges reconciling work-life integrity. Usually, individuals are forced to adjust their own behavior: share household burdens, manipulate supervisors’ perceptions, or just opt out entirely.

What makes this whole balancing process harder is that caretakers suffer a particular bias at work. In her seminar last week on “Reducing the Caretaker Penalty: Norms, Laws, and Organizational Policy,” Stanford University’s Shelley Correll demonstrated how mothers, for example, are paid less than both fathers and childless women---nearly 5-7% less per child, in fact. But it’s difficult to overcome this because of two absurd and paradoxical societal perceptions:

• The assumption that mothers are less committed to their office work
• The normative view that mothers should be more committed to their children than their office work-and if they’re not, they’re bad people.

If mothers try to work their way out of the caretaker bias, they’re seen as selfish, arrogant, and dominant, and are penalized accordingly. Basically, mothers can’t win!

So can laws change societal norms? Professor Correll explains how, yes, they can not only provide punitive protections but also create more symbolic social consensus that implies what’s right and wrong.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees that have worked for over twelve months in an organization with more than 50 people the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. Just knowing about FMLA and other organizational leave policies positively affects how colleagues view mothers and other caretakers who take short leaves. Even a limited law that’s weakly enforced can promote gender equity.

If we enable workplace leave more reflexively, we can prep society for more openness, namely to the reality that all people---men, women, rich, poor---have and must honor responsibilities outside of the workplace. As Professor Correll put it, “work should be a verb, not a place,” and Best Buy’s management has pioneered Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), where employees are paid for results and output rather than the number of hours worked.

Convincing employers and supervisors of the merits of this kind of flexibility might be more difficult, because they may have legitimate concerns about their workforce. But these employers ought to keep two things in mind. One is that their own expectations of different groups---women caretakers, African Americans, etc---are often incorrectly biased, and these are biases that impede a fair and efficient workplace. Another is that more flexible work environments will mean longer-term retention of good workers.

Low- and hourly-wage workers and their employers face another challenge: their work is inherently based on time commitment, and already feels risky. Even if they can afford it financially, these workers don’t want to take FMLA because it will prejudice their employers upon return.

Accordingly, good laws are even more important in these cases, setting the norm for what is right.

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How do we fix the work-life balance for everyone?

Over the last generation, we've seen a lot of changes. These days, more than two-thirds of children have two parents that are working full time. Meanwhile, those parents are simultaneously responsible for elderly, babyboomer dependents---which cuts into their financial responsibilities as well as their time. Add on other vital hobbies, leisure, a social life, and other priorities, and we see that balancing work and life is getting more and more difficult.

This was the challenge that Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University addressed in her recent seminar on “Work-Family Policy in the United States.”

Some private companies have allowances for personal leave, but low-income workers, who wouldn’t be able to pay for supplementary help (like babysitters or nurses), don’t necessarily benefit from this. So there’s clearly a need for the public sector to get involved.

While the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, the United States does not have paid maternity leave. Some of the states that are considering laws of that nature---California, Washington, New Jersey, and Rhode Island among them---are the same ones that currently have Temporary Disability Insurance. TDI is a publicly funded pool of money (taken from a small amount of payroll tax) that provides about 55% of wages for employees that are temporarily unable to work for up to six weeks, and job protection upon their return. Of course, when the US Supreme Court mandated that TDI must cover maternity leave as well, no other states adopted it.

Some other options for assisting with work-life balance have been paid sick leave, flexible work hours (outside the 9-5 box), and assisted care. Currently, child and elderly care only exist in a very expensive private market, while middle income families are often eligible for tax credits. Lower income families receive some subsidies---and since the welfare reform of 1994, HeadStart programs have been expanded to care for younger children. But those programs still cover only 30% of eligible families due to a lack of funding.

So what’s the next step?

One big challenge is simply framing the issue. The feminist movement in the US has been reluctant to talk about family issues out of fear that doing so will hamper equality in the workplace.

Instead, Professor Waldfogel has proposed something different: speak more broadly of the importance of work-life balance for not just fathers and mothers---but for caregivers. And more broadly, for those who have responsibilities and personal priorities outside of work---a balance is important not just to one’s self, but to an employee’s health, sanity, and ensuing contributions to hir organization.

Frankly, the nature of work has changed in America, and not necessarily for the better. We value even the perception of quantity over quality; as Anne-Marie Slaughter rightly wrote, “more time in the office does not always mean more ‘value added’.”

