Abstract
Using data from the 2003–2014 American Time Use Survey combined with the state unemployment rate data, this chapter examines the relationship between state unemployment rate and the time opposite-sex couples with children spend in child caregiving activities, and how this varies by socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity of the mothers and fathers. Any time spent as a family, solo time with children, and the time mothers and fathers spend providing primary and secondary child caregiving are each considered. The results show a nonlinear relationship between the state unemployment rate and the time parents spend with their children, and their primary and secondary child caregiving time that is stronger for households in which the father does not have a college degree.
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Notes
- 1.
While our full sample of mothers and fathers include all races and ethnicities, we report separate results for only African-American, Hispanic, or white mothers and fathers, as the remaining group of mothers and fathers is too heterogeneous and the sample size is too small to allow for any meaningful interpretations of the results.
- 2.
For a review of these models, see Benería et al. (2015).
- 3.
Using data from 2003–2010 ATUS for women and men, Aguiar et al. (2013) find that women and men reallocate their foregone paid work hours to leisure activities and unpaid work in a similar manner. In particular, women and men reallocate 50 percent of the foregone market work hours during the recession to leisure activities, 30 percent to unpaid housework, and 5 percent to child caregiving. However, they also find that men’s paid work hours declined by 11 percent while women experienced a less than 1 percent (0.32 percent) decline in their unpaid work hours (Aguiar et al. 2013, p. 1671).
- 4.
The share of families where only the father was employed increased by 4.3 percentage points, the percentage of families where only the mother was employed increased by 1.5 percentage points (Glynn 2014, p. 9).
- 5.
Workers in all but one of the ten occupations with the largest shares of workers in non-standard schedules are disproportionately black or African-American, and in all but two of them they are Hispanic (BLS 2016b). Four of these occupations, namely, registered nurses, health aides, personal care aides, and waiters and waitresses, are traditionally female occupation where at least 70 percent of the workforce are women.
- 6.
Authors’ calculations from quarterly unemployment rates data for married women age 25 or over, who live in households with their spouse by race and ethnicity for the 2003–2014 period, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.
- 7.
These trend are not attributable to differences in human capital only. An examination of differences in employment and earnings of non-college educated African-American men and non-college educated white men over the 2007–2009 shows that white men without a college degree were more likely to be employed and to have higher earnings than African-American men without a college degree (Dickerson vonLockette 2014).
- 8.
As pointed out by Morrill and Pabilonia (2015), the different results in the literature regarding mothers’ work schedules may be because during the expansionary period of 2003–2006, previous findings in the literature by Connelly and Kimmel (2011) may be due to a small number of mothers living in states where the unemployment rate was high during the expansionary period of 2003–2006.
- 9.
We included codes 030101 to 040399 as primary child caregiving. This includes direct caregiving for children who live in the household and those who do not live in the household. The time devoted to nonhousehold children is quite low.
- 10.
See DeGraff and Centanni, this volume for another analysis using the “with whom” information in the ATUS.
- 11.
Our calculations using BLS data show that in the last quarter of 2014, the unemployment rates among college-education or noncollege educated women and men were one percentage point higher, compared to their respective values in the last quarter of 2007. Similarly, among married women and men, the unemployment rates among Hispanics and whites, were only half a percentage point higher, compared to the last quarter of 2007. One exception is African-American men for whom the unemployment rate was 2.6 percentage higher. However, this group too experienced job recovery, after their unemployment rate peaked at 13.5 percent in the first quarter of 2011.
- 12.
The individual and family-level control variables are as follows: own and spouse’s age and age squared and indicators for the following: husband and wife education (high school dropout, some college, college, missing, with high school degree being the omitted category), race and ethnicity (non-Hispanic black, other, Hispanic, with non-Hispanic white being the omitted category), gender, age of youngest household child (infant, preschooler, elementary school aged, with high school aged being the omitted category), presence of household child older than age 18, number of children in the household by age group (Ages 0–1, 2–4, 5–9, 10–14, 15–18), cohabiting couple, gender composition of the children (all boy children, mixed gender children, with all girls being the omitted category), respondent lives in SMSA, and season (with fall being the omitted category). For a review of the microeconomic literature that links most of these variables to time use, see Connelly and Kimmel (2010).
- 13.
We use ATUS final weights for nationally representative results and following the methodology by Morrill and Pabilonia (2015), we reweight these weights to ensure equal day-of-week representation for each of our subsamples. In all regressions, we cluster standard errors by state of residence.
- 14.
- 15.
Morrill and Pabilonia (2015), who estimate these relationships using data for the 2003-2010 period, also report imprecise estimates.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier version of this study was presented at the 25th International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference held in Galway between June 24-26, 2016. We thank Günseli Berik, Rachel Connelly, Nancy Folbre, Joyce Jacobsen, and Elizabeth M. Dunn for the careful constructive feedback that we have received on earlier versions of this study. We also thank Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia for her helpful feedback on analysis of the American Time Use Survey data. The corresponding author is Mark Price.
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Kongar, E., Price, M. (2017). Gender, Socioeconomic Status, Time Use of Married and Cohabiting Opposite-Sex Parents, and the Great Recession in the USA. In: Connelly, R., Kongar, E. (eds) Gender and Time Use in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_6
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