Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment 143991866X, 9781439918661

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Are Mothers’ Experiences Constrained across States?
1. Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State: Lessons from Previous Research and Directions for the Future
2. Mapping the “United” States: Maternal Employment, Child Care, and School-Aged-Care Resources
3. State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment: Examining Female Social and Political Empowerment across States
4. Toward a Typology of U.S. Mother-Friendly Welfare States and Its Political, Religious, and Sociodemographic Determinants
5. Gendered Institutional State Contexts and Gender-Empowered and Child-Care Regimes
Conclusion: Policy Recommendations for the Future
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Motherlands

Motherl ands

How States Push Mothers Out of Employment

Leah Ruppanner

Temple University Press

Philadelphia  • Rome • Tokyo

Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 tupress.temple.edu Copyright © 2020 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System of Higher ­Education All rights reserved Published 2020 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ruppanner, Leah, 1981– author. Title: Motherlands : how states push mothers out of employment / Leah Ruppanner. Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The calculus for mothers between working and staying at home varies across U.S. states. Lower costs and longer school days tend to help mothers return to work after giving birth. States tend to offer either better workplace protection or affordable child care, but few states support mothers across their employment needs.”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052016 (print) | LCCN 2019052017 (ebook) | ISBN 9781439918654 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781439918661 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781439918678 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Working mothers—United States—States. | Mothers—Employment— United States—States. Classification: LCC HQ759.48 .R87 2020 (print) | LCC HQ759.48 (ebook) | DDC 306.874/30973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052016 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052017 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National ­Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all the Avas and Michelles who are stepping into this big world and “ killing it”— but, in particular, to my Ava, who is destined to do great things

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Are Mothers’ Experiences Constrained across States?

1

1 Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State: Lessons from Previous Research and Directions for the Future

11

2 Mapping the “United” States: Maternal Employment, Child Care, and School-Aged-Care Resources

27

3 State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment: Examining Female Social and Political Empowerment across States

54

4 Toward a Typology of U.S. Mother-Friendly Welfare States and Its Political, Religious, and Sociodemographic Determinants

76

5 Gendered Institutional State Contexts and Gender-Empowered and Child-Care Regimes

101

Conclusion: Policy Recommendations for the Future

132

Notes References Index

145 149 163

Acknowledgments

I thank C and A for all their love and support, M for reading early and late iterations of the book to provide insight into changing times and fix grammatical errors, D and M for always being cheerleaders and sources of support in all I do, and Ben Maltby, who provided crucial research support. My thanks also go to Judy Treas, who got me into the welfare game, and Sarah Damaske for providing enthusiasm and feedback on the book. Without any of these wonderful people, this book would not be possible.

Motherlands

Introduction Are Mothers’ Experiences Constrained across States?

M

ichelle is gregarious, warm, and quick to laugh. Her long curly hair frames her face and is quickly pulled back when she makes a serious point. Michelle lives in a townhouse with her husband and their one-year-old child. Michelle and her husband both work full time in jobs that are as rewarding as they are demanding. Their child is a central focus for this family full of love, with both parents engaged in providing child care. But finding reliable child care causes major stress for Michelle and her husband. After the birth of her child, Michelle took a short parental leave and then returned to work full time. Most of her friends, however, reduced their work hours or stayed at home to care for their children. A major obstacle for Michelle’s return to work was her difficulty finding high-quality infant care. In the state where Michelle lives, care for children up to eighteen months old is extremely difficult to find and very expensive. In fact, many in-home child-care centers in Michelle’s state have closed because operation costs (i.e., rents, labor, and supplies) are too high. When Michelle called, none of the inhome child-care centers had space or even waiting lists, and most could not anticipate when a space would open for Michelle’s child. As a result, Michelle and her husband decided to put their young child into center-based care. The center is often closed on holidays and for teacher-parent conferences and enforces a strict illness policy that leaves Michelle and her husband scrambling for care to fill these gaps. Infant care available in Michelle’s state boasts long days (7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) and expensive prices ($2,000 per month), while the toddler care more closely resembles a school day, with truncated

