A different kind of WFM
Multigenerational households and unpaid & paid labor
Though so many of us have felt stuck in one place for months, our lives indefinitely on hold, COVID has also led a sizable chunk of Americans to make a significant change in their lives. A Pew report from July found that nearly one-in-ten Americans either moved or had someone move into their household because of the pandemic. For close to half of those Americans who had someone move in, the new arrival was an adult child or spouse of an adult child. For 18 percent, it was a parent or in-law. Thanks to the pandemic, more family members are living under one roof.
While some people have decided to share homes for social connection, many are doing so to save money. Hello, recession. The same pattern emerged during the last recession, adding to the steady growth in multigenerational households since 1980. In 2016, 20 percent of Americans lived in a multigenerational household—a number that the country hadn’t reached since 1950.
So when I saw this new paper by Madhulika Khanna and Divya Pandey about the effect of live-in mothers-in-law on the employment of their daughters-in-law, I was intrigued. As I wrote in an earlier newsletter, American women’s ability to sustain paid employment is seriously threatened right now because of the enormous caregiving responsibilities that have disproportionately fallen on their shoulders. As one Washington Post article from November described the state of affairs:
The share of women working or looking for work has fallen to the lowest level since 1988, wiping out decades of hard-fought gains in the workplace.
Khanna and Pandey’s study focuses on India, where norms around both gender and multigenerational households differ from those in the U.S. But factors that affect women’s labor force participation tend to cross country lines, so some insights in one place can transfer to other settings.
The authors of the paper suggest that a mother-in-law could push her daughter-in-law in opposing directions—either to conform to more gendered norms and restrict her autonomy (think of the judgmental mother-in-law in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond) or to relieve the daughter-in-law from some household labor, and therefore enable her to work outside the home. So, which is it?
The study has a clever (if grim) approach to figure out what the effect is and disentangle it from confounding causes: they look at the daughter-in-law’s labor force participation before and after the mother-in-law’s death. The idea is that the deaths are random, giving us a fairly neat before-and-after comparison. (Let me assure you that the authors do some statistical maneuvers to make sure they aren’t overlooking non-randomness in mother-in-law deaths that could explain the results.)
They found that a mother-in-law’s death reduces a daughter-in-law’s labor force participation by about 4.5 percentage points. In other words, when a mother-in-law lives with her adult child, her daughter-in-law is more likely to be employed; after a live-in mother-in-law dies, the daughter-in-law is less likely to be employed. To give you an idea of what 4.5 percentage points means in this context: American women’s labor force participation increased by 3 percentage points after the introduction of the birth control pill.
The economists’ explanation for this effect is that the mother-in-law takes on some of the household work, leaving the daughter-in-law more time to pursue paid work. There’s evidence for this in their data: after a mother-in-law’s death, a daughter-in-law spends more time on household chores. The employment of women who have four or more children—who surely have a surfeit of household labor to do—was more strongly affected by the mother-in-law’s death. (A father-in-law’s death had no effect on a daughter-in-law’s labor force participation, it seems, because fathers-in-law don’t take up household work the way that mothers-in-law do. Sigh.)
The point here isn’t that mothers-in-law should all be packing their suitcases so that they can enable their overburdened daughters-in-law to work outside the home. It doesn’t advance gender equality much if the unpaid labor simply shifts from younger women to older women. But this study does show yet again how caregiving and other household work stands in the way of many women’s paid employment. The authors round out the paper with this conclusion:
Ultimately, challenging the norms that put housework and childcare responsibilities solely on women must be at the center of any policy response to low female labor force participation.
I’m still thinking about
Words: This piece about the secret network of people trying to topple the North Korean regime is a feat of reporting. The article’s protagonist made me think about the personal sacrifices and intense commitment that’s required to pursue the kind of change we admire from afar.
Sounds: This RadioLab episode sets out to answer a question that you’d think would be straightforward: what are the police for? There are so many surprising turns in this story.
Video: Short Term 12, a 2013 movie about a foster care facility for adolescents, may be the best movie I’ve watched all year.
I made
A few weeks back, the Embedded team put out an episode about the relationship between two of the most powerful people in Washington, who will have a big effect on what legislation makes it out of Congress in the coming years: Biden and McConnell.
Now you know
Today’s random nugget is: The word sinister comes from a Latin word that means “on the left side,” but which later took on a meaning of evil. In contrast, the Latin word for “on the right side,” dexter, has largely positive connotations (think dexterous), and of course, the word right refers not just to direction but what is true or correct. The linguistic bias toward right handedness keeps going: right-hand man refers to a vital person, but you don’t want to be told you have two left feet. Languages like French have the same bias built in: droit means right, and also is at the root of adroit. Gauche, meaning left, isn’t a compliment in either French or English. [Source: Merriam-Webster]
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