Since the 1960s, women’s role in the family has shifted from primarily wife and mother to also include economic contributor, particularly among non-Hispanic white women in the middle class. Yet men’s role in the family has remained largely the same. Women are thus tasked with juggling both domestic and market work responsibilities while men can focus more exclusively on their careers, popularizing terms like the second shift and the motherhood penalty, which describe the additional domestic labor women are expected to do at home after a day of paid work and the lasting disadvantage motherhood has on women’s careers. To make matters more dire, the United States has one of the least supportive public safety nets for families among developed countries in the world and the few resources available were compromised during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this dissertation, I investigate the issue of parenthood, gender, domestic labor, and paid labor using a combination of data sources, methods, and time periods.

The first chapter analyzes the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a national probability sample following American families and their descendants over time, using fixed effects regression. I examine change over time in the wage and labor supply effects of children, partnership status, and housework hours. I rely on a classic demographic approach to studying social change, comparing the experiences of successive birth cohorts: a sample of men and women born from 1947 through 1962 (Baby Boomers) to those born from 1965 through 1985 (Generation X). My findings suggest that the negative association between motherhood, partnership status, housework hours, and women’s wages have declined for women, but that these family roles remain negatively associated with women’s labor supply. In contrast, the wage premium associated with fatherhood, and the absence of an association between men’s housework hours and men’s wages, did not significantly change across cohorts of men. Taken together, these results suggest persistent gender-based inequality in labor outcomes.

In the second chapter, I interviewed 24 working mothers who support their families financially from December 2020 to March 2021 about how they share domestic labor with their husbands during the COVID-19. I seek to understand how these mothers describe and make sense of their domestic arrangements. The mothers I interviewed described fathers doing more childrearing than mothers, mothers doing more cognitive domestic labor—or planning and organizing the family—than fathers, and housework being either shared or delegated to one parent. How these mothers talked suggested neo-egalitarian attitudes towards appropriate gender roles for men and for women. Mothers whose husbands lost their jobs during COVID-19 perceived domestic gender equality as fluctuating throughout the marriage, such that men’s unemployment was a time when domestic gender inequality was acceptable. Mothers who were primary or sole earners since before the pandemic expected one parent to specialize in primary caregiving and one parent to specialize in market work, but they believed that either a man or a woman could fulfill each role. This paper introduces a novel gender ideology, or emotional understanding of what an appropriate family role is for a man and for a woman, for a small but growing population of women.

In the final chapter, I leverage census-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to examine how the average commute time in the public use microdata area (PUMA) where women live influences maternal wages and labor supply, using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and two-level random effect hierarchical linear models. In the United States, family is typically seen as a private issue, but this study is the first to investigate whether supportive public infrastructure and communities enables mothers to maintain a career. My findings suggest the largest wage and labor supply gaps between mothers and childless women are in PUMAs with long average commute times. This study provides evidence that where women live constrains their career opportunities after having children.