2 | Introduction

hours (8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.). Parents can pay extra for early drop-off or late pickup, but these time slots are staffed by a different group of teachers who are often new because salaries are low, which results in high turnover. Child care is a major source of stress for Michelle and her partner and disrupts her career, often pulling her away from work to fill child-care gaps. Michelle loves her job and always pictured herself having a long career, but she is considering joining her friends in becoming a stay-at-home mom so that her child has reliable, quality care. Ava is quick-witted and deeply intelligent. Her short brown hair frames a heart-shaped face that brightens when she talks about work, family, and her love of math. Ava is unstoppable in her ability to make big things happen and is passionate about supporting young women in their career advancement. Ava is married to a man who is also very intelligent, and she is mother to a six-year-old daughter, who is a mirror image of Ava and shares her love of all things math. Ava lives in a suburban home surrounded by families with other young children. After the birth of her child, Ava took the short maternity leave allowed by her work’s modest leave policy, after which she put her child into day care and returned to work full time. Ava felt that the cost of child care, although not inexpensive, was affordable and that the quality was good. The day care staff remained constant, and there were always enough teachers to assist with the children. When Ava’s daughter reached school age, she entered public school. While the school days (8:15 a.m.–2:50 p.m.) do not cover the entire workday, there is before-school (starting at 7:00 a.m.) and after-school (ending at 6:00 p.m.) care that is inexpensive and readily available. These programs are of high quality, provide children with education-based activities, and are well staffed with workers who stay with the program over the long term. When Ava’s daughter has school breaks or pupil-free days, the after-school programs offer coverage for working families. Most of the mothers Ava knows work full time. Among the handful who exited the labor market to care for children, most intend to return to work full time when their children reach school age. Although Michelle and Ava are hypothetical, their employment and child-care patterns typify distinct experiences of American motherhood that characterize two main clusters across states. Michelle’s experience captures traditionally gendered divisions of employment and expensive, hard-to-access child-care resources. Ava’s captures high rates of full-time dual-earner families, quick returns to work following childbirth, and inexpensive and more accessible child-care and school-aged-care resources. One might expect that Ava lives in a gender-progressive state like California; in fact, Ava is more likely to live in a conservative red state like Nebraska.

Introduction | 3

Child care in these states is more affordable and of higher quality, child-care workers are more readily available, and more eligible children are enrolled in a federally subsidized Head Start child-care program. Mothers in these states are more likely to be employed full time. These states tend to cluster in the middle of the country and have distinct racial profiles—smaller Latino populations and more African Americans and non-Hispanic whites—and are more politically and religiously conservative. These states are not the coastal economic powerhouses but rather have economic characteristics— lower home values and higher wages relative to the cost of goods—that allow more people to enter the middle class. This means that a second income has a dramatic impact on family finances and, as a consequence, these states have some of the lowest rates of married-couple poverty in the nation. By contrast, Michelle is more likely to reside in the politically progressive state of California than the red state of Nebraska. Child care in Michelle’s state is expensive, school days are short, and mothers are more likely to be out of the labor market or work part time. Mothers’ poor labor market attachment stands in contrast to the fact that these states have some of the best economic and political outcomes for women. Specifically, mothers in these states have access to higher-status professional positions, benefit from more progressive family policies, and are more likely to have a woman represent them in their state legislatures. These states are also more ethnically diverse, left-leaning, college-educated, urban, and secular. Economically, these states are more affluent, and state governments offer more parental leave and subsidies for pre-kindergarten education. In this regard, Michelle lives in a state that is one of the most gender progressive in the nation. However, child care is expensive, school days are short, and the concentration of child-care workers is low. Further, purchasing power is limited, meaning mothers’ earnings are unlikely to cover child care on top of other high costs of living (e.g., rent, food, electricity). Thus, states like California are characterized by ­extremes— progressive gender policies and economic opportunity for women, but tremendous constraints in finding high-quality, affordable child care, on top of high costs of living. As a consequence, married mothers’ employment in these states is among the lowest in the nation. Collectively, mothers’ employment experiences and child- and schoolaged-care resources tend to cluster together into distinct spatial groups across certain collections of U.S. states in unexpected ways. As states and the federal government are increasingly discussing ways to legislate governmentfunded child-care policies, they should look to many of the red states—like ­Nebraska—to structure effective government programs. This book shows

4 | Introduction

that access to high-quality and affordable child care is a bipartisan issue with many of the red states leading the charge.

