Working mothers around the world : Moderating effects of social position on mothers’ paid work in middle- and high-income countries

In this dissertation, I study the consequences of motherhood on different facets of women’s labor market outcomes. The main research question is: how does women’s social position moderate the way economic, policy, and cultural contexts influence motherhood effects on labor market outcomes in industrialized and developing countries? I research these heterogeneous effects in four country-comparative. First, I study aggregate labor force participation of prime age women at different levels of economic development (chapter 2). In the remaining three studies, I then research the interplay of country contexts and women’s social position on mothers’ paid labor by studying their labor market participation (chapter 3), their status in employment (chapter 4), and wages (chapter 5). This study contributes to work-family research and the stratification literature by systematically exploring the size of motherhood effects for women in different social positions across labor market outcomes and country contexts. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to knowledge of motherhood effects by testing the same relations across high- and middle-income countries. I show that the relation between motherhood status, social position, and women’s labor market outcomes is comparable across high- and upper-middle-income countries, with more tentative evidence in lower-middle-income countries. Finally, this dissertation critically evaluates the quality and availability of data for such global analyses because it includes a review of the quality of available data for high- and middle-income countries, suggesting comparable measurements of poverty rates and more detailed indicators for early childhood care and education are particularly lacking.