by Dalton Conley (New York University & NBER) and Karen Albright (University of California, Berkeley)

It is a sociological fact that the sons and daughters of the same family often have very different adult socioeconomic outcomes.^[1] Much of the literature treats this differential simply as an effect of occupational segregation by gender or as an effect of various family constraints, particularly child rearing, that disproportionately impact adult women.^[2] While there is indeed considerable merit in both explanations, the substantial body of literature on the effects of psycho-social interactions within the family may also help to explain some of this phenomenon. We seek to extend the insights from this literature, in combination with the psychological and sociological literature documenting mothers’ role in the socialization process, in order to address the effect of maternal labor market participation on adult siblings’ educational and occupational outcomes.^[1] This approach extends the literature on maternal labor market participation in two significant ways. First, rather than examine on the effects of maternal employment during the offspring’s childhood or adolescence, we investigate the effects it may have on adult outcomes. Second, while most previous research on this subject has examined the effects of maternal labor market participation on the psycho-social and/or cognitive development of offspring without regard to gender differences, we focus our attention specifically on socioeconomic attainment as it may vary by offspring’s gender.

THE EFFECTS OF MATERNAL LABOR MARKET PARTICIPATION

There has been little effort to understand the effect of maternal labor market participation on children’s adult outcomes, particularly as they may differ by gender. However, considerable attention has been devoted to examining other effects of maternal labor market participation. There are two main threads in the sociological discussion about these effects. The first, which focuses on the debate surrounding the effects of maternal labor market participation on various aspects of children’s well-being during their childhood, is in many ways an extension of a much older discussion about the moral importance of a woman’s place within the home. The second, which examines the consequences of maternal employment on the division of household labor, is a discussion that has emerged only relatively recently, with the dramatic rise in women’s labor force participation rates.^[3] Much of this literature highlights the inequity between male and female responsibilities in the home, following Arlie Hochschild’s (1989) The Second Shift, which estimates that women who are employed outside the home also spend anextra month of 24-hour days annually on household labor, as compared to their male partners. Because this thread of the literature is not directly relevant to the present study, we focus only on the literature on the effects of maternal labor market participation on children in the following review.

The results from studies that examine the effects of maternal labor market participation on children’s well-being are mixed, due in no small part to the different ways that well-being has been conceptualized and measured.^[4] Results concerning children’s cognitive outcomes are arguably the most clear, with recent work affirming previous findings that maternal labor market participation during the first few years – particularly the first nine to twelve months— of a child’s life negatively effects cognitive development ^[5](Baydar & Brooks-Gunn, 1991; Belsky & Eggebeen, 1991; Brooks-Gunn, Han & Waldfogel, 2002; Harvey, 1999). However, much of this effect depends heavily on the quality of day-care provided for the infant; consistent and higher quality day care arrangements appear to strongly mitigate this effect (Belsky & Eggebeen, 1991; Burchinal, Ramey, Reid, & Jaccard, 1995; Youngblade, 2003).

Even with the mitigation of such cognitive effects, there is some evidence that children who are away from their mother for a significant amount of time during their first year of life may suffer a variety of difficulties with attachment (Belsky, 1988; Belsky & Rovine, 1988; Haskins, 1985; Vandell & Corasaniti, 1990). Further studies have examined other social difficulties, with varying results. Youngblade (2003) found that children, particularly boys, whose mothers had been employed outside the home during their first year of life demonstrated more social and behavioral difficulties, acting out more in the classroom and evincing less frustration tolerance. In socioeconomically disadvantaged families, however, maternal labor market participation may actually ease such difficulties. Fuller, Caspary, Kagan, Gauthier, Huang, Carroll & McCarthy (2002) found that, for poor girls, maternal labor market participation was associated with a lower incidence of aggressive behavior and inattentiveness, while Chase-Landsale et al. (2003) report improved mental health and behavioral adjustment in young adolescents (aged 10-14) whose mothers entered the work force from welfare.^[6] Others have argued that maternal labor market participation has relatively little to no direct influence on propensity for delinquent behavior^[7] (Hillman & Sawilowsky, 1991; Ven, Cullen, Carrozza, & Wright, 2001; Youngblut, Loveland-Cherry & Horan, 1993). MacEwen & Barling (1991, 1994; Barling, MacEwen & Nolte, 1993) make the distinction between maternal employment status and experience, arguing that while maternal employment perse has no consistent effect on children’s behavior, the way a working mother experiences her employment status does. If she regards her employment status negatively, then her children are more likely to experience detrimental social and behavioral effects.^[8] Similarly, Menaghan, Mott, Cooksey, & Jekielek (2000) suggest that children of mothers who must cope with poor job conditions and unstable employment are more likely to experience behavioral problems, due in part to the diminished intellectual, material and emotional support their mothers are able to provide.^[9]

Studies of the effects of maternal labor market participation on children have also focused on the child’s academic achievement. Here, too, the results are mixed. While a number of studies have found that maternal labor market participation negatively affects child achievement (Bogenschneider & Steinberg, 1994; Goldberg, Greenberger & Nagel, 1996; Harvey, 1999; Myers, Milne, Baker & Ginsburg, 1987), other studies report that maternal labor market participation has beneficial effects on educational achievement (Guo, Brooks-Gunn & Harris, 1996; Haveman, Wolfe & Spaulding, 1991; Muller, 1995; Vandell & Ramanan, 1992) or that it has no significant effects (Gottfried, Gottfried, & Bathurst, 1988; Gottfriend, Bathurst, & Gottfried, 1994; Horwood & Fergusson, 1999). Still others argue that part-time employment, rather than full-time employment or full-time homemaker status, is most likely to result in children’s educational success (Muller, 1995; O’Brien & Jones, 1999). The lack of consensus on the effects of maternal labor market participation on children’s well-being has led many to conclude that the effects of maternal employment must be examined within the larger context of parent, family, and child characteristics, as well as family and relationship dynamics, including the degree and quality of paternal participation (Hoffman, 1989, 2000; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994). Some scholars have pointed to the importance of the family’s socioeconomic position in determining the effect of maternal labor market participation on the child. Harvey (1999) finds that any detrimental effects of early maternal employment may be overcome by the benefits of increased household income, and suggests that early maternal employment may be more beneficial for single mothers and lower income families. Indeed, Fuller et al. (2002) show that gains in maternal labor market participation rarely affect child behavioral outcomes unless the family’s broader economic security also improves. Greenstein (1995) shows that the most socioeconomically advantaged children are able to overcome any disadvantage that they might have experienced because of maternal employment during their early lives. Others have found that mothers’ quality involvement with their children buffers any potentially damaging social and cognitive effects of maternal labor market participation (Moorehouse, 1991; Zauszniewski, Chung, Chang, & Krafcik, 2002; see also Amato & Booth, 1997, for a discussion of the relationship between intra-family processes and child’s well-being).

