Friday, February fourteenth, the UN says at least 22 people have been killed in a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. Over half of those killed were children. No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident but the opposition parties blame the killing on the government.
Kids benefit from having a working mom
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Here's some heartening news for working mothers worried about the future of their children.
Women
whose moms worked outside the home are more likely to have jobs themselves, are
more likely to hold supervisory responsibility at those jobs, and earn higher
wages than women whose mothers stayed home full time, according to a new study.
Men raised by working mothers are more likely to contribute to household chores
and spend more time caring for family members.
“There
are very few things … that have such a clear effect on gender inequality as
being raised by a working mother”
The
findings are stark, and they hold true across 24 countries.
"There
are very few things, that we know of, that have such a clear effect on gender
inequality as being raised by a working mother," says Kathleen L. McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb
Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, who conducted
the study with Mayra Ruiz Castro, a researcher at HBS, and Elizabeth Long
Lingo, an embedded practitioner at Mt. Holyoke College.
McGinn's
previous research, with Katherine Milkman of Wharton Business
School, found that female attorneys are more likely to rise through the ranks
of a firm (and less likely to leave) when they have female partners as mentors
and role models. McGinn, Castro, and Lingo wondered how nontraditional role
models influenced gender inequality at home—both in terms of professional
opportunities and household responsibilities.
"The
link between home and the workplace is becoming more and more critical as we
have two-wage-earning families," McGinn says. "We tend to talk more
about inequality in the workplace, and yet the inequality in the home is really
stuck."
In
developed countries, employed women in two-parent households report that they
spend an average of 17.7 hours per week caring for family members, while employed
men report devoting about 9, according to the researchers. At the same time,
women report spending an average of 17.8 hours per week on housework, while men
report an average of 8.8 hours.
The
Global Effect Of Working Moms
To
gauge the global effect of working moms, the researchers dug into data from the
International Social Survey Programme, a
global consortium of organizations that conduct social science research, and
studied 2002 and 2012 responses to a survey called "Family and Changing
Gender Roles." They supplemented these data with data on employment
opportunities and gender inequality across countries.
The
survey included several pages of questions related to gender attitudes, home
life, and career path. The researchers were primarily interested in the answer
to one key question: Did your mother ever work for pay, after you were born and
before you were 14?
"It
didn't matter to us if she worked for a few months one year, or worked 60 hours
per week during your whole childhood," McGinn says. "We weren't
interested in whether your mom was an intense professional, but rather whether
you had a role model who showed you that women work both inside and outside the
home. We wanted to see how that played out."
The
research team aimed to find out whether growing up with a working mom
influenced several factors, including employment, supervisory responsibility,
earnings, allocation of household work, and care for family members.
Survey
respondents included 13,326 women and 18,152 men from 24 developed nations. The
researchers based their analyses on responses collected from the 2002 and 2012
surveys. They categorized the countries by their attitudes toward gender equality,
both at home and in the workplace.
"Liberalizing
Egalitarians" were those countries where respondents' attitudes toward
gender were already egalitarian in 2002 and became even more so over the
following decade (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, and
Slovenia). "Stagnating Moderates" leaned slightly egalitarian in 2002
and remained stagnant in the following decade (Israel, the United States, Great
Britain, Spain, Australia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland,
Austria, Japan, and Taiwan). "Stagnating Conservatives" started off
with conservative attitudes toward gender roles in 2002 and stayed that way
(Chile, Latvia, Mexico, Philippines, and Russia.)
Men
tended to report more conservative gender attitudes than women-with the
exception of Mexico, where women were more conservative than men, McGinn says.
The
researchers controlled for factors including: age; marital status; religion;
years of education; urban versus rural dwelling; average Female Labor Force
participation in the respondent's home country during the years the respondent
was 0 to 14 years old; Economic Freedom Index in the respondent's home country
during the survey year; Gender Inequality Index in the respondent's home
country; and Gross Domestic Product in the respondent's home country. Stripping
those things away, they focused on the effects of being raised by a mother who
worked outside the home. "The direct effects are significant across the
board," McGinn says.
The
data showed that men were just as likely to hold supervisory jobs whether or
not their moms had worked outside the home. But women raised by working mothers
were more likely to supervise others at work.
Effects
On Income
The
data also showed that while being raised by a working mother had no apparent
effect on men's relative wages, women raised by working moms had higher incomes
than women whose moms stayed at home full time. The one exception: women who
reported conservative attitudes toward gender equality. "It's only for
earnings that having conservative gender attitudes reduces the effect of a
working mom," McGinn says. "For all of the rest of them, having had a
non-traditional role model at home has a direct effect on the outcomes,
regardless of attitudes."
As
for men whose moms ever worked outside the home, they were more likely to
contribute to household chores and spent more time caring for family members.
"Growing up, what was being modeled for sons was the idea that you share
the work at home," McGinn says.
Women
spent about the same amount of time caring for family members, regardless of
whether their moms worked outside the home. However, "When we segmented
just for people who have children at home, we found that women who are raised
by a working mom actually spend more time with their kids," McGinn says,
adding that this includes women who grew up to become working moms themselves.
"There's
a lot of parental guilt about having both parents working outside the
home," McGinn says. "But what this research says to us is that not
only are you helping your family economically—and helping yourself
professionally and emotionally if you have a job you love—but you're also
helping your kids. So I think for both mothers and for fathers, working both
inside and outside the home gives your kids a signal that contributions at home
and at work are equally valuable, for both men and women. In short, it's good
for your kids."
About
the Author
Carmen
Nobel
is the senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge. Popular posts from this blog
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