Family Business
Who's Doing the Housework and Childcare in America Now? Differential Convergence in Twenty-First-Century Gender Gaps in Home Tasks
Melissa Milkie et al.
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, February 2025
Abstract:
Gender scholars have debated whether the recent movement toward a more equal division of domestic labor is stalling. Using a differential convergence perspective, the authors argue that examining which domestic tasks undergo gender convergence, whose changes narrow the gap, and why changes happen is critical for understanding gender inequalities in unpaid labor time. Using data from the 2003-2023 American Time Use Survey, the authors examine trends in total housework (including core and occasional housework), shopping, and childcare time. Results for married individuals indicate that the historically large gender gap in total housework time narrowed further this century, from a women-to-men ratio of 1.8:1 in 2003-2005 to 1.6:1 in 2022-2023. This shrinking of the gender gap was concentrated in traditionally feminine core housework (decreasing by 40 percent, from 4.2:1 to 2.5:1), particularly housecleaning and laundry. The gender difference in shopping time also narrowed, nearing parity. For childcare time, the gender gap shrunk from 2:1 to 1.8:1, though this change was not statistically significant. Decomposition analyses indicate that women's reduced housework time was explained mainly by population compositional shifts, whereas men's increased core housework time likely reflected behavioral or normative changes. With men taking on more female-typed domestic activities, the gendered norms associated with different forms of unpaid labor may be becoming redefined.
Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the U.S. Baby Boom?
Lisa Dettling & Melissa Kearney
NBER Working Paper, February 2025
Abstract:
This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern U.S. mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate) -- led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veteran's Administration (VA) loan insurance programs -- set the stage for the mid-twentieth century U.S. baby boom by dramatically raising rates of home ownership for young families. Using newly digitized data on FHA- and VA- backed loan issuance and births by state-year, and a novel instrumental variables strategy that isolates supply-side variation in loan issuance, we find that the FHA and VA mortgage insurance programs led to 3 million additional births from 1935-1957, roughly 10 percent of the excess births in the baby boom. Aggregate effects mask differences by group -- we find no effects of FHA/VA lending on births for Nonwhite women, consistent with well-documented racial discrimination in these lending programs. Our results highlight the importance of access to home ownership for fertility decisions.
Income and Fertility of Female College Graduates in the United States
Zhengyu Cai & John Winters
Journal of Labor Research, December 2024, Pages 479-498
Abstract:
Fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels in many economies. We examine the relationship between female incomes and fertility for college graduates in the United States. Female income is likely endogenous to fertility, and candidate instrumental variables are likely imperfect. We use the Nevo and Rosen (2012) imperfect instrumental variable procedure to estimate two-sided bounds for the effect of female income on fertility. The effect of female income on fertility is unambiguously negative and non-trivial, but the magnitude is relatively small. Our results suggest that the recent fertility slowdown in the U.S. is not primarily due to higher female incomes.
Psychiatric Gaslighting: The Surveillance of Mental Illness during Pregnancy
Charlotte Abel & Stefan Timmermans
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women living with mental health symptoms face the dilemma of continuing psychotropic medication when pregnant or breastfeeding. Based on two years of observations in a mental health clinic focusing on reproductive health, we examine how patients living with mental health conditions exert reproductive agency during meetings with psychiatrists; how these clinicians respond to this engagement; and the consequences of this advocacy for medical decision-making. We find that psychiatrists psychologize patient advocacy by interpreting it as a manifestation of untreated mental pathology. This psychologization moves beyond imposing a professional vision on the interaction and beyond a paternalistic communication style to psychiatric gaslighting: patient engagement is invalidated and subverted under psychiatric professional vision to double-down on psychotropic medication. Psychiatric gaslighting is a sociological and institutional phenomenon; operating through cultural scripts about how both gender and mental illness shape credibility, incentive structures in medical practice, lingering epistemic problems in psychiatry, and psychiatry's struggle for professional legitimacy. Within an unequal power relationship between health professionals aiming to safeguard their authority and a stigmatized population, patients are disempowered by psychiatric concepts that link mental health to good mothering. We conclude that the biomedical management of vulnerable populations serves professional interests.
The pharmacist will see you now: Pharmacist prescribed contraceptives and fertility rates
Daniel Grossman, Arijit Ray & Allyssa Wadsworth
Journal of Health Economics, March 2025
Abstract:
Policies that increase contraceptive access for young women and their partners are a potentially low-cost way of reducing unintended pregnancies and improving later life outcomes. Several states have recently implemented laws that allow pharmacists to prescribe contraceptives to women without the need to see a physician. We study the effect of these state laws on fertility rates. Using US Natality files for 2014-2020, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy using the 13 states that had enacted a law until the first quarter of 2020 as the treated group, and the 15 policy-implementing states post-2020 quarter 1 as the control group. We find approximately 0.5 fewer births per 1000 women aged 15-49 per quarter occur post law implementation, compared to control states. The effect of the policy appears to be focused among women aged 25-34 and 40-44 and women with a high school education or less.
Indirect restrictions demobilize supporters of abortion rights
Elizabeth Connors, Alessandro Del Ponte & Peter DeScioli
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
State governments have created a multitude of indirect restrictions on abortion in the decades since Roe v. Wade. Here we test whether indirect restrictions demobilize abortion supporters relative to direct restrictions. We draw on research from moral psychology showing that people judge indirect offenses as less morally wrong than direct offenses, holding constant the consequences of the offenses. In two experiments, pro-choice participants answered how much they oppose a banning policy (a direct restriction), a defunding policy (an indirect restriction), or an excluding policy (the same as defunding but framed as more direct). In both experiments, pro-choice participants were less opposed to defunding than banning or excluding, even when the number of women affected was held constant. These results support the hypothesis that indirect restrictions can demobilize political opponents.