It may also be that the larger social context of gender norms reduces some of the negative effects of maternal labor market participation. In a study examining the changing demographic profile of employed mothers of pre-school children between 1960 to 1980, Eggebeen (1988) notes that the dramatic rise in the labor force participation of women during this period led to significant changes in the reasons why (and the likelihood that) a pre-school aged child would have a mother who worked outside the home. In 1980, employed mothers of pre-school children were more likely to have a higher level of educational attainment than had their 1960 counterparts, and to contribute a greater percentage of the total family income. Age and marital status were also less likely to be determining factors in their decision to work outside the home. Eggebeen (1988:156) suggests that the rise in the labor force participation of women was likely due to several factors, including “the striking shift in societal attitudes toward employed mothers that took place during the 1970s,” and an increasing propensity for women to be attracted to work either “for the nonmonetary benefits… which may include intrinsic satisfactions or rewards gained by doing the job itself, the social relationships with one’s co-workers, or the prestige or status associated with the occupation” or because “the additional income was seen as essential… to maintain a preferred lifestyle” in the devastating impact of inflation and the recessions of the 1970s on total household income.^[10] In the decades since 1980, the number of women, and mothers, employed outside the home has only continued to rise. Table 1, below, demonstrates the growth in labor force participation among specific populations of American women (sixteen years of age and older).

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Though definitive conclusions regarding the implications of this point can only be speculative at the current time, the increasing commonness of maternal labor market participation and the corresponding shift in gender norms among children regarding it make it possible to imagine that over time any remaining stigma from maternal employment will be lifted, thus significantly reducing any shame or oddness that children of working mothers may feel. For example, all of the children in a recent study stated that they believed mothers should work, though most felt that they should do so only during the school day (Trzcinski, 2002). Certainly, it is imperative that the effects of maternal labor market participation be examined with regard to the environmental conditions in which they take place, rather than treated as if they occur in a social vacuum. As Gottfried, Gottfried and Bathurst (1995: 139-140) argue:

A conclusion that may be drawn is that maternal employment per se is neither facilitative nor detrimental to parenting or children’s development… Rather, research indicates that maternal employment is embedded within a complex network of cultural, developmental, environmental, family and socioeconomic factors. In order to fully understand the role of maternal employment in parenting and children’s development these factors need to be taken into account.

FAMILIAL INFLUENCES ON OUTCOMES

Gender Bias and Differential Investment

Over the past few decades, a substantial amount of psychological and sociological research has examined the gender biases that tend to favor males over females in many families. In many cases these biases are explicit and hard to ignore. For example, a majority of Americans have reported that they would prefer their first child to be a boy and that, if they plan to have more than two children, they would like to have a predominant number of boys (Steinbacher & Ericsson, 1994). This preference for male children seems to be an especially father-driven phenomenon. In Gallup Poll surveys conducted in 2000 and 2003, 35 percent of women expressed a preference for a daughter Edwards (1998) finds that the declining ability of families through the 1970s to attain homeownership, a central middle-class identifier, explains the notable increase in young mothers’ labor force participation.

if they could have only one child, while 30 percent expressed a preference for a son. In contrast to this slight difference, males expressed an overwhelming preference for a son: 48 percent stated their desire for a boy, while only 19 percent preferred a girl (Dahl & Moretti, 2004). After children are born, preferential treatment for males often continues: Harris & Morgan (1991) found that fathers are more likely to have a higher level of participation with their children if they have sons than if they have daughters; fathers with daughters and no sons have the lowest level of paternal participation. However, daughters receive more attention as their number of brothers grows… [They] are not treated equally but they receive more attention from fathers than they would if they had no brothers (Harris & Morgan, 1991:540). Importantly, fathers’ strong preference for male children appears to have a substantial effect on numerous familial patterns involving both parents: Dahl & Moretti’s (2004) findings include that parents with girls aresignificantly more likely to be divorced than are parents with boys, women with only girls are much more likely to have never been married than women with only boys, divorced fathers are more likely to have their sons (rather than their daughters) living with them, and mothers who learn that their unborn child will be a boy are more likely to marry their partner before delivery.

Researchers have also documented differential investment patterns between families with sons and families with daughters. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, Lundberg & Rose (2002) found that housing expenditures are significantly higher for families with a male child rather than with a female child—in fact, such families spend almost $1200 more per year on housing than do families without a son. According to these data, families with boys also spend more on other investment-type costs, including things like health insurance, charity and political contributions (cultivating social capital and demonstrating more concern about the future), and books and toys.^[11]

Some sociobiologists have argued that differential parental investment by gender makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense. For instance, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis theorizes that high-status parents typically invest more in their sons than in their daughters, while low-status parents invest more in their daughters than in sons, because parents are trying to maximize their resources and their socioeconomic position in the hierarchy (Trivers & Willard, 1973). The hypothesis theorizes that because the reproductive success of males tends to be tied to their social rank, high-ranking males have a much better chance of mating with more than one female, while low-ranking males have less potential to produce many heirs than do their low-ranking sisters. Therefore, low-status parents of daughters will have more descendants –and, thus, a better chance of survival-- than will low-status parents of sons, so they are better off if they invest more in their daughters. For high-status parents, on the other hand, it makes more sense to invest in their sons than in their daughters. Because their sons are more likely to produce more descendants than will their daughters (women’s reproductive potential being less variable than men’s), investment in sons is a good way to secure their genetic continuation.

However, there are a number of problems with the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. More recent work has shown that, in contemporary America, gender biases within families are due less to biology than they are to the particular social and cultural forces. Freese & Powell (1999, 2001), for example, argue that the Trivers-Willard hypothesis does not, in fact, explain differential investment by gender, and point to other factors that are more critical to parental investment. These factors include the total amount of resources that parents have at their disposal, the number of other dependents competing for those resources, the level of parents’ education, and contemporary cultural norms regarding child rearing. Ultimately, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis appears to be a better fit for non-human populations^[12] or for less developed societies than it does for people in today’s Western industrialized societies, for whom high status does not have to be tied to reproductive success. In fact, in modern industrialized societies, too much reproductive success (i.e. too many children) can drain a family’s resources, which often translates into less success for that family’s offspring overall (Conley, 2004).

Given such debate, it is clear that differential treatment must be examined in the context of each particular family. As McHale, Crouter & Tucker (1999) have argued, problematic gender bias occurs only in families that have both the opportunity for differential treatment by gender (because they contain both sons and daughters) and choose to implement such treatment (usually when the father has traditional sex role attitudes). These two criteria certainly do not hold true for all families. When they do, however, it can make a substantial difference in the social experience of a family’s children over the course of their lives. For example, a number of researchers have reported that parents tend to restrict their sons less than they do their daughters, assign them fewer household chores to do, react with less hostility to signs of their emerging adolescent sexuality, allow them more independence, and criticize them less (Cowan, Cowan, & Kerig, 1993; Goodnow, 1988; Steinberg & Steinberg, 1994).

Further, extensive differences in fathers’ treatment of their daughters as compared to their sons have been documented. Fathers tend to spend more time with their sons, and report feeling both closer to and happier with them than they feel with their daughters (Lamb, 1986; Larson & Richards, 1994; Yeung, Sandberg, Davis-Kean, & Hofferth, 2001). Though this may be simply due to the fact that fathers can more easily relate to their sons’ experiences, fathers of sons also tend to be more involved with their children’s activities, including their schoolwork, than are the fathers of daughters (Lamb, Pleck & Levine, 1987; Morgan, Lye & Condron, 1988).

