Research Note: New Evidence on the Motherhood Wage Penalty.

U.S. women's age at first birth has increased substantially. Yet, little research has considered how this changing behavior may have affected the motherhood pay penalty, or the wage decrease with a child's arrival, experienced by the current generation. Using Rounds 1-19 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), in this research note we examine shifts in hourly pay with childbirth for a cohort of women who became mothers mostly in the 2000s and 2010s. Results from fixed-effects models indicate that the motherhood pay penalty for NLSY97 women who had their first child before their late 20s is generally similar to that of previous cohorts. Those who became mothers near or after age 30, however, encounter a parenthood premium, as men do. The growing proportion of women delaying motherhood, coupled with the rising heterogeneity in motherhood wage outcomes by childbearing timing, contributes to a comparatively small motherhood penalty for this recent cohort. The pay advantage of "late mothers" cannot be explained by factors such as their labor market locations, number of children, stage of childrearing, marital status, or ethnoracial composition. Instead, the hourly gain stems from such mothers' tendency to reduce working hours more than other mothers without experiencing a commensurate decrease in total pay. Unlike the fatherhood premium, the premium for late mothers does not lead to a real boost in income.

Going the extra mile at work: Relationships between working conditions and discretionary work effort.

Despite the implications of work effort for earnings inequality, rigorous and comprehensive analyses of how work conditions affect people's tendency to exert extra work effort are rare. Using two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study examines how individuals' discretionary work effort-i.e., effort in excess of what is required-changes with their work time, the tangible and intangible rewards from their jobs, and the social contexts of their occupations. Results from fixed-effects models show that frequently working in teams is associated with both women's and men's reported discretionary effort. Women also express a greater tendency to exert extra work effort when they work full time instead of part time and when their employers offer paid maternity leave, but less so when their occupations are male-dominant or require confrontations with people. Racial and ethnic minorities' discretionary work effort changes in response to collaborative and competitive occupational environments somewhat differently from Whites. In addition, Black women's tendency to exert excess work effort is less tied to their time spent on their jobs than White women's. Beyond uncovering gender and ethnoracial differences, this study also underscores the need to consider the ways in which social aspects of work contribute to workers' motivation and effort.

Stability and Relevance of Marriage Desires: Importance of Age Norms and Partnering Opportunities.

Objective: This study investigates shifts in marriage desires during singlehood and the potential consequences associated with these shifts in Japan, a country epitomizing later and less marriage without substantial increases in nonmarital childbearing. Background: Despite researchers' long-standing interest in values potentially motivating demographic changes, few have systematically examined marriage desires among unmarried adults. Even fewer have considered how marriage desires may change during adulthood and how relevant such changes are to marriage and family behavior. Method: The analysis uses 11 waves of the Japan Life Course Panel Survey, which tracks singles' marriage desires yearly. Fixed effects models are estimated to demonstrate factors associated with within-person changes and account for unobserved heterogeneity. Results: Japanese singles' marriage desires decline with age but are stronger when they perceive greater opportunities to form romantic relationships or marriage. Singles experiencing an increase in the desire to marry are more likely to take actions to seek partners and to enter a romantic relationship or marriage subsequently. The associations between marriage desires and the various behavioral changes strengthen with age and feasibility of marriage. Increases in marriage desires also correspond to increases in single men's parenthood desires and ideal numbers of children, and the link between marriage desires and fertility preferences is stronger as they age. Conclusion: Marriage desires are not always stable or equally relevant throughout singlehood. Our study suggests that age norms and partnering opportunities both contribute to the fluctuation of marriage desires and affect when such desires would have behavioral implications.

Maternal Age, Early Childhood Temperament, and Youth Outcomes.

