Kelly Musick - Cornell, Department of Policy Analysis and Management
State-level Gender Inequality and Couples’ Relative Earnings Following Parenthood
Date: 11/11/2021 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Giovanna Merli
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
Meetings will be held via Zoom unless otherwise noted.
Meeting location: (Please sign in to see the link.)
11:00am - Marwa AlFakhri
11:30am - OPEN
12:30pm - Yuan Zhang
1:00pm - Anna Rybińska
1:30pm - Christina Gibson-Davis
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Cross-national comparisons form the basis of much of what we understand about the link between gender inequality at the societal level and family change. There has been little attention to this process in the United States, despite substantial variation in structural features of gender inequality and families across states. We leverage this variation to examine how state-level gender inequality shapes couple-level inequality following the critical transition to parenthood, in particular how state gender wage gaps, parenthood employment penalties, early family formation, and attitudes about working mothers moderate changes in couples’ relative earnings after a first birth. Our study relies on newly available identifiers in the Current Population Survey to link couples longitudinally across the 16 months of their participation in the survey, and it includes four decades of overlapping panels. Preliminary findings suggest that state-level gender inequality shapes couples’ responses to birth, with greater within-household inequality in earnings among couples living in states with fewer working mothers and less progressive attitudes about working mothers.