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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Are women more moral than men?

Are women more moral than men?

There have long been the stereotypes of the “nurturing mother” and the “strict father”. But what does this mean in more real circumstances?

Jooa Julia Lee, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, recently presented some of her work, with David Tannenbaum of UCLA, on just this subject. In “Gender and Moral Decision-Making,” she looked at how women and their decisions are perceived in society.

Off the bat, there’s the idea that when a white man is “agentic,” he’s seen as assertive, authoritative, ambitious and, fundamentally, a leader. But when a woman is agentic, she’s seen as bossy, aggressive and emotional. Accordingly, when people think of competent managers, they tend to think of males and masculinity. Women, meanwhile, are expected to be “communal”: empathetic, gentle, and compassionate.

Lee wondered whether these associations are driven by the actual decisions that leaders make---particularly when there’s a moral conflict between doing what’s best for the greater good (utilitarian choices) and doing no harm (neutral, deontological choices).

After a series of simulations and psychological tests, they found that when individuals were asked to suppress their emotions, they were more likely to make utilitarian decisions; that cognitive and emotional processes are in conflict when moral decisions need to be made.

How does this affect perceptions of gender? Well, when told about a hypothetical Mayor Edward Jones making massive lay-offs, people saw him as a decisive, moral leader who could make the best decision for the city. But when the name was changed and Mayor “Elizabeth” Jones made those same lay-offs, she was seen as an immoral, bad leader.

Because of these biased perceptions, female utilitarian decision-makers are not given as many leadership positions. To overcome this, Lee suggests that women use the system while advancing what needs to be done: blend agentic and communal leadership styles by making the tough, utilitarian decisions that must be made, while also being empathic and building strong relationships.





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Under Pressure!

Papers, finals, job search, the holidays – the pressure of it all! I was hoping to learn in this seminar that being a woman would somehow improve my performance. What I did learn was not quite so straightforward, but still fascinating. Some experimental studies in recent years had found that in a mixed-sex environment, the pressure of competition improved men’s performance, but not women’s, and that women often opted out of competitive environments. Olga Shruchkov, Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, noticed something about those experiments. The “tasks” which subjects performed under competitive pressure were invariably math-oriented, like addition problems and mazes, and there was no range of performance quality, only right or wrong answers.

Shruchkov designed an experiment that would fill these gaps – a Boggle-like verbal task, a comparable math task and a difference between competitive pressure and time pressure. This experimental design was not only creative, but also rigorous, with relevant controls, task-consistency mechanisms and a whole range of variables to measure. The experiments replicated previous findings that under time pressure on math tasks men attained higher scores and had a higher propensity to select into tournaments.

The innovative experimental design also yielded important new insights. On verbal tasks under time pressure, women performed as well as men and had a similar propensity to enter competitions. In a verbal competition under time pressure, women did slightly better than men. Things really took off once the time pressure was lowered – women outperformed men on the verbal tasks under competition. On the math task with low time pressure, women and men performed similarly both with and without competition. Interestingly, giving more time for the math task doubled the number of women who elected to compete. So it’s not the pressure of the competition or inherent math abilities that were hurting the performance of women in earlier experiments – it was time!

Why did time help women so much more than the men? Making the competition about total points, not speed, allowed for a measurement of the quality dimension. A look at the kinds of words women were finding when given the time reveals an emphasis on quality – they made longer words and made fewer mistakes. The men, on the other hand, went for quantity of words and in the process lost points for misspellings and typos. Perhaps more women participated in the math tournament when they had more time, because it allowed them to check their calculations more thoroughly.

Professor Shruchkov was careful with drawing policy implications out of experimental results, but she suggested that take-home exams in math and science might help more girls excel in those subjects early on, which could get more of them interested in pursuing those careers. Personally, I am tempted to use the results to ask for a final paper extension right now! I wonder what Shruchkov tells her students when they try to do that. 

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.