Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia March 2009

1. Gender Role Attitudes and Women’s Labor Market Participation: Opting-Out, AIDS, and The Persistent Appeal of Housewifery Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia March 2009 University of New South Wales

2. Issue of InterestLeveling-off of FLP • After a century of remarkable growth, female labor force participation (FLP) in the United States has leveled-off in the late 1990s. • From less than 5 percent at the turn of the 20th century, female labor force participation (FLP) among 18 to 65 year olds grew to over 70 percent in the mid 1990s peakingaround 72 percent in the late 1990s, before it began to retreat back to 70 percent in 2004 (and 2007). • Since the mid-1990s, there are also been a slowdown in the rate of growth of female labor force participation (FLP) in many high FLP countries, such as Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (see Fortin, 2005).

3. U.S. Labor Force Participation by Gender(18-65 Year Olds) Source: U.S. BLS, March CPS and Canada, Cansim

4. Leveling-off of U.S. FLP in comparison to Canada Source: Statistics Canada, LFS and U.S. BLS, March CPS

5. Labor Force Participation in Australia(15 Year Olds and over) Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Table 6202

6. Issue of InterestOpting-Out • Given that the FLP of college-educated women had almost reach parity with men's in the mid-1990s, this stabilization or slight retreat was particularly disappointing for the women's movement. • It has been characterized as “opting out” in the popular press (Belkin, 2003; Wallis, 2004; Story, 2005) and among sociologists (Cotter et al., 2007; Stone, 2007) who wonder whether we are witnessing “The End of the Gender Revolution” as an ideological movement. • The “opting-out” phenomena has raised more skepticism among economists (Boushey, 2005; Goldin and Katz, 2007) • Women’s educational attainment has continued to rise, although their relative wages have not. • Their husband’s income has remained relatively unchanged, with an elasticity of income quite low (Blau and Kahn, 2005) • Demand-side (e.g. technological change, sectoral shifts; Black and Spitz-Oener, 2007) factors continue to favor women’s work.

7. Issue of InterestRole for Beliefs • This paper appeals to changing gender role attitudes, whose progression halted in the mid-1990s, as a source of explanation for the retreat in FLP. • Recognizing that traditional gender role attitudes, • defined below to capture the notion the husband should be the main ``breadwinner" and the wife the main ``homemaker", • are not necessarily antagonistic to egalitarian attitudes, • defined below to capture the notion that women are as capable as men in the workforce, the impact of both type of attitudes is studied. • Accommodating (rather than opposing) both views in the Work-Life Balance (WLB) has arguably become the new face of feminism.

8. Contribution • This paper contributes to the study of the impact of gender role attitudes on FLP in several novel ways, by 1) Accounting for non-linear time-period, life-cycle and cohort effects, as well as a host of background variables, using data from the 1977-2006 General Social Surveys (GSS) and 2) Using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72) to corroborate the age-period-cohort specification and address concerns about reverse causality. 3) Using a double prong instrumental variables strategy based on extraneous attitudes about sexual morality and political views found in the GSS, and on an exogenous shock to attitudes, namely the mid-1990s AIDS scare using repeated cross-sectional data from the 1988-2006 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) in the context of a variant of two-sample two-stage least squares (TS2LS) to address concerns about endogeneity.

9. Findings • Gender role attitudes, whose secular trends reversed in the mid-1990s when the AIDS crisis peaked, are found to explain the recent leveling-off in FLP, while general cultural trends towards more conservative social, religious and political views do not. • More precisely, the estimated coefficients of gender role attitudes imply that the 2 points rise in average traditional attitudes and 4 points decline in average egalitarian attitudes from 1993-94 to 2004-06 would account for one half to a full percentage point decline in FLP. • Gender role attitudes are thus found to be the missing gender-specific factors that explain the differences in the concavity of time trends in male and female labor force participation, which remain after accounting for the usual factors.

