Abstract:

This study revisits the relationship between maternal employment and children’s well-being in Japan, a wealthy society marked by strong normative beliefs about distinct gender roles within the family and pronounced gender inequality both at home and in the workplace. We pay particular attention to distinctive features of Japanese mothers’ employment, including the high prevalence of nonstandard employment, unstable or intermittent labor force attachment, and relatively limited educational variation in employment patterns. Our findings reveal an overall negative relationship between children’s cognitive performance and their cumulative exposure to mothers’ regular employment, a relationship that is largely limited to children of less-educated mothers. In contrast, mothers’ nonstandard employment has little influence on children’s cognitive performance, regardless of maternal education. Decomposition analysis indicates that educational differences in the relationship between maternal (regular) employment and children’s cognitive outcomes contribute to disparities in children’s cognitive achievement. Our study highlights the importance of gender context in understanding the effects of maternal employment on children’s well-being and underscores the need for policies that better support working mothers in gender-inegalitarian societies.

Bio:

Dr. Jia WANG is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research areas include social stratification and inequality, work and family, health, aging, and the life course, and East Asia. Her research work has been published in leading academic journals including American Journal of Sociology, Demography, European Journal of Population, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, among others.