Not All States Are Equal: Child Care and Gender across States The unusually high political and cultural autonomy of U.S. states is notable. The division of power between the federal and state governments means that states hold significant power to develop their own legislation that, especially in terms of gender, captures ideological fissures across states. Yet gender social policy and gender welfare state scholars often treat the United States as a single, homogenous political entity. Common sense suggests this is misguided. The United States is among the most politically polarized developed nations, with its coastal constituents among the world’s most progressive, and its southern constituents the most conservative. Public opinion tends to assume that U.S. states, and their governments, principally differ along political lines (i.e., “red” versus “blue” states) that capture ideological cleavages (i.e., liberals versus conservatives). These national discussions often portray the eastern and western coastal states as uniformly socially progressive in their policies, gender role attitudes, and politics. Yet these broad generalizations mask important state divisions, especially in relation to gender. Kweilin Ellingrud and colleagues (2016) show that no state is close to gender parity on an index of equality at work, provision of essential resources, legal and political voice, security, or autonomy, and that closing work-based gender gaps would add $4.3 trillion to the gross domestic product (GDP). Clearly, an analysis to reach a comprehensive understanding of American mothers’ employment patterns must foreground the state for two key reasons: first, state governments have considerable power to legislate publicly funded assistance to American mothers; and second, state governments vary substantially in their political and ideological behavior. Since the coastal states are often seen as the most progressive—advocating women’s right to work and access to equal pay—it would be logical to assume that these states are best at supporting maternal employment. However, the data on maternal employment and child care do not support this presumption. Rather, Figure I.1 shows that states tend to divide into a typology of four distinct policy clusters: (1) child-care-regime states, or those with fulltime maternal employment, inexpensive child care, and expansive schoolaged resources but little political and economic empowerment of women; (2) gender-empowered states, or those that offer more generous family leave policies and anti–gender discrimination laws, higher levels of female repre-

Introduction | 5

Figure I.1. Four child-care-policy and gender-empowerment-policy types across states.

sentation in state legislatures, and smaller gender pay gaps but limited childcare resources; (3) ideal child-care and gender-empowered states, or those with high maternal employment, child-care resources, and gender empowerment; and (4) policy-void states, or those with limited maternal employment, child-care support, and weak gendered economic and political resources. Surprisingly, many states with strong child-care regimes rank poorly on gender empowerment, and many states that rank high on gender empowerment offer few public child-care resources. Only one state—Hawaii—and the District of Columbia offer both strong support for working mothers and mothers’ rights to work. Yet even in these broadly successful contexts there are policy voids, with neither Hawaii nor Washington, D.C. offering long school days and widely available after-school care. This omission is important because it indicates that no American state holistically supports working mothers across all ages and stages of life. But since different states perform well across different metrics of maternal welfare, they can look to one another for policy solutions to equalize mothers’ access to child care, school-aged resources, and employment. The study results in this book are valuable for policy makers and academics alike, offering a guide for state-level public policy makers seeking to create more employment opportunities for mothers by revealing which states perform particularly well or particularly poorly across these different metrics.