While we rethink the work-life balance, we really ought to reconsider the work-work balance itself.

Is 'Opt'ing Out Even an Option?

Over the last year, Facebook Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg, has made a splash with her “Lean In movement,” which seeks to elevate the role of women in the professional world. In her book and preceding TED talk, Sandberg---a former VP at Google, and former Chief of Staff at the US Department of Treasury---has been trying to “keep women in the workforce...because I really think that’s” why we have so few women leaders. “The problem…is that women are dropping out.”

At the New York Times, Lisa Belkin had written a piece called the “Opt-Out Generation, about educated mothers who have left a career to stay home, usually to take care of children. (Statistically, the revolution was limited to an economically fortunate few). More recently, follow-up articles have talked about how the promise of home life didn’t deliver: how “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” but is having trouble reintegrating into the workforce.


In last week's WAPPP Seminar, Opting Out among Women with Elite Education: Evidence, Causes, and Societal Consequences, Professor Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School looks at how valid these views really are. She looks at national averages across different types of college-educated women, and finds that most opting out is concentrated among married mothers who are graduates of elite institutions like Ivy League universities. To the extent possible, Professor Hersch even looked at how a woman’s parents’ educational background affects their current decisions; and indeed, the more educated her parents, the more likely she stayed in the workforce.

Women are more likely to stay in the workforce if they have science and engineering background; if they have graduate degrees; if they are employed in management, science, or health (rather than service or blue-collar industries); or if they are not married to very high-earning men.

Of course, as Anne-Marie Slaughter famously argued, the pressures on all women, in lower income and upper-echelon circles alike, to focus more attention on their own family remain strong---maybe even biological. The option to have a better work-life balance ought not be limited to those of elite educations, backgrounds, and industries, nor should this only pertain to women. Women that are not able to pay for nannies and other surrogate caregivers are particularly in need of “opting out” themselves.

Some steps toward that include lowering institutional barriers to that work-life flexibility: increasing public funding and other access to childcare and family leave, through legal protection.

That's definitely a vital start. But a sad paradox is that many industries that have welcomed women over the last decades---from increasing their numbers to improving work-life balance---have supposedly lost their economic and social “prestige” at the same time, making even that hard-won progress seem incomplete.

So, even as we start to change institutions and policies, we've got to influence how people think of their work and colleagues as well.

When Daddy is CEO - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Man: David Ross, Assistant Professor of Management, Columbia University
The Talk: Like Daughter, Like Father: How Employees’ Wages Change When CEOs Have Daughters
The Question: Do people get paid more if their CEOs have daughters?

Daddy's little girl may be a boost to his workforce -- in Denmark, at least. Recent research by David Ross of Columbia University in the country suggests that when male CEOs have daughters, they tend to on average pay their employees more than if they have boys.

Why?

It's a thorny issue. Some people (including some who attended the seminar) may balk at the idea that men think more like women once they have daughters. But these are exactly the assumptions the study uses to conduct its research. Ross's intuition based on his own experience having daughters got him thinking that:

• When anybody has a child, they tend to start thinking about the well-being of others.

• This proximity matters when it comes to leading a group of employees

• When men in particular have girls, they may be more conscious of having to protect/care for someone's well-being -- a "nurture" effect that women tend to exhibit more often.

The results of the research back up Ross's claim: On average, men pay their employees o.4% more when they have daughters. What's more:

• This only happens when have their first daughter. It doesn't happen with subsequent children.
• People who are closer in proximity to the CEO - ie, higher rank in the company - also tend to get paid more than people who know the CEO less or are a lower rank.
• The age and education of the CEO don't really matter - the effect is the same across all groups.

The limitations of the study are many, however. Chiefly, can the Danish example be extrapolated to other countries where gender parity is worse, or where parents do not share the same burden of raising a child? What if the effect is actually negative - that is, daughters don't have an effect at all, but having a son actually makes CEOs pay employees less? And since the data only analyzes numbers, we can't make a causal claim by observing behavior: our evidence is at best circumstantial.

At the very least, Ross's research backs up the idea that the wage gap persists, and that seemingly innocuous variables like the gender of a CEO's child can make a difference.


*Photo Courtesy Smithsonian Magazine


Effie-Michelle Metallidis is a guest student blogger for the Women and Public Policy Program and Master in Public Policy first-year student at Harvard Kennedy School.