Is Everything Bigger in Texas? Working Mothers Navigate Policy Absence in the Lone Star State

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 18: Policies and Organizations

Abstract

Despite significant gains in women’s workforce participation and educational attainment, gender inequality remains embedded in the organization of unpaid care, paid work, and social policy in the United States. Women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid household labor, face employment instability, and report elevated stress and anxiety associated with work–family conflict. While the “motherhood penalty” has been well documented (Budig and England 2001; Almond, Cheng and Machado 2023; Du 2023), less attention has been paid to how the limited or lack of institutional protections generates broader and enduring forms of gendered disadvantage well-being across women’s life course. This dynamic is especially pronounced in the state of Texas, where limited state-level work-family policy protections and the absence of paid leave institutionalize a policy environment of constrained support. This study asks: How do women in Texas exercise agency in managing work–family conflict within a limited policy environment? How does the absence of comprehensive national care policies shape women’s well-being, career trajectories, and fertility decision-making across the life courses? We contribute to sociological debates on gender inequality, work-family conflict, and social policy by illustrating how the absence of institutional support does not merely constrain women’s opportunities but actively reorganizes their life-course strategies and well-being. We employ a mixed-methods design combining in-depth, semi-structured interviews and original survey data collected from mothers ages 20-45 currently residing in Texas. In this context, women must negotiate employment, caregiving, and fertility decision-making under conditions that structurally intensify vulnerability while simultaneously demanding individual resilience and self-management. As a large, economically powerful, and demographically diverse state, Texas is not an outlier but a revealing case of how subnational governance structures the privatization of care and redistributes economic and social risk onto women across large segments of the U.S. population.

Authors

• Paula Cornejo-Abarca, Texas A&M University-College Station

• Katherine Eva Maich, Texas A&M University-College Station

• Zoraya Berlanga Aguilar, Texas A&M University-College Station