6 | Introduction

Narrowing the Scope: The Focus on Married Mothers This book focuses on married mothers to assess, among other questions, whether living in a state with stronger child-care or gender-empowerment policies reduces mothers’ financial dependence on their partners. State-tostate variation in policies and resources result in some mothers being better equipped to maintain full-time employment, a form of economic independence, than others. These arguments appear regularly in the literature on gendered welfare states, and both are tested throughout the book. This is not to discount the utility of family-friendly policies or child-care regimes to single mothers; a body of research shows that single parents are less likely to be financially secure than two-parent households and thus can find themselves particularly reliant on family policies (Damaske, Bratter, and Frech 2017; Han and Waldfogel 2001; Meyers et al. 2001). Gendered welfare state theorists underscore that a key role of the welfare state is to reduce gender inequality at the institutional and family levels. Narrowing the focus to married mothers enables this book to test the efficacy of state-level welfare state systems at both levels, examining how they affect mothers’ employment overall, vis-à-vis their dependence on their partner in a family setting. These questions are interesting given the changing patterns of marriage whereby the most educated, middle- and upper-middle-class women are more likely to marry than those from lower socioeconomic statuses (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.b) and to maintain employment following childbirth (Damaske 2011). Thus, the barriers to maternal employment faced by the married may be even larger among those with fewer resources and mothers of color. This is not to say that the female-friendly political and child-care measures developed in this book are theoretically and substantively unimportant for single mothers and same-sex and extended families. Rather, this book’s empirical scope is limited to more closely align with existing welfare state literature, and to provide a starting point for a broader discussion about gender, family, and policies across the United States. Further, while this book investigates the relationship between child care, maternal employment, and gender empowerment for states with higher concentrations of minority groups and families in poverty, these models cannot provide the richness of a more detailed intersectionalist approach. Rather, this project provides a broad conceptualization of state-to-state variation that can be utilized in more detailed studies linked to individual-level data. This book is the starting point for a national discussion about state-to-state differences in maternal employment and thus does not holistically capture or claim to speak to all mothers’ experiences.

Introduction | 7

It is also worth noting that this book focuses on cisgender heterosexual constructions of femininity and masculinity. By estimating married mothers’ employment consistent with gender binaries, it excludes more fluid understandings of gender, motherhood, and employment. This is an acknowledged limitation of this research, and future scholarship might consider whether the institutional contexts and employment outcomes documented across this book remain consistent across more diverse expressions of sex and gender.

Regionality across States: The U.S. Census Bureau Definitions To describe how different states cluster together with similar institutional contexts, the U.S. Census Bureau regional clusters are used to classify states. These are illustrated in Figure I.2, which illustrates both the regional (e.g., Pacific and New England) and broader (e.g., Midwest and South) grouping terms used throughout this book. Although these terms are only intended to designate geographical locations, they are implicitly loaded with normative implications; the southern states are generally recognized as being more politically conservative, for example, while the West Coast states are typically seen as more liberal. These regional political and cultural qualities likely influence each state’s family-friendly institutional context. Typically, conservative states vote for Republican presidential candidates and are referred to as “red states,” while liberal states vote for Democratic candidates and are known as “blue states.” As stated previously however, a central aim of this book is to look beyond stereotypical assumptions about the relationship between each state’s politics and its approach to maternal employment. This model of red and blue states is referred to throughout the book but does not prejudice the results of its statistical analyses. Although the census groupings provide broad geographical overviews, four key geographical entities—Nebraska, California, Idaho, and Washington, D.C.—are heavily referenced throughout to isolate the four patterns identified through the child-care-regime and genderempowerment-regime types.

Overview of the Book The book is divided as follows. Chapter 1 reviews the welfare state literature and the capabilities perspective, which provide the theoretical frameworks for this book. Chapter 2 offers a descriptive overview of U.S. states across measures of maternal employment, child-care and school-aged-care resources,

8 | Introduction

Figure I.2. U.S. Census Bureau regional divisions. (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.a.)

and gendered political and economic characteristics. Chapter 3 provides a descriptive overview of women’s broader economic and political position across states and its relationship to mothers’ employment. Chapter 4 applies factor analyses to identify that states cluster into groups: (1) child-care regimes, or those with similar levels of maternal employment, institutionally supported

