The New Lifecycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

By Claudia Goldin, Joshua W. Mitchell. 2016

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new lifecycle of women’s employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, lifecycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak and then declined starting in the fifties. The new lifecycle of employment is initially high and flat, there is a dip in the middle and a phasing out that is more prolonged than for previous cohorts. The hump is gone, the middle is a bit sagging and the top has greatly expanded. We explore the increase in cumulative work experience for women from the 1930s to the 1970s birth cohorts using the SIPP and the HRS. We investigate the changing labor force impact of a birth event across cohorts and by education and also the impact of taking leave or quitting. We find greatly increased labor force experience across cohorts, far less time out after a birth and greater labor force recovery for those who take paid or unpaid leave. Increased employment of women in their older ages is related to more continuous work experience across the lifecycle.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1043d8ea891df5aaf34f42a789c24acf219a09a

Citations in the corpus

• Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, unknown): “…in the years leading up to parenthood, but diverge sharply with the arrival of children, with little recovery for mothers in the medium to longer-term (up to 10 to 20 years) (Angelov et al., 2016; Kleven et al., 2019a; Chung et al., 2017; Goldin and Mitchell, 2017; Fitzenberger et al., 2013).”
• What Explains Uneven Female Labor Force Participation Levels and Trends in Developing Countries? (2019, unknown): “This trend has occurred at a time when female education was rising to the levels of men, fertility was low and falling further, and an expanding service sector was absorbing many women workers (e.g., Gehringer and Klasen 2017; Goldin and Mitchell 2017).”
• The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood? (2018, unknown): “…(see, e.g., Kleven et al., 2018 using Danish data; Angelov et al., 2016 using Swedish data; and Byker, 2016, Chung et al., 2017, and Goldin and Mitchell, 2017 using U.S. data).3 Consistent with past work, we find large and significant employment declines (roughly thirty percentage points)…”
• Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021, unknown): “Among the reasons cited to explain this gap are gender differences in education, occupational segregation, and part-time work (see, e.g., Goldin and Katz 2016, Goldin et al. 2017); fertility choices; and selection into family-friendly career paths (Adda et al. 2017).”