The Apron Strings of Working Mothers? Socialization, Institutionalization, and the Allocation of Household Labor in Cross-National Perspective

Judith Treas, University of California, Irvine
Tsui-o Tai, University of California, Irvine

The increase in married women’s paid employment has prompted research on the effects of maternal employment on the children of working mothers. Because women’s paid employment challenges gender conventions, research has focused on childhood socialization and gender attitudes and behavior in the next generation. This paper considers a key indicator of gender parity, the division of household labor. We employ multi-level HLM models with cross-national ISSP survey data from 34 countries. Two hypotheses are evaluated: 1) the micro-level socialization hypothesis that having had a working mother is associated with a more egalitarian division of household labor between husbands and wives, and 2) the macro-level institutionalization hypothesis that growing up in a society where many children have working mothers fosters egalitarian practices consistent with societal processes of lagged accommodation to maternal employment. We find support for both hypotheses.