Maternal labor force participation and differences by education in an urban birth cohort study - 1998-2010.

1. IntroductionMaternal employment in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. Among mothers with children under 18, 47% were in the labor force in 1975 and this figure increased to more than 70% in the late 1990s, where it has remained over the last 15 years (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2009, 2014). Maternal labor force participation, employment intensity, and type of participation (non-standard work, multiple jobholding) are not only linked with economic wellbeing, but also with parenting, child care, and the home environment, all of which impact the wellbeing of families. Despite these changes in maternal labor force participation in recent decades, surprisingly few studies have investigated participation using longitudinal data. This is an important oversight as studying the continuity, intensity, and type of participation mothers engage in over time is key to understanding how and whether maternal labor force participation is linked with family wellbeing. In this descriptive report we describe maternal labor force participation (employment, unemployment, out of labor force), intensity (part- vs. full-time) and type (nonstandard, multiple job-holding), in the first nine years after giving birth.A second aim of this paper is to describe variation in maternal labor force participation in the years after a birth by maternal education. We do this for a few reasons. Changes in U.S. social policies in the late 1990s led to a greater increase in maternal employment among the least advantaged groups (Coley et al. 2007). Research has also documented the phenomenon of "diverging destinies", whereby the families in which children are being raised are increasingly diverging in terms of key inputs such as time, quality, and money for child health and development by maternal education (McLanahan 2004) and, more generally, there are huge disparities in economic resources that children receive by parents' education levels (Putnam 2015). To shed light on these potential disparities, we study whether the levels, timing, and intensity of maternal labor force participation over time vary by maternal education.A handful of studies have examined women's labor force participation longitudinally and have found that women make numerous entries into and exits from the labor force (or employment) over the life course (Hynes and Clarkberg 2005; Moen 1985; Vandenheuvel 1997). These entries and exits have important implications for thinking about long-term earnings potential, overall economic wellbeing, and ultimately the wellbeing of families. The current study builds on these earlier studies by examining maternal labor force participation in a contemporary cohort of mothers - those who had children between 1998 and 2000, shortly after major welfare reforms in the U.S. and just after maternal labor force participation rates leveled out.2. Data and methods2.1 DataWe use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS; N~3000), a representative study of births to mothers in large US cities (with populations over 200,000) between 1998 and 2000. These data are ideal for studying recent maternal labor force participation patterns as the data were collected at the time of the birth and again when the child was aged 1 (1999-2001), 3 (2001-2003), 5 (2003-2006), and 9 years (2007-2010). Moreover, from the vantage point of the child, they represent the mother's employment patterns during the first decade of that child's life. The FFCWS included approximately 5,000 births, drawing a random sample from 75 hospitals in 20 large US cities. The study oversampled non-marital births (at a ratio of 3 non-marital to 1 marital birth), resulting in a racially diverse, somewhat economically disadvantaged sample; however, the sample was designed so that when the data are weighted they are representative of mothers who gave birth in the late 1990s in large U.S. cities. The weights also adjust for non-response and attrition. …