A new National Bureau of Economic Research study examines the impact of women’s participation in the workforce on their children’s college attainment. The researchers use data from the Norway Registry, which includes information on all children born in the country between 1967 and 1993 (roughly 725,000 males and 690,000 females). They match children’s data with their parents' earnings history when the children were between birth and age seventeen (among other information).
Descriptive data show that the employment of mothers with young children has increased from 10 percent in 1967 to 65 percent in 1993, while fathers’ employment has remained fairly constant—around 93 percent.
Controlling for various family and child demographics, the analysts find that a mother’s employment has a positive impact on her daughter’s college attainment relative to the effect on her son’s. Specifically, daughters are more likely than sons to have at least a college degree by the age of twenty-five. Mothers with more female children are also more likely to be in the workplace, after controlling for the total number of children. Interestingly, fathers’ employment also has a negative effect on boys’ college attainment and a positive effect for girls.
Increased time with sons already results in higher marginal gains in college attainment, so it makes sense that decreased time would have a higher consequence for them as well. For the daughters, the analysts reason that a working mother provides a working role model, which may increase her “expected return” from schooling. All of these data help to explain the narrowing and reversal of the educational gender gap since the 1950s—defined here as the difference in college attainment between females and males. The trend is both encouraging and troubling.
SOURCE: Xiaodong Fan, Hanming Fang, and Simen Markussen, "Mothers' Employment and Children's Educational Gender Gap," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21183 (May 2015).
