Gender Inequality and the Changing Landscape of Economic Opportunity

Abstract

Children often reproduce their parents' economic (dis)advantages when they become adults, but through different pathways. Gender conditions these pathways, limiting women’s chances at maintaining or improving upon their economic conditions through the labor market, where they tend to earn less than men. Instead, women typically do so through the family, via the earnings of a (male) partner. Yet over the past half century, labor market shifts and changes to the economic foundations of the family have transformed how women and men attain their economic resources. This dissertation examines the implications of these transformations for the persistence of economic (dis)advantages across generations in the United States. Across three empirical chapters, I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to compare the gendered relationship between children’s economic resources during childhood and their income attainment in adulthood. In Chapter 2, I develop a framework to quantify the extent to which earnings can account for the intergenerational persistence of family incomes. This chapter reveals substantial shifts in the relationship between parents and their daughter’s positions in the distribution of economic resources: though this relationship remained stable across cohorts, it became increasingly intertwined with women’s personal earnings in later cohorts. Chapter 3 explores how personal earnings and partner earnings contribute to women’s and men’s upward economic mobility across the economic spectrum. I find that personal earnings make substantial contributions to women’s mobility outcomes, and partner earnings to men’s, but partner earnings contribute more to women’s and men’s economic mobility at the middle and top of the childhood income distribution: though those at the bottom stand to gain the most from partner earnings because the threshold for upward mobility is lower, they are less likely to be partnered and their partners less likely to be consistently employed. In Chapter 4, I examine how personal earnings and partner earnings contribute to women’s and men’s cumulative family incomes across the origin distribution. This chapter takes a life course approach to reveal how gender inequalities in the labor market interact with family processes to create long-run economic disparities within and across generations. I show that gender earnings differences widen with age but are offset within families by partner’s growing earnings: though women from advantaged origins accrue larger earnings gaps compared to men, they also accrue more partner earnings to make up for these differences. By contrast, families amplify intergenerational inequalities, such that women and men from advantaged origins accrue greater benefits from both their own and their partner’s growing earnings compared to their disadvantaged counterparts. These findings underscore that as women’s and men’s social and economic roles converge, labor market and family dynamics interact in new ways to stratify and equalize women and men’ life chances, changing the gendered landscape of economic opportunity.