Mothers as Agents of Socialization

If research has documented a tendency for fathers to invest more time and other resources into their relationships with sons, mothers are generally assumed to give equal attention to boys and girls.^[13] This would lead to the conclusion that there is a net gain for boys. However, there is a substantial literature on the effects of maternal influence on gender attitudes and expectations which points to a pronounced maternal influence on girls.^[14] Indeed, various psychological and social-psychological theories have indicated the importance of mothers as socialization agents in their children’s gender role development (Arditti, Godwin, & Scanzoni, 1991; Blumer, 1981; Chodorow, 1978; Goldberg, 1994; Peters, 1994; Starrels, 1992), and significant associations have been shown to exist between mothers’ and daughters’ gender role attitudes (Boyd, 1989; Schroeder, Blood & Maluso, 1992; Starrels, 1992).

Given such findings, and given that mothers who are more educated and are employed outside the home often hold nontraditional gender attitudes (Hoff-Ginsberg & Tardiff, 1995; Spitze, 1988), it is perhaps not surprising that a number of studies have demonstrated the positive relationship between maternal labor market participation and daughters’ non-traditional gender role attitudes (Booth & Amato, 1994; Ex & Janssens, 1998; Herzog & Bachman, 1982). Other studies have also found similar results with children of both sexes^[15] (Gardner & LaBrecque, 1986; Wright &Young, 1998). As Ex & Janssens (1998: 172) note, “The least controversial and most repeatedly found result is that children of employed mothers, especially daughters, have more egalitarian and less stereotyped attitudes compared to children of unemployed mothers.” Unfortunately, however, such studies stop short at examining how such attitudes translate over time into educational and occupational outcomes in the adult sons and daughters of working mothers; thus, we know little about the differential effects of maternal labor market participation on brothers and sisters. A better understanding of this relationship will help to illuminate the processes of gender socialization and examine the structural constraints that women still face in the family, the educational process, and the labor market.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

The Study of American Families and the General Social Survey

To address the issues of the impact of maternal employment on gender equality within the family, we first analyzed national data from the Study of American Families, conducted in 1994 by the University of Wisconsin, in conjunction with the General Social Survey of that same year^[16] (Hauser & Mare, 1994). Module Six of the SAF-GSS asks respondents to identify their least and most economically successful living relatives. This module also asks for explanations as to why the most and least economically successful living relative occupies that distinction. The SAF-GSS data also provide the evidence of how differently respondents remember (or experienced) their childhoods, on dimensions ranging from parental ages to education levels.

We used these SAF-GSS data to analyze the impact of maternal labor market participation on gender equality within families. Sibling fixed effects models were deployed to examine three outcomes: whether or not the respondent completed a four-year college degree, his/her occupational prestige, and his/her income (not the total household income). In the education model, the control variables were only age and sex (relative birth position was controlled by age). All other relevant (that is, competing) characteristics are assumed to drop out of a within-family model. Other individual-specific factors like occupation and income were assumed to be causally downstream from education, and thus were not included. For the models predicting occupational prestige, the control variables were age, sex and education level. And finally, for the analysis of sibling differences in income by gender, we controlled for age, sex, education level and occupational prestige. For all three of these outcomes (college, occupational prestige, and income) we ran models for the entire sample and then separately for those families where the mother worked for pay for as long as a year while the GSS child was growing up (MAWRKGRW).

Descriptives, broken down by maternal labor force status, are presented in Table 2, below. On most fronts, the two populations look similar. However, there are two notable exceptions: race and age. There are significantly more blacks in the mother-in-labor-force category than in the mother-out-of-labor-force category. This is to be expected, as it reflects a long history of higher employment rates for black women. Also to be expected is the fact that the group with employed mothers is about 10 years younger, on average, than the group with mothers out of the labor force. This too reflects historical trends, particularly the increased participation of women in the formal economy over the course of the twentieth century (as noted above). We will return to these dichotomies in the analysis section.

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In-Depth Interviews

In order to obtain a textured portrait of siblings’ gendered inequality in American families, we also employed qualitative data. Because we were particularly interested in exploring how and why maternal labor market participation affects adult siblings’ outcomes, it was imperative to talk to actual siblings about their childhoods, their family relationships and their socioeconomic trajectories in in-depth interviews. From these interviews, we gathered data regarding the socioeconomic attainment of respondents, their siblings, and their parents. For the purposes of this paper, we define socioeconomic attainment strictly by level of education and type of occupation. Though we were also interested in income variation, we were unable to obtain sufficient reliable data on respondents’ income. However, our quantitative data allow for analysis of patterns regarding respondents’ income as well as their education and occupation; these data thus provide additional insights to our results regarding respondents’ education and occupation.

This study draws primarily on data about 112 individuals from 32 families.^[17] These individuals comprised a subset of respondents from a larger project in which interviews were conducted with 175 individuals from 68 families (see Conley, 2004). We focus on this subsample in part because we specifically oversampled atypical families (i.e., those containing twins, or one or more homosexual siblings) in the larger project, and we wished to mitigate any factors that might disproportionally affect our results in this paper. Even more important, we restricted our sample in order to focus solely on families that contained at least one child of each sex. Because the purpose of this investigation was to examine the differential effects of maternal labor market participation by siblings’ gender, we necessarily excluded families that contained only single-sex children (i.e., only two daughters, or four sons). These interviews provide a first pass at understanding complex social dynamics within the family and should be followed up by future researchers with large scale statistical analysis to confirm (or reject) the theories generated from this study.

The interviews were conducted with a snowball convenience sample of respondents. With one research assistant, we canvassed our own social networks to obtain starting points, asking acquaintances if they knew of siblings who might consent to being interviewed for the study.^[18] We began with these references, who were one step removed from us personally, and then branched out from there through the snowball method, asking each interviewee if she or he could recommend other sibling sets that might consent to be interviewed. Interviews lasted approximately two to three hours each, covered a wide variety of topics, and were semi-structured in nature. We allowed enough freedom so that respondents could follow tangents and new topics could emerge; maternal labor market participation was but one in a set range of topics that our respondents discussed.

Demographic Profile of In-Depth Interview Respondents

In our initial contacts and in our subsequent snowballing, we attempted to maintain age, class, nativity, race and geographic comprehensiveness. In this manner, we tried to maintain a convenience sample that was spread across social and geographic boundaries. Ultimately, however, we cannot know the sample’s representativeness and it cannot serve to draw inferences about the population distribution of the varied conditions and processes we observe in the sample. Though we can speculate that the processes we glean from the interviews might play important roles in the patterns we find in the large-scale data analysis, the interview data cannot be interpreted as evidence that the speculation is correct. That is a job for future researchers. However, the demographic profile of the subsample of respondents analyzed in this paper suggests that our qualitative data are good supplements to our quantitative data, though they are not an exact match.