Introduction | 9

child care and school-aged care, and (2) gender-empowered regimes, or those with rich economic and political opportunities for women. It then uses regression results to contextualize why some states have more generous childcare resources or stronger gender empowerment, paying careful attention to states’ sociodemographic, political, and religious composition. The more successful child-care regimes—the states where mothers find more child-care resources—are states with high concentrations of politically and religiously conservative constituents. These states tend to cluster in the middle of the country. By contrast, the gender-empowered states have Democratic voting patterns, constituents concentrated in urban centers, and secular religious attitudes. In Chapter 5, regression results test political and religious explanations, the role of state policy makers’ approaches to child-care resources, gendered labor market characteristics, costs of living, and traditional family/ gender roles. The results show that child-care-regime states have state governments that more effectively provide poor children with spaces in subsidized care and markets that offer higher-quality child care, more child-care workers, and more female-dominated jobs. By contrast, gender-empowered-regime states are more affluent (i.e., have higher home values) and generous (i.e., provide more money to state-sponsored pre-K care) but have fewer child-care workers, lower child-care availability, and higher costs of living. The Conclusion provides clear policy solutions to equalize mothers’ access to the labor market. These include (1) reducing child-care costs and increasing child-care spaces, especially in states with a high cost of living; (2) maximizing enrollment in the federal Head Start program; (3) lengthening school days; (4) legislating high-paid parental leave to all parents; (5) investing in femaledominated professions to ensure that these are well resourced and paid; (6) restricting work to enable more flexibility and schedule control for women and men to handle caregiving roles; (7) opening male-dominated higherpaying professions, including blue-collar work, to women; and (8) reducing the structural barriers to men taking on more paid and unpaid caregiving. The purpose of this study is not to advocate for universal maternal ­employment—many mothers may prefer to stay at home, especially with small children—but rather to reduce the institutional barriers mothers face when reentering employment so that they have greater autonomy in making employment decisions following childbirth. Men often take medical leaves (e.g., following a heart attack) and return to work without consequences. Mothers are unique in experiencing economic penalties for leaves to birth and care for young children. Effective family policies are crucial to mitigate this cost. By providing policies utilized in other states to support working families, a state can better integrate mothers into the labor market. These poli-

10 | Introduction

cies are e­ ssential given that women’s gains in high-skilled, male-­dominated professions stalled in the 1990s, with women remaining disproportionately clustered in female-dominated, low-skilled professions (Hegewisch et al. 2010). Equalizing mothers’ access to all aspects of the labor market will benefit individual families and state economies alike. Drawing lessons from red states like Nebraska, state politicians can address child care as a bipartisan issue that benefits their constituents and economies alike.

1

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State Lessons from Previous Research and Directions for the Future

W

elfare state theorists conceptualize how certain countries create or restrain opportunities for their citizens. Welfare state typologies identify the shared characteristics that group countries together, creating a welfare state type. Extending these concepts to U.S. states, this book addresses a central question: What would Ava’s life look like if she lived in Michelle’s state (and vice versa), and do states cluster in their offerings? Thus far, welfare state scholars have assumed that Michelle’s and Ava’s life chances would be similar because they live in the United States rather than in Sweden (see Lesthaeghe and Neidert 2006 for an exception). Such a view would benefit from greater nuance. Michelle’s and Ava’s lives are different because Michelle lives in California and Ava in Nebraska. Similarly, it would be overly simple to buy into the cultural ideology of free and rational choice and assume that Michelle’s and Ava’s choices about whether to enter employment were a simple matter of salary against costs. There are additional, structural barriers to Michelle’s and Ava’s employment as a consequence of living in different states. Under a rational-choice approach, Ava and Michelle should weigh their opportunities and make the most rational (beneficial) employment decisions. Rational choice predicts Michelle and Ava should be equally likely to work full time because Michelle lives in a state where women earn more money in higher-status professions and Ava lives in a state where second incomes keep families in the middle class. Yet the results of this book show that most mothers in Michelle’s state reduce work to part time or stay at home. The math of earnings versus expenses says choice might not be purely

12 | Chapter 1

economically rational, so its prevalence is best explained by a capabilities perspective, which asks another question: What are the constraints on individuals’ autonomy and self-maximization? For Michelle, child-care costs on top of high costs of living structurally constrain mothers’ employment in this state. What is surprising, however, is that Michelle is more likely to live in a gender-progressive state like California than a more conservative red state like Nebraska. More details on these theoretical frameworks are outlined below.

