Women's Employment Patterns during Early Parenthood: A Group-Based Trajectory Analysis.

Research on women's employment and parenthood frequently focuses on the correlates and consequences of decisions at a particular time, such as a birth. This article applies a group-based trajectory method to examine women s employment trajectories across the period of early parenthood using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 2,093). We find that throughout early parenthood, women exhibit significant movement into and out of the labor force. Factors that typically predict women's employment status, such as age at first birth and education, are also good predictors of women's employment patterns. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research, particularly on the use of a static measure of women s or couples' employment status. Key Words: fertility, life course, mothers, trajectory, women's employment. The employment of young women, wives, and new mothers has profound practical and theoretical implications for a wide variety of social phenomena, including marriage and divorce, gender equity, and children's well-being. It is not surprising, therefore, that a substantial body of empirical research has developed over the last 30 years, with a focus on revealing the causes and consequences of changes in women's employment. Although these studies have made substantial contributions to our understanding of women's employment transitions at particular points in time (such as the birth of a child), very little research had the aim of understanding individual women's employment patterns over longer periods of the life course. This omission has had broad implications for how we view women's employment decisions. For example, scholars frequently imply that at the first birth, women divide themselves into two groups: workers and homemakers (Klerman & Leibowitz, 1999; Shaw, 1994). The few studies that examine women's employment trajectories, however, hint that women, particularly mothers, might exhibit a high degree of mobility between employment and nonemployment over their life courses (Moen, 1985; Vandenheuvel, 1997). Although many studies examining the causes and consequences of women's employment still operationalize employment as a stable dichotomous variable, evidence of substantial movement into and out of the labor force by mothers would suggest that a more complex theorizing and operationalization of employment status may be appropriate. This article uses a relatively new method, the group-based trajectory method (Nagin, 1999), to analyze women's employment trajectories in the period surrounding both first and second births. This methodology allows us to examine the diverse ways that mothers of infants and young children negotiate the continuing decision to be employed or not. Our results suggest that there are six typical employment trajectories around the birth of a child. Consistent with the models employed in traditional studies of employment, we find a substantial group of women who leave employment before or at the birth of a child, and groups who remain stably employed or stably out of the labor force. In addition, however, our results highlight other employment trajectories across the transition to motherhood, including patterns marked by both decreases and increases in employment. Examining the employment patterns of women across two births reveals even less continuity in employment. Descriptive analyses indicate that traditional demographic characteristics such as educational attainment easily distinguish between women at either extreme of the employment continuum, but may provide us with less insight about the differences between those groups without stable employment patterns, particularly around the second birth. We suggest that focusing on employment trajectories rather than on employment status at one point in time allows us to better understand the diversity and prevalence of various employment careers across women's childbearing years, and their implications for the life course. …