The respondents that we interviewed are all adults, but represent a wide range of ages. The median age of respondents was 35.5. This figure is only slightly higher than the median age of the entire US population in 2000 (35.3); however, it is by definition younger than the median adult population, the relevant comparison since we sampled only adults (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001:1).^[19] The sample is also comparable to the national population on other demographic dimensions. 78.6 percent of the respondents identified as white; 11.6 percent as black and 7.1 percent as Asian. Latinos (2.7 percent) were underrepresented, due partly to the fact that we conducted our interviews only in English, which excluded a sizable portion of the Latino population from the snowball. Geographically, 44.6 percent of respondents grew up in the Northeast; 16.1 percent in the West; 11.6 percent in the South; and only 9.8 percent in the Midwest.^[20] Thus, our data under-samples Midwesterners and Southerners and over-samples Northeasterners.^[21]

The sex distribution of our sample mirrors the distribution in the general U.S. population almost perfectly: 51.8 percent of respondents were female and 48.2 percent were male.^[22] The sizes of the families that our respondents came from, however, were less representative, because we necessarily excluded not only families that contained only single-sex children, but also families that contained only [single] children, which is increasingly common in America. Thus, in this sample, 8.9 percent of respondents came from families with two children; 45.5 percent from families with three children; 17 percent from families of four; 8.9 percent from families of five; 10.7 percent from families of six; and 8.9 percent from families of seven or more children. (Though there were fewer very large families, we generally interviewed more siblings [though not all] from these families.)

In our sample of respondents, 59.8 percent of mothers were reported to have worked regularly while their children were growing up. Worked regularly implies a substantial period of consistent work at or near full-time status^[23], which typically resulted in an identity (in both the respondents’ and their mothers’ minds) as someone with a career or steady job. This was determined not only by direct questions about mothers’ employment (e.g., Did your mother work outside the home when you were growing up?

For how long? What kind of work did she do?), but also through other references to mothers’ work throughout each interview. Indeed, most respondents whose mothers worked regularly while they were growing up referred to their mother’s work in various ways as they discussed their childhood and/or adolescence (e.g., “I got in trouble at school, and they had to call my mother at work to have her come get me;”“Thank God my mother is a financial planner, because she really helped when I got into all that debt;”“I always thought my mother had an okay job, but I thought when it came to me, I would want something different for myself.”)

40.2 percent of respondents’ mothers did not work regularly while their children were growing up. Table 3, below, depicts the distribution of respondents by maternal labor market participation and by gender. This number of mothers out of the labor force corresponds closely to the General Social Survey data (years 1994, 1996 and 1998), in which 38 percent of the respondents report that their mother did not work regularly outside the home (variable: MAWRKGRW); however, the GSS uses the looser standard of “ever work for pay for as long as a year, while you were growing up.”

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Though the number of families with non-working mothers that we included is a close match to the national GSS data, the class status of the parents in our sample was higher than average for the US population. Nationally, about 34 percent of Americans held managerial or professional occupations in 2000 (US Bureau of the Census, 2002b: 4). However, in this sample 49.1 percent of respondents’ fathers held this type of jobs. Likewise, the respondent population was also employed in more prestigious occupations than the national average. Among the sibling respondents, an even fifty percent held managerial or professional jobs—46.6 percent of the female respondents and 53.7 percent of the male siblings.

As indicated in Table 3, 59.8 percent of our sample of respondents had mothers who regularly worked outside the home while the respondent was growing up. The majority of these working mothers were employed in the service industry (59.7 percent). Managerial/professional positions and sales/administrative support positions employed 13.4 percent each. Nine percent of working mothers worked in the farming, forestry, or fishing industries, while 4.5 percent were classified as operators or laborers. This distribution, and how it breaks down by gender, is depicted below in Table 4.

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RESULTS

Statistical Analysis

The analytic approach is straightforward. We present within-family regressions (family-fixed effects) of brother-sister differences in several outcomes: the likelihood of having graduated high school, the likelihood of having completed a bachelor’s degree, the likelihood of being employed at the time of survey, the occupational prestige of those employed and, finally, the total household income of the respondents. We first ran fixed effects models for all families, then for only those families where the mother worked for at least a year during the childhood of the respondents, and lastly for those respondents whose mothers did not participate in the labor force. The sibling fixed effect framework causes unobserved factors that vary between families—such as race, class, region, religiosity and so on—to be de facto factored out to the extent that they are stable over time. (Results presented come from linear probability models; results from conditional logistic regressions are similar.)

Table 5, below, shows the impact of gender (within families) on chances of completing high school. The national data indicates that women are more likely to complete high school than their brothers. However, when we break this analysis out by maternal employment status, it is among those families where the mother worked outside the home that the gender difference is the biggest: sisters have a five percentage point advantage over their brothers in the likelihood of finishing high school. Among those with non-working mothers, the difference is insignificant.

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When we move to the context of higher education, where parental investment and life choices are likely to play a much greater role, we find that among all families, girls are six percentage points less likely to complete a four year college degree than are their brothers. Among those with non-working mothers, the difference widens further: sisters are 10 percentage points less likely to receive a four year college degree when compared to their male siblings. However, among working mother families, they are statistically indistinguishable from their brothers. These data are depicted in Table 6, below.

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Examination of labor market outcomes initially suggests the same pattern of results. As Table 7 shows, women are three percentage points less likely to be employed at the time of survey in the population as a whole. Among those from working-mother families, the difference is insignificant, while among those from non-working-mother households, the difference is significant at four percentage points.

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Limiting our analysis only to those who are employed indicates that while women suffer from a one point deficit in occupational prestige as compared to their brothers, the earlier pattern does not emerge when the analysis is broken down by maternal labor force status. (See Table 8, below.) Indeed, the coefficient for female is not significant for either group, and an examination of the point estimates shows the opposite pattern—it is larger (more negative) among the sample with working mothers. This “non”-finding suggests that the more important gender-stratifying dynamics occur with respect to entry into the labor market among female respondents. Holding education constant, women with working mothers are more likely to enter the labor force themselves; among those who do, there does not seem to be a prestige gap in these data, at least as compared to their brothers.

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Lastly, Table 9 compares brothers’ and sisters’ income. In the population as a whole, sisters generally earn about five thousand dollars less than their brothers do. This figure drops by five hundred dollars among the group with working mothers. But it swells to over eight thousand among those with non-working mothers. Keep in mind that we are holding occupational prestige and education level constant in this analysis (in addition to family fixed effects). Thus, there appears to be an effect of lower pay for women for similarly prestigious jobs. While we are hardly the first to note such a finding, what is new here is the fact that this gap is even more pronounced among women who grew up in non-working-mother households.

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While fixed effects analysis is quite effective at eliminating all sorts of observable and unobservable heterogeneity from the data, thereby focusing our analysis on comparisons between brothers and sisters within the same family, the moment that we split the sample by a “between-family” variable such as maternal labor force participation, we are back to a problem of potential spuriousness. In other words, that split between working and non-working mothers may be acting as a proxy for other dichotomies within the data. Given our comparison of means, two immediately leap to mind: race and age, since both of these displayed different means when descriptives were broken down by maternal employment status. (Of course, there may be other unobservable differences between the two groups, but we cannot address those, by definition, without a valid instrument for maternal labor force participation, of which we can think of none that meet the exclusionary requirement of not affecting filial education or labor market outcomes.)