Conceptualizing the United States as a Liberal Welfare State In the United States, the concept of a welfare state first emerged under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who enacted measures to provide federally administered welfare for those in greatest need. The signature piece of legislation was the Social Security Act, introduced in 1935, which provided guaranteed, federally administered financial support for those above a certain age threshold. The old-age benefits are an entitlement based on workers’ contributions over the duration of their work lives. Other policies that followed Social Security were largely need based—that is, provided to those with the greatest need—which has become the hallmark of the U.S. approach to welfare at a federal level (Berkowitz 1991). This ideological approach—that welfare is restricted to the poor rather than universally available—coheres with the American individualist “pullyourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” ideology and provides the foundation of most federal policies including those aimed at supporting working families. As welfare policies proliferated throughout Western industrial nations during the twentieth century, it became clear that states’ approaches to welfare were influenced by their differing social and political cultures. Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990) offered arguably the most influential account of this phenomenon, through his typology of three worlds of welfare. This typology overlaid different nation-states’ welfare policies with analyses of their culture and history, producing three different holistic types of welfare state: liberal, conservative, and social democratic. The liberal welfare state is characterized by limited government intervention. When governments provide direct welfare assistance to their citizens, resources are allocated to those in the greatest need, and who meet certain means-tested criteria. The rest of the population’s needs are left to be resolved by the market or from within their families. The United States, with its limited, means-tested welfare policies, is typically placed in this category, and the way U.S. families source child care, parental leave, school-aged re-

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  13

sources, and after-school support tends to exemplify the liberal welfare state model. While other Western industrial nations offer welfare at a federal level to support working families, the United States’ provisions are minimal, and their cumbersome rules often make them difficult to access.1 In line with Esping-Andersen’s model of the liberal welfare state, resources for child and school-aged care are both market-based and means-tested; the state supports those in greatest need, leaving the rest of its citizens to utilize the market or family and friends to redress their family demands. This approach reinforces class-based differences because those of higher status are better equipped with a variety of child-care sources that allow them to maintain employment (Boushey 2016; Damaske 2011). At the other end of Esping-Andersen’s spectrum are social-democratic welfare states, which are characterized by high taxation and expansive ­government-provided resources. These countries support equalizing access to benefits, with resources provided to all citizens regardless of their income or personal circumstances. The Nordic countries typify this model of welfare state by, for example, offering comprehensive, universal, and governmentsubsidized child care. In the middle of the spectrum are conservative welfare states, which provide their citizens with some government resources that are more explicitly tied to maintaining traditional family forms. For example, Germany provides long-term maternity leave with a guaranteed return to work. This program offers new mothers guaranteed financial assistance at a federal level but denies them direct institutional support through services such as subsidized child-care or after-school programs.2 This reinforces traditional divisions of labor—with women assuming the bulk of the homemaking, and men the breadwinning. While it was developed with nation-states in mind, EspingAndersen’s typology of welfare states may also apply to states within federated governments, especially in a large and diverse nation like the United States.

Criticisms of the Three Worlds Typology: The Role of Gender Here, Esping-Andersen’s typology is used as a starting point to investigate the United States in terms of its liberal approaches to welfare. The typology of three worlds of welfare states has been used across a range of international comparative sociological, economic, and gender research (for example, Boeckmann, Misra, and Budig 2015; den Dulk, Peters, and Poutsma 2012; Huber and Stephens 2000; Korpi 2000, 2010; Lewis 1992; Meyers and Gornick 2003). Yet Esping-Andersen’s typology has been criticized for failing to

14 | Chapter 1

foreground gender in its analysis of the welfare state (Goldscheider, Bern­ hardt, and Lappegård 2015; Lewis 1992; Orloff 1993, 2009). Much of this research on the gendered welfare state contends that gender norms and welfare state structures are mutually reinforcing; in other words, gender norms influence how welfare states behave, and different welfare states’ institutional and political contexts reinforce norms of masculine and feminine behavior (Lewis 1992; Orloff 1996). Ann Shola Orloff (1993) develops an extension of Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology that incorporates gender into its construction, paying attention to maternal employment patterns and mothers’ ability to financially support an autonomous household. She argues that an effective welfare state is one where women can be financially independent at all life stages, without needing to rely on a husband’s resources for survival. Diane Sainsbury and coauthors (1999) examine how family-friendly welfare policies can alleviate mothers’ unpaid “second shift” of housework, facilitating more equal access to employment. Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers (2003) develop a typology of family-friendly resources, including family leave, work time regulation, child care, preschool, and school-aged care, to create their own typology and illustrate that mothers are more likely to be employed in countries with more expansive family policies that increase access to these resources. Collectively, these studies show that a country’s institutional context, its family policies, and its level of maternal employment are interlinked. Empirical studies show that when mothers live in countries with more policies supporting working families (i.e., child care, workplace protections, and parental leave), they divide their time more equitably between employment and domestic work (Fuwa 2004; Geist 2005; Ruppanner 2009, 2010). Crucially, this research shows that some welfare states are simply holistically better at supporting working mothers than others, which results in less gendered economic, political, and employment inequality (Gornick and Meyers 2003). In an American context, however, a major limitation of this existing gendered welfare state research is the treatment of the United States as a single liberal welfare state type, which masks how U.S. states vary in their approaches to welfare policy, demography, and attitudes. This is the major innovation of this book—understanding these patterns across states.

