Inter-Generational Transmission and the 21st Century Rise in Skilled Mothers' Labor Supply

Abstract

By most measures, gender progress in the U.S. labor market has stagnated since the 1990s. Yet, this paper reveals that skilled U.S. mothers' full-time employment rate rose by 12 percentage points between 1999 and 2016. After ruling out several standard explanations for such a change, I hypothesize that the surge of skilled mothers entering the full-time workforce in the previous generation has induced a recent shift in household gender norms. I develop a model in which a new mother's ex ante valuation of the disutility of pursuing a career is conditioned by her own mother's prior career behavior, and find empirical support for the model in two-generation datasets constructed from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. An accounting exercise attributes roughly 30 percent of the recent change to the model's inter-generational mechanism. Shifting norms appear to be promoting gender equality in household labor supply in the 21st century.

Keywords: mothers' labor supply, gender norms, inter-generational transmission

JEL Classification: E71, J13, J22