We could not reasonably split the sample by race, since there would be too few non-white families for a meaningful comparison. However, we could (and did) split the sample by age, as an alternative to the maternal employment dichotomy. Doing so produced a very similar pattern of results: the split by age of respondent (< 45 years old versus 45 or more years old) reproduced the same results in our within-family analysis as did the maternal employment split.25 This suggests that it could be that maternal employment status is acting as a proxy for generation. Unfortunately, given one survey year, we cannot factor out cohort from age (i.e. lifecycle) effects. So we are left with the following possibilities: (1) Maternal work status has no direct effect on the equality between attainment patterns of male and female offspring but rather the correlation between mother’s age and children’s ages generates a dynamic in which later born mothers were more likely to have worked and have had children in an atmosphere where gender equality was more pervasive society-wide. (2) Maternal labor force status does play an important role within the family in terms of socializing offspring and these happen to map onto changing dynamics of female labor force participation in society as a whole. This implies that maternal labor force participation is an important mediating variable in the society changes with respect to gender equity within families. (3) Maternal labor force participation is, in fact, the driving force (i.e. causally prior) to the changing nature of gender equality within families.

Since we cannot distinguish between these three (or other) possibilities with the GSS data, we sought to gain some insight through analysis of qualitative data gathered through our in-depth interviews. We now turn to these data, focusing first on the results for education and then on results for occupation.

Qualitative Analysis

Education

Analysis of our qualitative data both within and across families suggests that maternal labor market participation has an effect on adult siblings’ educational attainment. Because our main concern in this paper is to discern the patterns that emerge between siblings in working mother families, as compared to those that emerge between siblings in homemaker mother families, we present data on the dynamics within families in the tables below; data depicting dynamics across families are depicted in the appendix.

25 Results not presented; tables available upon request from the authors.

Our data indicate that families where mothers worked outside the home may encourage more equal sibling outcomes regarding educational attainment according to some measures. As shown in Table 10, below, at least one sibling of each gender earned a Bachelors degree in 63.2 percent of the working mother families in our sample; in 36.8 percent, every sibling in the family achieved this goal. In contrast, the same was true for only 53.8 percent and 30.8 percent, respectively, of families where mothers did not work outside the home.

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Table 10 also shows that the mean male-female sibling difference in years of schooling was greater in families with working mothers than in families with homemaker mothers. In both types of families, sisters spent more time in school than did brothers26; however, in families with working mothers, they spent slightly more. Daughters in families with working mothers were more likely than daughters of homemaker mothers to be the most highly educated sibling in their families (52.6 percent to 38.5 percent). They were also less likely to be the least educated sibling; daughters were the least educated in 15.8 percent of working mother families, compared to 23.1 percent of homemaker mother families. Further, a comparison of daughters’ educational data across families, depicted in appendix Table A1, indicates that daughters of working mothers in our sample attained a higher level of educational attainment than did daughters from families where mothers were not employed outside the home. For example, 88.9 percent of daughters of employed mothers received at least a Bachelors degree, while only 72.7 percent of daughters of mothers not employed outside the home did so. A full 27.3 percent of daughters of homemaker mothers failed to attain a Bachelors degree, while only 11.1 percent of daughters of mothers who worked outside the home failed to do so.

26 Sisters’ higher educational attainment in both types of families is not surprising. Nationally, a greaterpercentage of women graduate high school, attend “some college,” and/or earn their Associates degrees than do men (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004d). However, a greater percentage of males earn Bachelors degrees and postgraduate degrees than do females (although a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic females have at least a Bachelors degree than do their male counterparts; see U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004e).

The data for the educational attainment of male respondents in our sample suggest a different pattern for sons. As Table 10 shows, sons in families with working mothers were less likely than sons of homemaker mothers to be the most highly educated sibling in their families (26.3 percent to 46.2 percent). However, the two groups of sons were approximately equal in their likelihood of being the least educated sibling in the family: a male was the least educated sibling in 53.8 percent of homemaker mother families, compared to 52.6 percent of working mother families.

A comparison of sons’ educational data across families, presented in Table A2, helps to explain these results, and suggests that the pattern for sons is considerably more complex than it is for daughters. While approximately the same percentage of sons in both types of families failed to earn a bachelors degree (45.2 percent in families with working mothers, compared to 47.8 percent in families with homemaker mothers), the college attainment of sons of working mothers was almost double that of sons of homemakers (35.5 percent to 17.4 percent). However, this pattern was reversed for postgraduate^[24] education: the attainment of a postgraduate degree of working mothers’ sons was 19.3 percent, compared to 34.8 percent of homemaker mothers’ sons.

Occupation

As with educational attainment, analysis of our qualitative data both within and across families suggests that maternal labor market participation has an effect on adult siblings’ occupational attainment. We gauge occupational attainment by analyzing which sibling(s) held occupations that were classified by the U.S. Census Bureau to be professional/managerial (referred to in the tables below and in the appendix as P/M).^[25] Though this measure is somewhat crude, we believe it is the most systematic way to approach the comparison of siblings’ socioeconomic status for the purposes of this paper. As the proper measurement of SES is a topic of considerable (and ongoing) debate in the social sciences, we must leave it to future researchers to employ a more complex comparative method in their analyses.

Our data for occupational attainment suggest that sons and daughters of families in which mothers worked outside the home are more likely to experience more equal outcomes as adults. These data are depicted in Table 11, below. In almost half (47.4 percent) of working mother families, at least one sibling of each gender held an occupation categorized as professional/managerial, but the same was true for slightly less than a quarter (23.1 percent) of homemaker mother families. Further, the mean male-female difference indicates that, among families with homemaker mothers, brothers were somewhat more likely than sisters to hold professional/managerial occupations as adults, while in families where mothers worked outside the home, the difference was smaller and its direction was reversed; daughters of working mothers were more likely than their brothers to hold professional/managerial positions, but only slightly.

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Daughters from families with mothers who worked outside the home were considerably more likely to hold professional/managerial positions than were daughters of homemakers. As Table 11 shows, at least one female sibling was employed in such a position in 78.9 percent of working mother families, while the same was true in only 46.2 percent of homemaker mother families. Comparing data across families similarly suggests that daughters of working mothers are more likely to experience a higher level of occupational success. Table A3 shows that female respondents who came from families where mothers worked outside the home were much more likely to have managerial/professional occupations than were those from families where mothers did not work outside the home. Indeed, the difference is substantial: women with working mothers were more than twice as likely to be managers/professionals (58.3 percent to 27.3 percent). Conversely, female respondents were twice as likely to not work outside the home as adults if their own mothers had been out of the labor force: 27.3 percent of daughters of homemakers were themselves not participants in the labor force as adults, while only 13.9 percent of daughters of working mothers did not participate in the labor force as adults.

Similar to the patterns observed in siblings’ educational attainment, sons of working mothers in our sample experienced less occupational success than did the male offspring of homemaker mothers, according to the measure we employ here. The difference in percentages is quite small, however: In 69.2 percent of families where the mother was not employed outside the home (compared to 63.2 percent of families where she was), at least one male sibling held a professional/managerial occupation as an adult. Our data across families indicates this, as well. As Table A4 indicates, sons of homemakers were more likely to hold professional/managerial occupations than were sons of employed mothers (60.9 percent compared to 48.4 percent). Further, sons of women who worked outside the home were almost twice as likely to not be in the labor force as adults than were sons of women of who did not work outside the home.