The Liberal Welfare State: An Overview of State Approaches to Family Policy The U.S. needs-based welfare approach is most clearly seen in access to government-sponsored child care. Although some federal and state tax relief

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  15

is provided to subsidize market-based child-care purchases, the government only directly provides child-care services for those in greatest need through subsidized child care, after-school programs, and school lunch support (Cohen 1996; U.S. Department of Agriculture 2019). For example, Head Start is a federal program operated through the Office of Head Start with the Department of Health and Human Services and Administration of Children and Families. Head Start was enacted in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson to close the educational gap between children in poor and higherincome families. Head Start provides child care aimed at school readiness to qualifying low-income children from birth to five years. Head Start child care must conform to federal regulations and standards, but Head Start can be provided in child-care centers, schools, and in-home care facilities. To date, this program has served over thirty-six million children (Office of Head Start 2019). Although Head Start is federally funded, significant variations in enrollment emerge across states. Local providers, facing the varying costs of operation depending on their local labor markets, must make difficult decisions on how to utilize Head Start money—investing in either expanded enrollment, longer duration, or staff salaries (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016). Clearly, while the federal funding of Head Start is standardized, states implement the program differently. This leads to significant state-to-state variation in Head Start enrollment, which may restrict maternal employment. Further, Head Start is limited, by design, to those in greatest need and thus this federal program fails to support most working families. As a result, many American families are forced to find child care on the open market, which can be difficult to access and expensive, imposing further barriers to maternal employment. Another dimension through which states provide care is by legislating universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs. These programs are targeted at children in their year before entering kindergarten with the goal of school readiness. However, the coverage of preschool-aged children varies dramatically across states. Only two states—Vermont and Florida—and the District of Columbia can truly be considered universal in their coverage of eligible four-year-olds (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016). Other states that provide “universal” child care (Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New York, and Wisconsin) have significant gaps in coverage. Georgia, for example, allocates pre-K care through a lottery program, which means not all eligible children are covered. Oklahoma’s “universal” pre-K is implemented through local school districts. While 99 percent of Oklahoma’s school districts offer pre-K services, their delivery varies, with some districts offering spaces to all

16 | Chapter 1

eligible children but others providing spaces on a first come, first served or a lottery basis (National Institute for Early Education Research 2017). Across most of these states, the decentralized approach reduces the effectiveness in coverage of these programs. These gaps reflect inadequate resources; filling the gaps would require state governments to allocate more funding to the programs so local school districts can expand space and staffing to cover all eligible children. Indeed, Washington, D.C., saw maternal employment increase by 12 percent, 10 points of which are directly attributable to expanded child care, following its introduction of universal child care (Malik 2018). Creating a truly universal child-care program will not only benefit children in school readiness but increase maternal employment. Another federal welfare policy aimed at working families is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA). The FMLA “entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave” (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). Employees are eligible for twelve weeks of job-protected unpaid leave within a year following the birth of a child or the placement of a child in adoption or foster care, to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious medical condition, to accommodate an employee’s own serious health condition (including pregnancy), or following the serious injury of a military service member within the family (for which the employee can claim an additional fourteen weeks of leave). The FMLA is a universal federal provision, meaning individuals in any state can access FMLA protections. However, since it offers a relatively short amount of leave (twelve weeks maximum per year), and since it is unpaid leave, it is a lessthan-comprehensive family-friendly policy leaving many families to cobble together market or family-based solutions to care for children. Because it applies only to full-time workers who have been employed at firms of more than fifty employees for at least one year, the FMLA covers only 60 percent of the civilian workforce. Actual use is even worse because, even among those who qualify, many workers do not use it because they cannot afford to take unpaid leave. Yet paid leave provides families with a range of health benefits including reduced infant and maternal mortality, better physical and mental health among children and parents, and more family stability and economic security. But paid leave is often restricted to those in high-resource professional positions and married mothers with high levels of resources and support, further exacerbating class-based gaps in family support (Schulte et al. 2017). Collectively, this approach to leave further illustrates the fragmented use of

