Patterns in Women's Subjective Wellbeing By Work and Family Status

Background and Purpose:

The remarkable social, economic and political progress that women in the United States have been directly and indirectly affected by since the 1960s, have translated into many gains and achievements in education, in the labor market and in terms of women’s political agency. However, the promise of a rewarding career outside the home that would exist alongside the satisfaction of raising a family, remains largely unfulfilled. This popular sentiment and frustration was captured in a very popular article titled “Why women still can’t have it all” that was published in the Atlantic magazine in 2012. Written by an accomplished foreign policy analyst and academic, Anne Marie Slaughter, the article generated a renewed interest in the irreconcilability of the pulls of work and family in the present socio-economic and policy environment, in the mainstream public conversation, and was followed by a surge in publications on closely related themes. Empirical evidence on this matter is however, very limited. In this paper, I examine patterns in women’s subjective wellbeing by family and employment status and also disaggregated by education income.

Methods: Using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2005-2010 and the American Time Use Survey’s wellbeing modules, 2012-2013, I replicate least squares regression models in two key prior studies (Bertrand 2013; Deaton and Stone 2014) and additionally estimate inverse probability of treatment weighted models, to adjust for selection. In examining these patterns, I use two key measures of subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction and Cantril’s life evaluation ladder, as well as a number of related wellbeing indicators such as self-reported health status, emotional and mental health, and adequacy of rest and sleep. 

Results: I find evidence of a positive association of being a parent with subjective wellbeing as well as a positive association of being employed with subjective wellbeing. Confirming prior research, I also find no evidence of the combination of these relationships translating into a “double bonus” for wellbeing and instead find a penalty to being an employed parent. This core pattern is identical across measures of subjective wellbeing, model specifications and datasets. The pattern also exists for all but the lowest socio-economic groups, as demarcated by education level and family income. However, there are differences in the wellbeing penalty between subgroups; for instance, women with a Bachelor’s degree and above face a significantly higher wellbeing penalty for being an employed parent than those with less education. In more detailed analysis focused on more specific categories of work and family status, I further find that women who are working but not raising families and women who are raising families but not working, tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction on average than women who are doing both.

Conclusions and Implications: Results confirm anecdotal evidence and indicate that work-family conflict likely affects women's life satisfaction in every socio-economic and demographic subgroup, but also that the problem is not the same everywhere, once again highlighting the importance of work-family reconciliation in women’s wellbeing.