10. Reminder of the Talk • Relevant Literature • Theoretical Underpinnings: Economic Identity Theory and the AIDS Scare • Data and Descriptive Evidence • Time-period, life-cycle and cohorts effects in FLP • Measurement of gender role attitudes • Subjective Risk of HIV/AIDS • Econometric Specification and variant of TS2SLS • Regression Results • Main results • Longitudinal analysis with the NLS-72 • Instrumental variables strategies • Alternative hypotheses (divorce, religious, social and political conservatism, ethnic and health factors) • Sub-groups (African-American women, College-educated women vs. women with less than college, men) • Implications for subjective well-being • Conclusion

11. Relevant Literature • Impact of gender role attitudes on FLP • Levine (1993), Vella (1994), Fortin (2005), Fernandez and Fogli (2005) • Intergeneration transmission of gender role attitudes • Fernandez, Fogli and Olivetti (2004), Farré-Olalla and Vella (2007) • Dynamic macro-models with gender role attitudes • Fernandez (2007) and Fogli and Veldkamp(2007) • Cohort-effects – “Pill Revolution” • Goldin and Katz (2002), Goldin (2004) and Bailey (2006) • Identity and Gender • Akerlof and Kranton(2000, 2002), Goldin and Shim (2004), Goldin (2006)

12. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory • In historical terms, the spectacular rise in FLP from the mid-1960s onwards, has been shown to coincide with contraceptive innovation, the “Pill” revolution (Goldin and Katz (2002) and Bailey (2006), which facilitated women’s access to higher education and the labor market. • Yet, it happened in the same era as other changes, the Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution and more importantly the “Women’s Liberation Movement”, • which proposed to women with the new identity of “career women” equal to men in the workplace, capable of high achievement, and assuming their own identity by keeping their birth name (Goldin and Shim, 2004).

13. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory • But for many women who were already assuming multiple identities as spouse, mother, cook, housekeeper, and caregiver to elderly parents, this proposition may have seemed simply like adding another largely untested role or identity to an already long list. • Indeed in Fortin (2005), I distinguished three identities,---wife, mother, and career women---, which enabled me to consider mother's guilt separately. • Here, because of data limitation in terms of attitudes towards career women in the GSS, I regroup views representing the role of wives and stay-at-home moms into the traditional views and the attitudes associated with the identities of working moms and career women into the egalitarian views.

14. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory • Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2002, 2005) have proposed to incorporate one's sense of self as an important element of the utility function. • Identity translates cultural values and social norms into motivational factors. • Benabou and Tirole (2006) have introduced competing identities that are competing for time or resources, such as a traditional identity and a modern identity, where investing in the identity-capital of one can damage the other. • Here I retain some of the basic elements of their framework: retain the basic elements of the framework: • identity-endowment, identity-asset and saliency of identities.

15. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory and the AIDS Scare • To the extent that the Women's Liberation movement and Sexual Revolution of the 1960s went together, the new “career woman” was to be a “liberated” women in control of her sexuality and fertility. • In this context, the AIDS scare would make the lifestyle of the single, but not celibate, career woman less attractive. • With the Pill, some women could become as sexually promiscuous as some men without facing the gender specific consequences; with the AIDS epidemic this equality of “opportunities” was severely tested • Other health scares, such as the 2003 Mad Cow and SARS scare also had profound impacts on attitudes, identities and even trade.

17. AIDS Crisis in Canada:Number of cases reported Source: Public Health Agency Canada (2007)

18. Data • The main data are drawn the 1977 to 2006 General Social Surveys (GSS) conducted yearly (or bi-yearly) by National Opinion Research Center. • Each cross-section comprises 1372 to 2992 observations per year with a total of total of 20,000 females and 19,194 males between the ages of 18 and 65. • But the sample for which consistent gender role attitudes are measured comprises a subset of about 9000 women, because the same questions are not asked in each survey. • Data from National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72) which follows the first post-Pill cohort (1954-55 birth cohorts) are also used.

19. Data √ • Data from the National Health Interview Surveys which have been conducted yearly, for over fifty years, as one of the major data collection programs of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) combine information on health characteristics and many demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. • Designed to monitor the health of the U.S. population, these large repeated cross-sectional surveys comprise from 20,000 to 30,000 observations a year. • In the late 1980s, the NCHS added they an “AIDS Knowledge and Attitudes" supplement; in 1997 a subset of that module was incorporated into the core components “Sample Adult” . • The information one's own chances of getting HIV/AIDS is from the question: “What are your chances of getting HIV/AIDS? High/Already have HIV/AIDS (1), Medium (2/3), Low (1/3), or None (0).“

20. Table 2. Women's Averages by Birth Cohort for Selected Years

21. Table 2. Women's Averages by Birth Cohort for Selected Years

22. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006)

23. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Number of Children by Birth Cohort

24. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Number of Children by Birth Cohort

25. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)FLP by Birth Cohort

26. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)FLP by Birth Cohort

27. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Male Labor Force Participation by Birth Cohort

28. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Male Labor Force Participation by Birth Cohort

29. Age-Period-Cohort Specifications • Various flexible A-P-C specifications show the following parsimonious specification captures well the time trend in FLP • Yit= α0+ α1T + α2T2 + α3 A +γ4A2 + Σjδj Bj + βgGit+ βxXit+ εit • where Yit is the outcome of interest • where T is time , A is age and Bjare the 8 birth cohort categories • where Gitare gender role attitudes that capture the saliency of traditional or egalitarian identities • where Xitiindividual characteristics that capture the identity-endowment(living in intact family, mother ever worked, religion at 16, etc.), identity-asset(education, children, married, divorced, etc.) variables • For simplicity, the model is estimated with a Linear Probability Model, but corroborated by a Probit model

30. Table 3. Time-period, Life-cycle and Cohort Effects in Labor Market Participation

31. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

32. Gender Role Attitudes • Unlike psychological variables, such as non-cognitive skills (e.g. the Rosenberg self-esteem scale), no consensus on how to measure gender role attitudes exists in the literature, perhaps in part because the questions vary by survey. • Psychologists prefer to ask a number of questions (rather only one) aggregated in a “scale” whose validity can be assessed on three principles: • convergent validity (a similar index should yield a similar assessment of the individual), • stability (the index would yield a similar assessment if administered in a short time span), and • reliability (answers to each question comprising the index should be highly correlated) • Here two indexes are constructed and answers to each question scaled 1 to n were rescaled 1 to 0 using the formula (n-k)/(n-1) where n is the number of categories and k is the categorical integer, but multiplied by 100 in Table 1.

33. Gender Role Attitudes √ • In the NLS72, there a total of ten questions: 5 on traditional views and 5 on egalitarian attitudes

34. Gender Role Attitudes • In the GSS, out of a total of eight questions on gender role attitudes, only four are asked in the 2000s

35. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006)Traditional Attitudes of Women by Birth Cohort (FEFAM)

36. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Egalitarian Attitudes of Women by Birth Cohort

37. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTable 4. Baseline Results – GSS 1977-2006

38. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

39. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTable 5. Single-Cohort Longitudinal Data –NLS72

40. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPInstrumental Variables Strategies • In the GSS, questions about gender role attitudes and labor market decisions are asked contemporaneously, this raises the issue of possible biases associated with the avoidance of cognitive dissonance (Akerlof and Dickens, 1982). • Letting , equation (1) can be rewritten as • Cognitive dissonance generates an errors-in-variables, where denote the true attitudes. • In the classical case, , this would lead to an attenuation bias in .

41. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPInstrumental Variables Strategies • This issue is addressed using a double prong instrumental variables strategy with some instruments coming from the GSS and another instrument from a TS2SLS. • The instruments from the GSS are answers to questions about the respondents’ political viewsand attitudes towards sexual relations. • These variables are correlated with gender role attitudes and are thought to impact labor market decisions only through attitudes toward whether women should work outside the home or not.

42. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006) Premarital Sex Wrong - Women by Birth Cohort Risky

43. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006)Liberal Political Views - Women by Birth Cohort

44. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLP Table 6. 2SLS Results - GSS 1977-2006

45. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTwo Sample 2-Stage Least Squares Variant • In the usual case (Angrist and Krueger, 1991; Inoue and Solon, 2005) , both samples contain on the instruments. • Here the instrument is available only in sample 2. So an estimate of the instrument in sample 1 has to be constructed. • Let be the excluded instrument not available in sample 1 and let • From each cross-section of sample 2 (the NHIS), I estimate where is a M-vector of age dummies. Stacking the estimates results in a M ΧT matrix .

46. Subjective Risk of HIV/AIDSWomen by Birth Cohorts NHIS 1988-2006

47. Subjective Risk of HIV/AIDS√ √√Women by Birth Cohorts NHIS 1988-2006

48. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTwo Sample 2-Stage Least Squares • An estimate of the subjective risk of HIV/AIDS is constructed as • where is a T-vector of time dummies, assuming as in Inoue and Solon that . • Writing the linear projection of included instruments onto , the residuals then net out the included instruments, and can be used as excluded instruments to identify and . • In other words, the instrumentation relies on the fact that women of different ages at different time periods evaluated their chances of getting HIV/AIDS differently.

49. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLP Table 7. TS2SLS Results - GSS 1988-2006

50. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP