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Title: Economic self-reliance and gender inequality between US men and women, 1970-2010: A population perspective
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2017
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Abstract: Between 1970 and 2010, US men and women became increasingly economically self-reliant, depending on their own paid labor for their positions in the income distribution, rather than on their spouses earnings or government supports. Women's self-reliance increased much more than men's, leading to increased gender equality. In this article, we document these trends and trace them to changes in the family (including declining marriage rates and increasing spousal earnings correlations), the labor force (including rising female employment and earnings), and the welfare state (including the growing dependence of government tax- and transfer-based income supports on individuals own labor earnings). We introduce a comprehensive, population-based approach to studying economic self-reliance, expanding on prior work that was limited to married couples labor earnings by incorporating all people and income sources. We use this comprehensive approach to join separate lines of research on the family, labor market, and state in order to reveal how correlated trends in these overlapping domains contributed to trends in economic self-reliance. To do so, we introduce a novel yet straight-forward decomposition of economic self-reliance using data from the Current Population Survey. Our analysis shows that a large portion of the increase in economic self-reliance among US women stems from changes in family structure. Increasing diversity in family forms can play an important role in increasing gender equality in economic self-reliance, in addition to the traditional focus on equalizing husbands and wives income contributions within married couples.
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Authors: Bloome, Deirdre; Burk, Derek; McCall, Leslie
Conference Name: American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Publisher Location: Chicago, Illinois
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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