Gender Investment and Gender Role Expectations

These data suggest three patterns. First, families with mothers in the labor force are more likely to produce sons and daughters with relatively equal levels of educational and occupational attainment than are families with mothers who were not in the labor force. Second, daughters of working mothers are more likely to be highly educated and to hold professional/managerial occupations than are daughters of homemakers. Third, patterns for sons are more complex than they are for daughters. While sons from working mother families in this study were more likely to earn a Bachelors degree than were sons of homemakers, this pattern did not hold with regard to postgraduate attainment; instead, sons of homemakers were more likely than were sons of working mothers to earn a postgraduate degree. Sons of homemakers were also more likely than sons of working mothers to occupy professional/managerial positions. Our interview data suggest that two separate, yet mutually reinforcing, dynamics undergird these findings. Indeed, the observed patterns can be better understood if we consider them in light of the effects of differential gender investment and of differential gender role expectations.

Resources in families with working mothers were more likely to be more evenly distributed between males and females than were the resources in families where mothers did not work outside the home. The resources in question could be financial, educational, or emotional; frequently, they were all of these. As one female respondent from such a family put it: “Both my parents helped me so much with school, in every way. They went to all my activities, they helped me with my work, they were just there. I never, ever thought that I shouldn’t do something, and especially not because I was a girl. I was their child before I was one [sex] or the other.” Similarly, Annette, described her mother, an accountant, as having

…lots of interest in what was going on with us [Annette and her two brothers] at school, always. I never felt like there was a difference; she and Dad both always treated us all the same. And it was always really important to both of them that we all go to college. In fact, there was really no question at all that we would go; I don’t think we even had a choice!

Annette’s younger brother, Zach, confirms Annette’s memory:

I think Mom was always really gung ho for all our school things. God, I remember being dragged to all of Annette’s plays, and having just no interest in them at all, but Mom and Dad were both there, smiling along, and we just had to do the same. Then again, Annette got dragged along to all my junk, too. No unequal treatment. And when it came to college, it was always very clear, ‘there is money for you, and there is money for you, and there is money for you.’ They always said that they’d started a college fund for each of us when we were born, and if we wanted that money, there was no other way to get it other than to go to college.

Daughters of working mothers, then, were more likely to be provided with the resources to attain educational success than were daughters of homemakers; their educational aspirations were more often treated (both explicitly and implicitly) as worthy as their brothers’ were, which often led to more similar occupational outcomes. However, sometimes mothers who were employed outside the home explicitly encouraged their daughters to succeed academically even more than they encouraged their sons. Nancy, now a lawyer, remembers her mother pulling her aside one afternoon:

She said, you know, ‘we have to talk.’ I had just gotten my report card, and it really wasn’t that terrible, but she said, ‘look, let me tell you why this is bad, why you should be more concerned about this.’ And she laid out this whole argument about how I was going to have a tougher fight in my life than [my brother] just because I was a woman, and at the end of the day it was up to me to make something of myself. You have to remember, this was all very relevant in her life, too, because she had had to get a job and work her way up in the ‘50’s, when my father died, and things had been really hard for her. So, it wasn’t like she didn’t encourage my brother, too; both of us were always sort of expected to do well and make something of ourselves, and we did. But, she was just making the point that I had a special role, a special responsibility, and that I shouldn’t think it would be all right to screw up, even a little bit. And after that report card she kept after me; she would always ask and check and remind me. And I have to say that it made a difference: I wound up doing very well.

In the same vein, Dorothy, a business manager, describes similar, if somewhat less intense, instruction from her mother:

I remember when I was a little girl, planning what I was going to be when I grew up, and of course at a certain stage you just want to be like your mother. Mine was then working as a secretary for a doctor, and I thought that was so glamorous. I remember she wore these little slim pencil skirts every day, and high heels. And so I was playing secretary, with my friend, who was also playing a secretary –we were playing two secretaries but there was no doctor—and my mom came in and saw us. And later she said to me that there were a lot of jobs that were better out there than a secretary’s job, and that the only way I could be sure to get one of those was to be sure to get my education, and that that would make her very proud.

A common undercurrent in the narratives of children of working mothers was that both sons and daughters were expected to be able to take care of themselves, both as children/adolescents (when their mother was at work), and as adults. As Dave, now a research analyst, stated: “No two ways about it; we all had to chip in. No one got a free ride in our house-- there weren’t any free rides to give out; we all had to contribute, and we all did, and we all do now [as adults], too.”

This was especially true in families where mothers had to work, particularly in the wake of divorce or a father’s death. Such families often experienced financial difficulties after such an event, and thus a relatively equal pressure was often placed on each child to contribute to the household, even if that contribution was sometimes shaped by gendered expectations. Sometimes these expectations led females toward greater educational attainment (and, by extension, occupational attainment), while leading males away from it. For instance, Eli, a carpenter who did not go to college, recalled how the household responsibilities were neatly divided into gendered categories, which likely explains some of his own educational and occupational trajectory:

My sister was the ‘inside person.’ She did the house stuff, cleaned things, cooked. I didn’t do any of that; it was my job to do the ‘man stuff,’ so I did the outside things, and started working pretty early to help bring in some money. I never did really get into school after that; it just seemed like a waste of my time. But Deb [his sister] stayed more on top of her schoolwork; that was more inside stuff, anyway.

Usually, however, the main effect of the expectation of equal contributions was that it simply prohibited extra privileges from being bestowed on sons at the expense of daughters. And, importantly, sons from these families learned not to expect differential treatment, typically rejecting the notion that they were better than their sisters. Rob, a graphic designer, captured this well:

Maybe I’m a ‘new man,’ but I truly don’t think that I should be treated any better than a woman should, and I’m not… just saying that. I just wasn’t brought up like that; my mom could do everything, and she did. And, therefore, so can my sister and my brother and I. I just think it’s more up to the individual, what the individual has inside him or herself, what he or she can do.

In contrast, families where mothers did not work outside the home were more apt to devote more of these resources to sons’ educational attainment, frequently at the expense of daughters’. Our interviewees described such differential gender investment as coming from both mothers and fathers. For instance, Claudia, now a social worker, recalled that her father lavished hours of attention on her younger brother, Tim, helping to build his confidence in math and science:

Every night—well, almost every night—they would just be sitting there in the kitchen, going over [Tim’s homework]. And I know that Tim didn’t love it at first, because it obviously took a lot of time. But you couldn’t really put Dad off with stuff like that, so he sat there and did it. And, you know, over time, it stopped being a struggle for him; he started being really good at it, and they went way ahead of where Tim’s class was. By, I’d say, the end of tenth grade, Tim was like a superstar in math, and he ended up completely acing the SATs.

While Tim would go on to Princeton, thanks in large part to his excellent performance on the SATs, and later attended graduate school, Claudia did not receive frequent tutoring from her father, and later attended the local state college. Indeed, not only did she fail to receive tutoring from her father, her own academic interests often received criticism instead of encouragement:

With me—with me, it was different. [Dad] was pretty old fashioned, even though I’m sure he would never admit that himself. But the things I was interested in in school, like writing and English and things like that, he thought were just soft. He got on me too much; he kind of made fun of me about it. And it really hurt my feelings, I guess. It made me pull away from him, but it also made me pull away from school. Not the whole way, but I definitely never thought of myself as smart, like I think Tim is.