Demographers and family researchers have long debated whether early childbearing has negative consequences on the offspring, but few have considered that the benefits of delayed childbearing (or the lack thereof) may not be universal. Using sibling data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, we investigate how the relevance of mothers' age at childbirth to youth outcomes (academic performance, years of education completed, and psychological distress) may differ for youth whose early-childhood behavioral disposition (i.e., temperament) indicated varying degrees of insecure attachment. Results from family fixed-effects models, which take into account much of the unobserved heterogeneity among families, show that having an older mother is associated with improved educational and psychological outcomes for youth with a rather insecure early temperament. In contrast, mothers' age at childbirth hardly matters for children with a secure disposition. Further analysis indicates that the moderating effect of maternal age cannot be explained by the mother's first-birth timing, education, work status, income, or family stability. Older mothers' higher likelihood of prior child-rearing experience explains part of the older-mother advantage for temperamentally insecure children. However, the aging process, which equips older mothers with enhanced maturity, more calmness, and therefore greater capacity to overcome adversities, seems to account for the smaller detrimental effects of an insecure disposition on their children.

Do Immigrants' Health Advantages Remain After Unemployment? Variations by Race-Ethnicity and Gender.

Immigrants tend to display more favorable health outcomes than native-born co-ethnics. At the same time, they face considerable employment instability. It is unclear whether immigrants' job conditions may compromise their health advantage. Using U.S. National Health Interview Survey data, this study shows that the experience of unemployment reduces immigrants' health advantage, but unemployed foreign-born Blacks, White women, and Asian women still have lower mortality rates than their native-born employed counterparts. Overall, unemployment is less detrimental to immigrants than to natives, and immigrants' "survival advantage after unemployment" persists as their duration of residence extends. We further find substantial heterogeneity in the unemployment effect within immigrants. Asian immigrants display a much sharper gender difference in the mortality consequence of unemployment than other immigrants. Asian men's worse general health and substantially higher smoking rate, especially among the unemployed, lead them to fare much worse than Asian women following unemployment.

Diminished Advantage or Persistent Protection? A New Approach to Assess Immigrants' Mortality Advantages Over Time.

Much research has debated whether immigrants' health advantages over natives decline with their duration at destination. Most such research has relied on (pooled) cross-sectional data and used years since immigration as a proxy for the duration of residence, leading to the challenge of distilling the duration effect from the confounding cohort-of-arrival and age-of-arrival effects. Because longitudinal studies tend to use self-rated health as the outcome, the changes they observed may reflect shifts in immigrants' awareness of health problems. We illuminate the debate by examining how immigrants' mortality risk-a relatively unambiguous measure tied to poor health-changes over time compared to natives' mortality risk. Our analysis uses the National Health Interview Survey (1992-2009) with linked mortality data through 2011 (n = 875,306). We find a survival advantage for U.S. immigrants over the native-born that persisted or amplified during the 20-year period. Moreover, this advantage persisted for all immigrants, regardless of their race/ethnicity and gender or when they began their U.S. residence. This study provides unequivocal evidence that immigrant status' health protection as reflected in mortality is stable and long-lasting.

Research Note: Gender Differences in Employment During the COVID-19 Epidemic.

We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on gender disparities in three employment outcomes: labor force participation, full-time employment, and unemployment. Using data from the monthly Current Population Survey, in this research note we test individual fixed-effects models to examine the employment status of women relative to that of men in the nine months following the onset of the epidemic in March of 2020. We also test separate models to examine differences between women and men based on the presence of young children. Because the economic effects of the epidemic coincided with the summer months, when women's employment often declines, we account for seasonality in women's employment status. After doing so, we find that women's full-time employment did not decline significantly relative to that of men during the months following the beginning of the epidemic. Gender gaps in unemployment and labor force participation did increase, however, in the early and later months of the year, respectively. Our findings regarding women's labor force participation and employment have implications for our understanding of the long-term effects of the health crisis on other demographic outcomes.

Motherhood Penalties and Fatherhood Premiums: Effects of Parenthood on Earnings Growth Within and Across Firms.

