Mothers’ Employment and Teenage Children Gender Composition: How Class and Family Affect Women’s Paid Work

• In Event: Family Ties Across the Life Course and Across the Globe

Abstract

A strong body of research has investigated the factors influencing mothers’ employment outcomes; yet the potential effect of children's sex composition has received relatively little attention. We examine the potential connection between the sex composition of adolescent children and mothers' employment in Mexico. Mothers typically handle most family labor, and traditional gender norms assign domestic roles to females. Therefore, having a daughter may enable mothers to delegate some tasks, freeing up time to seek employment. Additionally, we anticipate that this association may be more pronounced among disadvantaged mothers, who have fewer resources to outsource family labor. We rely on the Survey of Households’ Income and Expenses (ENIGH) and, in a supplemental analysis, on life-history data from the Demographic Retrospective Survey. We examine mothers in prime-working-age with at least one teenage child, using linear probability and logistic models, focusing on the “sex composition of teenage children” as key predictor. Results indicate a positive association between having an adolescent daughter (versus having only son(s)) and employment. Further, this link is concentrated among disadvantaged mothers, proxied by their educational attainment. In this group, the difference in the predicted probabilities linked to having a teenage daughter is non-trivial (10 percentage-points). Ancillary analyses indicate that time spent on domestic labor partially mediates this association, with daughters taking on some responsibilities typically held by mothers. Comparing cross-sectional results with those from life-history data suggests that this “daughter effect” is driven by differences between mothers with teenage daughters and those with only sons, rather than “within women” differences over time. Findings have implications for support systems in middle-income societies facing demographic changes, resulting in fewer children and less kin availability than in past generations. Moreover, our study emphasizes the need to analyze both gender and class to understand women’s paid work and the intergenerational reproduction of disadvantages.

Authors

• Aida Villanueva, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Celia Hubert Lopez, National Institute of Public Health, Mexico