While Claudia and Tim’s mother was described as relatively absent from this dynamic (as Claudia said, “I don’t know that Mom ever thought much about what was happening, and I’m sure that she didn’t think it was a bad thing—I think she more or less thought it was nice that Dad was getting involved with Tim’s school stuff”), other homemaker mothers were described as actively encouraging of their sons’ educational attainment, especially in comparison to the attention they gave their daughters’. Gina, a physician’s assistant with an Associates degree, recalled her mother’s priorities in the following way:

It was Gary [Gina’s older brother], Gary, and then Gary. Gary was the star in our family, hands down. Really, my mother lived for him, and she went out of her way to get him what he needed. We [Gina’s sister, Kerry] always thought that maybe it was because Gary just looked so much like [their mother’s father]. He was like the spitting image. But she was like his personal cheerleader in everything… and then it sort of confirmed how great he was when he wound up becoming a dentist. But, I mean, that was no accident—what else could have happened, she paid for his college and then for dental school!

At least some of this differential investment in education appears to be rooted in the belief that males would need better occupations in order to earn higher incomes, because as adults they, not their sisters, would be the sole (or, at least, primary) breadwinner of their family. Clark, a high-ranking executive for a pharmaceutical company whose parents paid for his college education but for only two years of his sister’s,^[26] defended this logic:

Ultimately, do I feel funny that my parents helped me more than my sister? Do I feel that it was unfair? No. No, I do not. You have to look at it the other way: it’s Lynn [his sister, also a homemaker] who doesn’t have to work. It’s not like I think she is living the high life, I’m just saying that it’s not particularly easy to get up and every morning and go to work. And it’s also more the point that everyone has a job to do, especially if you want to bring kids into the world. Mine –and Lynn’s husband’s for that matter—is to earn some money for my family. This I accept. This I will do. This I do, even when I don’t feel like it. And you’ve got to make choices. My parents had to bank on one of us. They put their money on me. And in the society that we live in, I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say that I think they made the best choice.

Not surprisingly, the expectation that males, not females, are more likely to be the sole (or primary) breadwinner in the family was much more likely to be held by respondents who came from families where the mother did not work outside the home.

Indeed, Clark’s observations highlight the ways that gender role expectations contribute to the patterns observed in our data. Mothers’ relationship to the labor market during respondents’ childhoods often significantly shaped respondents’ expectations of “how women should be,” as one interviewee put it. This was particularly the case with female respondents, who often commented on this directly, but the impressions of having a mother who worked outside the home –or didn’t—also appear to have a strong impact on male respondents’ conceptions of appropriate behavior for men and women.

Indeed, our data suggest that the greater self-esteem that employment outside the home often provided mothers had significant effects on their children, both indirectly, in the belief that they could positively impact their children’s development, and directly, in their efforts to do so and the example that they provided for their daughters and sons alike. In the words of Jenna, a marketing director whose mother was a schoolteacher while Jenna was growing up:

Oh, there was never any question for me that I would work when I was an adult, [that I would] have a career. I mean, it wasn’t like anyone said I had to or anything, but it was just sort of the way things were. You know, women worked, too, and that was just that. It wasn’t even an issue. The only issue was to figure out what I wanted to do, not if I wanted to do anything. And I saw my mother enjoying working, so why wouldn’t I want to have that, too? What am I going to do, stay home all day and eat bon-bons?

Emily, a registered nurse and the daughter of a beautician, put it even more succinctly: “Well, duh. What else was I going to do if I didn’t work? I wasn’t going to just sit around waiting for my prince to come.” Similarly, comments made by Mark, whose mother became a seamstress after his father died in a car accident, suggested that her example had affected his own way of looking at women:

I can’t imagine ever looking down on a woman who wanted to work. My wife works, and she works hard. I respect that. It would be very strange to be with a woman who just wanted to sit home all day and not pitch in. I think it would feel odd to be the sole support; I think it would just be uncomfortable—in a lot of different ways, in fact.

Indeed, the implicit –and often, explicit—message from working mothers to their daughters (and sons) was that not only was it acceptable for women to work outside the home, there were many benefits to be had by doing so. This was particularly the case in families with more financial resources to draw from, and/or mothers who enjoyed their work. In these cases, daughters and sons alike often felt inspired by their mother’s example. To Laura, a photographer, her mother’s job as a journalist provided not just additional income, but also an outlet for creative and intellectual expression:

I really look up to her [mother], you know. She drove me absolutely crazy as a teenager, of course, but I respected her even then. And now that I’m out there [in the adult workforce] myself, I just respect her more. She is a great example of a strong woman, you know? She held it all together at home, and God knows my Dad wasn’t always the easiest person ever, but she was also doing her thing and making her mark [in journalism]. It wasn’t the biggest mark ever, but it was her mark, and it was obvious what it did for her—sometimes it was a hassle and all, but overall, it just gave her a kick.

Laura’s brother, Daniel, now studying to be a chef, echoes his sister’s belief that his mother’s employment was a positive influence:

Man, Mom loved that job. We used to ask her if she could find out who ‘Deep Throat’ was for us; she would come back from covering some local event and tell us that it was, say, the grocer or someone around town that we knew. Her enjoyment of what she did really rubbed off on us, too; I think we all sort of followed our dreams because she did it. Dad was less… joyous about it all, more traditional, I guess. I definitely think that Mom’s why I’m following this dream [to be a chef].

In cases where mothers experienced less pleasurable, even adverse, occupational environments–such as jobs that consisted of monotonous, uninspiring work, where initiative was not valued or encouraged and compensation was relatively low— or when they had to enter the labor force unwillingly –after a divorce, or the death of a husband-- female respondents often expressed admiration for their mothers, describing them as “brave,”“strong,” and “taking hits for the team.” Many indicated that their mothers’ experience inspired them to concentrate on their education, so that they might be in a better position as adults. As one respondent put it:

My mother showed me that as women we have to be strong. And that we are strong. And I knew that I could do anything I put my mind to, eventhough it might be hard. And she also showed me that I was probably going to have to do it myself, because there was no one else who was going to do it for me.

If many daughters of working mothers felt empowered by their mothers’ example, and typically equated that with their own educational and/or occupational attainment, daughters of homemakers did so much less frequently. Those who were homemakers themselves, or those who worked but were relatively uninvested in their professional lives, also frequently cited their mother’s example as the inspiration for their own choice of the proper role for mothers. For instance, Susan, who works part-time at an antique store but is home everyday by three o’clock to welcome her children home from school, linked her own emphasis on family to her mother’s example:

After doing a lot of thinking about it, I realized that the most important thing is to be there for my kids. I know that I got so much out of my mom being home with me, and I really want to be able to give that back. So I decided not to work full-time… Keith [Susan’s husband] supports me in this, although of course it would be nice to have more money. But we both think it’s better, in the long run, to have one person whose job it is to earn the money, and then the another person whose job it is to do the other kinds of work.

Women whose mothers did not work outside the home were also more likely to describe childhoods in which they were encouraged not to show up the boys. Renee, an administrative assistant at a hospital, remembered:

My mother and I were always a little out of sync. In eighth grade, I remember I had to get glasses, and that same year, I won the district spelling bee. And that was really without even trying, I have to be honest with you. But my mother, you could tell, she was worried that her little girl was going to be a nerd. And this was a woman who was a former beauty queen herself, and very popular with the boys. She kept telling me how boys weren’t going to like me if I was smarter than they were.