Despite much interest in how parenthood contributes to the gender pay gap, prior research has rarely explored firms' roles in shaping the parenthood pay penalty or premium. The handful of studies that investigated parenthood's effects within and across firms generally compared parents and their childless peers at a given time and failed to account for unobserved heterogeneity between the two groups. Such comparisons also cannot inform how having children may alter individuals' earnings trajectories within and across firms. Using 26 rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and fixed-effects models, we examine how being a mother or father is linked to earnings growth within and across firms. We find that women's pay decreases as they become mothers and that the across-employer motherhood penalty is larger than the within-employer penalty. By contrast, fatherhood is associated with a pay premium, and the within-employer fatherhood premium is considerably greater than the across-employer one. We argue that these results are consistent with the discrimination explanation of the motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium. Because employers are likely to trust women who become mothers while working for them more than new recruits who are mothers, their negative bias against mothers would be more salient when evaluating the latter, which could result in a larger between-organizational motherhood penalty. Conversely, employers' likely greater trust in existing workers who become fathers than fathers they hire from elsewhere may amplify their positive bias favoring fathers in assessing the former, which could explain the greater within-firm fatherhood premium.

Does school learning shape gender ideology? Academic performance and adolescents' attitudes toward gender practices.

Despite research linking education to values, our understanding of the effects of academic learning on gender attitudes is still limited. Using sibling data collected over time, we investigate how learning in school, measured by achievement test scores, affects adolescents' views on gender issues both with and without direct implications for women's economic mobility. With fixed-effects models accounting for unobserved heterogeneity between high and low achievers, we show that the relationship between academic achievement and gender ideology is not spurious, but learning does not enlighten adolescents on all gender-related beliefs, either. Rather, school learning socializes both boys and girls into more liberal views on issues clearly related to women's economic opportunities. For views concerning dating practices or boy-girl interactions, which are irrelevant to the meritocracy-based mainstream values, academic performance has less consistent effects, with higher achievement scores sometimes associated with more conservative views among boys. Our results generally support the socialization and reproduction model of the role of school learning, although self-interest also explains high and low achievers' different attitudes on dating and other personal-realm gender practices.

Job characteristics, marital intentions, and partner-seeking actions: Longitudinal evidence from Japan.

BACKGROUND: Most research linking jobs to marriage formation focuses on how job contexts and prospects affect singles' paces of entering marriage. Direct evidence on whether job traits shape singles' desire for marriage and actions toward forming a union remains scarce. OBJECTIVE: We examine how changes in a range of job characteristics correspond to alterations in never-married people's intention to marry and actions taken to meet romantic partners in Japan, a country with increasing inequality in job quality and declining marriage rates. METHODS: We use longitudinal data from the Japan Life Course Panel Survey to fit fixed-effects models, which take into account unobserved heterogeneity among people with differing jobs. RESULTS: We find that rises in job insecurity and workplace staffing shortages weaken, whereas increases in income and job autonomy strengthen, men's intention to marry. Moreover, men with a low marriage desire are especially likely to withdraw from partner-seeking activities when they have low-income jobs or face great deadline pressure at work. Job prospects and quality are generally less important to women's desire for marriage or partner-seeking actions. Nevertheless, being in workplaces where teamwork is prevalent, which could enhance singles' exposure to married and older coworkers, raises both women's intention to marry and their probability of using a formal method, such as employing a marriage agency, to find a partner. CONCLUSIONS: For Japanese men, our results offer support for the argument that economic stagnation and deterioration of job quality are conducive to later and fewer marriages. The findings for women, however, are more consistent with the narrative focusing on values and social influences. CONTRIBUTIONS: This study enriches our understanding of singles' considerations of marriage and partner search and provides highly rigorous evidence on the roles of job conditions.

Comparing same- and different-sex relationship dynamics: Experiences of young adults in Taiwan.

BACKGROUND: Few studies of same-sex relationships are able to capture the dynamics of these relationships from formation to dissolution, and even fewer provide evidence on these dynamics in a non-Western context. OBJECTIVE: Using retrospective relationship history data collected from a nationally representative sample of young adults, this study compares the processes of forming and terminating relationships between same- and different-sex couples in Taiwan, an Asian society featuring both strong parental influences on children's mate selection and an ongoing legislative effort to legalize same-sex marriage. RESULTS: Results from event-history models show that factors associated with relationship formation and dissolution are largely similar for same- and different-sex unions and that same-sex relationships do not have higher dissolution rates. Nevertheless, premarital coresidence with parents, which is likely to amplify parental influences on children's mate selection, deters the entry into and accelerates the dissolution of same-sex relationships more than it does different-sex relationships. Moreover, same-sex relationships are more heterogamous in family economic background, but more homogamous in age and education level, than different-sex ones. CONTRIBUTION: This study is among the first to provide evidence on the dynamics of same- and different-sex relationships in a non-Western context. Aside from a few differences between same- and different-sex relationships related to parental influences, our study provides strong evidence that same- and different-sex couples experience intimacies in similar ways-even in a relatively conservative cultural context like Taiwan.

