The Rigidity of Men’s Work and Family Lives and the Making of Gender Inequality

Abstract

This dissertation examines how men’s rigidity in work and family lives contributes to gender inequality in the labor market. It investigates whether and how limited changes in men’s behavior in the workplace and at home following parenthood, alongside their breadwinning role that is embedded in institutions and social norms, serve as key drivers of the social stratification produced by the contemporary gender system. Chapter 1 investigates the temporal accumulation of the fatherhood wage premium over the life course in the United States. Using marginal structural models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that the wage premium accumulates over time, starting with the birth of a resident child but ceasing to grow once fathers no longer live with a child. The immediate wage benefit associated with residential fatherhood is minor. I argue that the mechanisms driving the wage premium for fathers therefore evolve only gradually in men’s work lives and are contingent on their co-residence with a child. The findings also suggest that the valorization of the breadwinning role of residential fathers, coupled with the instability of fathers’ residential contexts, operates to stratify wage trajectories among men by yielding privileges to those who remain residential fathers. Chapter 2 examines how fathers’ involvement in first-time U.S. mothers’ pursuit of full-time employment and additional childbearing is constrained by fathers’ limited involvement in household labor. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and bivariate probit regression models, I find that mothers are less likely to combine full-time employment and second childbearing when fathers participate less in housework. In such situations, mothers tend to make interrelated decisions to retreat from full-time employment but not from second childbearing. I argue that greater participation of fathers in household labor is essential for gender equity in the labor market. By examining the configurations of employment and motherhood, I further contextualize this argument in relation to mothers’ decision to have a second child regardless of fathers’ involvement in housework, which may reflect intense workplace time demands and the strong two-child ideal in the United States as suggested by my supplementary analyses. Chapter 3 delves into the effect of deinstitutionalizing overwork on female representation in the workplace. Leveraging the 52-hour workweek rule implemented in South Korea in 2018 and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the rule increased the proportion of female workers in the rule-eligible firms. The increase was likely driven by the rule’s effect on retaining female full-time employees, particularly mothers. The findings suggest that institutional overwork may exclude women from the workplace and, conversely, new institutional rules limiting overwork may create more inclusive workplace environments for female workers. This chapter thus illuminates a causal pathway through which the structure of our workplaces upholding men’s breadwinning role shapes gender inequality in the labor market.