In contrast, many male respondents typically remembered both their fathers and their homemaker mothers as encouraging their pursuit of stereotypically male activities. For some respondents, this meant sports, as with Alex, whose parents never missed a single football game in all four years of high school, even though he only played about half the time. (His two older sisters, however, did not benefit from the same attention, particularly from their father: though each played field hockey in high school, and the younger sister in particular was quite good, their parents attended their games only infrequently.) For other respondents, it meant encouragement and investment in a successful career. In Joshua’s case, this meant becoming an engineer, “just like my dad.” Joshua ultimately earned his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering without having to “work at a real job a day in his life,” according to his sister, Jane. His parents, pleased that he was following in his father’s footsteps, provided all the money he needed until he was firmly established. Perhaps tellingly, Joshua did not indicate surprise at such generosity; while he expressed appreciation for it, it was not unexpected: “Both my parents have wanted me to [become an engineer] for a long time. So, you know, I’m happy, and they’re happy. Everyone gets something out of the investment.” Jane, having struggled to find a professional niche for herself since she got out of college a few years ago and somewhat resentful of the ease at which Joshua was able to access his own “ready-made” professional career, was understandably less sanguine about the arrangement.

DISCUSSION

The results of this study suggest a number of patterns in the relationship between maternal labor market participation and adult siblings’ outcomes, lending support to the hypothesis that, rather than having no direct effect on the equality of male and female offspring’s adult attainment, maternal labor force status does indeed play an important role within the family in terms of socializing offspring. Analysis of our qualitative and quantitative data indicate that siblings who grew up in families with working mothers have more equal educational and occupational outcomes across gender than do siblings who grew up in families with homemaker mothers. While by some measures our data show a greater difference in the number of years spent in school between sisters and brothers whose mothers had worked outside the home (as compared to sisters and brothers whose mothers had not worked outside the home), which might seem to indicate a greater educational inequality between these siblings, we argue that the number of years of schooling is less important to siblings’ future occupational success than the degree attained. This is particularly so with Bachelors degrees, a common threshold for socioeconomic success. Using attainment of Bachelors’ degrees as our educational measure, our data show that adult siblings’ outcomes were more equal in families with working mothers than in families with homemaker mothers. Similarly, measuring occupational success by siblings’“professional/managerial” status shows more equal outcomes for adult brothers and sisters whose mothers worked outside the home.

However, more equality between brothers’ and sisters’ outcomes meant different things for the male and female respondents in this study. For women, the pattern was relatively straightforward: Daughters of working mothers attained a higher level of educational attainment (at all levels) than did daughters of homemaker mothers. The same pattern was true for the measure of occupational attainment that we employed: daughters of working mothers were much more likely to hold professional/managerial occupations than were daughters of homemaker mothers. For men, the pattern was more complex. A greater percentage of sons of working mothers attained Bachelors degrees than did sons of homemaker mothers, but a greater percentage of homemakers’ sons went on to earn postgraduate degrees than did sons of working mothers. Further, sons of homemakers were more likely to hold professional/managerial occupations than were sons of working mothers.

As discussed above, our interview data suggest that these results can be at least partly explained by differences in gender investment patterns and gender role expectations between the two types of families. Families with working mothers typically distributed their educational, emotional, and other resources more evenly between sons and daughters than did families with homemaker mothers. (This often included the expectation that children of both genders would contribute to the household, which prepared both males and females well for adulthood.) In “working mother” families, daughters’ and sons’ educational and occupational aspirations were often treated as similarly worthy. In some cases, daughters benefited even more than did sons, either because their mothers gave them a bit more direct encouragement to achieve, or because of gendered role expectations: when both children were expected to contribute to the maintenance of the household, it often fell to daughters to do the “inside” chores, while sons often had more responsibility for the “outside” chores. Dividing the spheres of boys’ and girls’ expertise in this way sometimes had the unintended result of encouraging behavior in girls that was less rambunctious, and more easily translatable to scholarly pursuits (e.g., reading, etc.), while boys’ physical responsibility sometimes placed them in a sphere far removed from activities that might encourage educational achievement.

Both sons and daughters of working mothers also reported learning, through their mothers’ example, that women could receive a great deal of satisfaction from working outside the home (particularly in families where mothers’ didn’t “have” to work) and/or that women had a great deal of strength (particularly in families where mothers “had” to work, and held positions that were less rewarding). In the latter cases, daughters in particular often reported feeling inspired to study hard so that they might be able to get “better” jobs than their mothers held; sometimes their mothers also encouraged them to do this.

In contrast, in many families in which mothers did not participate in the labor force, more resources were devoted to sons, often at the expense of daughters. Not surprisingly, such families often made it possible for their sons, rather than their daughters, to receive postgraduate education, by helping them financially, encouraging them to do so throughout their lives, and so on. Both fathers and mothers contributed to this pattern of differential gender investment, at least partly on the assumption that educational and/or occupational attainment was more necessary for sons than daughters, since they expected sons to become the breadwinners for their own families. As in families with working mothers, the example of mothers who did not work outside the home shaped their children’s gender role expectations. Many daughters and sons of homemaker mothers expressed the belief that females’ educational and/or occupational achievement should come second to that of males’ (whether their brothers’ or their husbands’).

However, due to the relatively small sample size of the qualitative component of this study, and the snowball nature of respondent selection, at least two issues which likely impact these patterns remain unexplored. Both must be subject to future examination if we are to more fully understand the effect that maternal employment has on adult siblings’ educational and occupational outcomes. First, as noted above, we cannot determine the extent to which generational change between cohorts has impacted our findings. Because our sample is too small to tease out significant differences between respondents of different ages, we can only hypothesize that older adults, who grew up during a time where few mothers worked outside the home, might have different gender role expectations (and life experiences) than do younger adults, for whom mothers’ employment was not such a cultural anathema. Future studies on maternal employment should therefore explore the effect of generational change between cohorts in order to determine the degree to which such differences impact the effect of maternal employment per se.

Second, future studies should examine the differential effect of maternal employment by families’ social class. Our data include some references to differences between families in which mothers “had” to work and families in which mothers did not “have” to work, but our sample size prohibits us from exploring these differences conclusively. Systematic exploration of the effect of mothers’ reasons for working, as well as differences in the types of jobs held by mothers (i.e., monotonous, unsatisfying jobs, compared to stimulating, satisfying jobs) and differences in nuclear family structure (i.e.., families headed by single mothers, compared to two-parent families) will result in a much fuller picture of how maternal employment impacts the equality of adult siblings’ outcomes.

CONCLUSION

In this article, we have sought to extend the literature on maternal employment in two ways. First, we have departed from previous studies by examining the effects of maternal employment on adult offspring, rather than on children or adolescents. Second, we have focused our examination of adult siblings exclusively on the issue of gender equality between brothers and sisters, which has been only touched upon in studies of early childhood. Our findings indicate that brothers and sisters are more likely to experience equal educational and occupational attainment if they come from families with mothers who were employed outside the home, rather than mothers who were homemakers. Though further research is necessary in order to more fully explore these findings, the data highlight the long term effects of differential gender investment and differential gender role expectations. They also indicate the fruitfulness of extending the study of the effects of maternal employment, historically the domain of psychological, developmental, and/or moralistic discourse, to analyses of adult siblings’ socioeconomic attainment.

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APPENDIX : Additional Cross-Tabulations for In-Depth Interview Data

Used only with express written permission

Used only with express written permission

Used only with express written permission

Used only with express written permission

Notes