Family Characteristics and Mate Selection: Evidence from Computer-Assisted Dating in Japan.

Research on mate selection rarely considers singles' preferences for their future partners' family configurations and experiences. Using online dating records from a major matchmaking agency in Japan, a society with a strong emphasis on family and kinship, we examine how singles' responses to date requests correspond to potential mates' family circumstances. Results from fixed-effects logit models are consistent with the argument that singles' preferences for potential partners' family characteristics stem from both a concern about future obligations toward the partner's family and stereotypes associated with certain family traits. Singles, for example, are less likely to accept requests from those from large families, which are seen as traditional. Being from a large family nevertheless hampers individuals' dating chances considerably more if they are firstborn and have no brothers, two conditions that make them the designated child to care for elderly parents. We also find that Japanese singles largely seek partners with more of the universally valued family traits, rather than traits similar to their own.

Explaining the Effect of Parent-Child Coresidence on Marriage Formation: The Case of Japan.

Many single adult children in countries around the world live with their parents. Such coresidence has been thought to delay the transition to first marriage, although the exact reasons for the delay have not been sufficiently examined. Using panel data from Japan, we investigate whether changes in never-married adults' residential status lead to alterations in their marital aspirations, courtship behaviors, romantic opportunities, and perceived obstacles to marrying. Our estimation of fixed-effects models helps address potential bias caused by single individuals' selection into living in the parental home. The analysis indicates that living with parents is associated with a lower probability of forming romantic relationships, thereby decelerating the transition to first marriage. The never-married, however, do not desire marriage less, put less effort into finding romantic partners, or have fewer opportunities to meet potential partners when coresiding with parents. Overall, the findings suggest that living in the parental home increases never-married men's contentment with their immediate social environment, whereas it decreases women's psychological readiness to transition into adult roles, making both men and women less eager to settle into a romantic relationship.

Placing Families in Context: Challenges for Cross-National Family Research.

Cross-national comparisons constitute a valuable strategy to assess how broader cultural, political, and institutional contexts shape family outcomes. One typical approach of cross-national family research is to use comparable data from a limited number of countries, fit similar regression models for each country, and compare results across country-specific models. Increasingly, researchers are adopting a second approach, which requires merging data from many more societies and testing multilevel models using the pooled sample. Although the second approach has the advantage of allowing direct estimates of the effects of nation-level characteristics, it is more likely to suffer from the problems of omitted-variable bias, influential cases, and measurement and construct nonequivalence. I discuss ways to improve the first approach's ability to infer macrolevel influences, as well as how to deal with challenges associated with the second one. I also suggest choosing analytical strategies according to whether the data meet multilevel models' assumptions.

Off to a good start: A comparative study of changes in men's first job prospects in East Asia.

Research on young adults' transition to the labor market rarely investigates how nation-level institutional arrangements shape changes over time. In particular, a systematic comparison of shifts in young adults' job opportunities in East Asia is virtually absent. Using comparable data from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, we examine cohort differences in the timing, quality, and stability of men's first jobs. The results indicate overall declines in first occupational attainment for men in all three countries, but the main driving force for the decrease in Japan differs from that in Korea and Taiwan. Whereas macroeconomic pressure fully explains the decline in Japanese men's first occupational attainment, educational expansion accounts for a considerable part of the declines for men in Korea and Taiwan. Moreover, educational expansion has eroded better-educated men's advantages in speedily transitioning from school to work in Taiwan, but it has not had a similar effect on Japanese men. We argue that Japan's employment system, coupled with a fair amount of institutional ties between schools and firms, has shielded young men from the pressure of educational expansion, making the trends about their early-career outcomes different from those of their counterparts in Korea and Taiwan. The different degrees to which firm internal labor markets have been adopted in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan also explain how increasing macroeconomic pressure has different impacts on men's first job stability in East Asia.

It's Who You Work With: Effects of Workplace Shares of Nonstandard Employees and Women in Japan.

Previous research on workplace composition has not addressed how the share of nonstandard employees affects individual workers' opportunities and well-being. Moreover, existing studies generally assume that the effect of a group's numerical representation is mediated through the group's relative power and status within establishments. This study asks whether workplace composition matters when the size of each social group has little impact on its relative status. Specifically, I examine the economic and psychological consequences of the proportions of nonstandard employees and women in Japanese workplaces, where both groups are typically secondary workers who lack power regardless of their relative size. The results indicate that working in establishments with modest proportions of nonstandard employees enhances individuals' wages and likelihood of promotion, but working in those with higher proportions is detrimental. Conversely, the greater the share of nonstandard employees in a workplace, the more likely all workers are to suffer psychologically. Workplace gender composition is also linked to Japanese workers' reported chances of promotion and life satisfaction, but it is relevant to fewer worker outcomes than employment-status composition. This analysis underscores the need to consider workplace demography, even if the power and status gaps between different social groups vary little with each group's share within establishments. In addition, the findings suggest that the global trend of increasing nonstandard work arrangements has a more extensive impact on disparities among workers than prior research implies.

Better Off Jobless? Scarring Effects of Contingent Employment in Japan.

Previous research fails to address whether contingent employment benefits individuals' careers more than the alternative they often face: being without a job. Using work history data from Japan, this study shows that accepting a contingent job delays individuals' transition to standard employment more than remaining jobless. Moreover, having a contingent job, rather than having no job, leads Japanese men to have lower occupational status after they transition back to standard employment. I argue that in a highly segmented labor market like Japan's, the strict separation of labor pools for standard and contingent jobs makes being labeled as a contingent worker particularly detrimental. Meanwhile, the legacy of Japan's welfare corporatism alleviates the stigma of unemployment, making individuals better off jobless than having a contingent job. This research thus demonstrates the importance of labor-market contexts in shaping the scarring effects of contingent work arrangements.

Enduring an Economic Crisis: The Effect of Macroeconomic Shocks on Intragenerational Mobility in Japan.

After the burst of its "bubble" economy in 1989, Japan experienced an astonishingly long economic recession whose gravity surpassed any seen in the industrialized world since the 1930s. While this recession is likely to have important consequences on the well-known workplace arrangements and career mobility patterns in that country, systematic analyses of such consequences are nearly absent. This study examines changes in the rates and directions of job mobility in Japan using work history data collected in 2005 from a nationally representative sample of men and women. I find evidence that Japanese firms have largely retained the core elements of the permanent employment system. The norm that stresses men's loyalty to their employers, however, appears to have weakened, resulting in higher voluntary job turnover among male workers. In addition, the gender gap in lifetime mobility processes has narrowed, but not because Japanese women have gained opportunities in the workplace. Rather, economic stagnation has led to greater fluctuations in employment and wages over men's life course, thereby closing the gender gap. Beyond illustrating the changing stratification process in Japan, the findings have general implications for understanding how economic crises impact employment relations, institutional transformations, and social change in advanced industrialized countries.

Changes in women's postmarital employment in Japan and Taiwan.

Research on female labor-force participation has not fully explained why economic development has different effects on married women's employment continuity across societies. I use life-history data from nationally representative samples of women in Japan and Taiwan to examine the divergence in women's patterns of labor-force exit in these two countries during the postwar period. The findings reveal that the effects of family demands, occupation, firm size, and employment sector on women's exit rates differed substantially between Japan and Taiwan. Taken together, these factors account for the different trends in married women's employment during this period. I argue that the cross-national differences in the predictors of women's labor-force withdrawal reflect the extent of incompatibility between work and family responsibilities for married women in these two societies.