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  17

“universal” federal provisions that require direct action to ensure all families have access to parental leave after birth. In response to the void in paid federal parental leave, a handful of states have passed their own provisions. These paid parental leave programs are an impressive start at redressing the problems of quick returns to work postpartum and class-based gaps in access to parental leave. The legislation of paid parental leave in many progressive states helps financially support families to take leave following childbirth and is a major advance in expanding family benefits to working parents. Yet these provisions, much like all the other state and federal family benefits, fall short of universally covering their intended population. California passed the Paid Family Leave Act as a component of the California State Disability Insurance program. Parents can apply for up to six weeks of partially paid leave (60–70 percent of income) to bond with a newborn child only if they were employed or actively looking for work prior to the child’s birth (Employment Development Department, n.d.). This policy is an important starting point, but California’s parental leave policy is not accessible to all constituents and provides only partial wage replacement. Massachusetts also tied its Paid Family and Medical Leave Act to its unemployment insurance fund, making those who work in but live outside of Massachusetts eligible for the provisions but not those who live in but work outside of the state. Distributing paid parental leave through a state’s disability insurance program may reduce the administrative burden on the state but also introduces issues of eligibility and path-dependency within large, cumbersome bureaucracies. Linking paid parental leave to work status is typical of a needs-based welfare state that emphasizes self-reliance but lacks universal coverage that is typical in more generous welfare states. On a practical level, these decisions mean some parents remain uncovered by these policies. Given the important health benefits of parental leave, states should look to expand, strengthen, and better fund these provisions to benefit all families within their states. When children become school-aged, the U.S. federal and state governments assume greater responsibility for children’s education and care through public schooling. According to the U.S. Constitution, responsibility for kindergarten through high school (K–12) education is largely grounded in the state. Thus, federal funding is aimed at supplementing state and local contributions to public school. For every dollar spent on public education, 83 cents come from the state and local levels, and 8.3 percent come from federal agencies (U.S. Department of Education 2014). While the federal government places some restrictions on the parameters of federal spending, states have considerable discretion in determining the structure, delivery, and content

18 | Chapter 1

of public education. Where federal policies do exist to support families with school-aged children, they are disproportionately targeted at low-income households. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA 1965) was enacted to support low-income families, expand instructional materials, strengthen the educational agencies, and supplement educational centers and professional development of teachers. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was a reauthorization of the ESEA 1965 legislation with important caveats, tying federal funding to research-based instruction and testing outcomes while also increasing parental choice to use federal money for public school alternatives (U.S. Department of Education 2014). Again, these policies exemplify a federalist approach to supporting families that is largely needsbased and individualistic—emphasizing parental and state choice—further fragmenting the policies. Because states also contribute the bulk of funding to public schools, state governments often cut public education funding by shortening school days and lowering teacher salaries when facing budget crises. With the intensification of teacher strikes around the country, the state-based approach to public education suggests many states are stretched too thin to provide teachers with a livable wage and good work conditions. The failure to properly fund public education fails students, teachers, and, as demonstrated here, mothers alike. Federal support for after-school care and free lunches also follow a needsbased approach. Families below an established income threshold can access three types of federal programs: (1) entitlement programs, like the National School Lunch Program, which provides children with a free or reduced-price school lunch and an after-school snack for families below an established income threshold; (2) discretionary programs, like the AmeriCorps grant to support after-school care, which are competitive funding accessed through state, government, and local agencies; and (3) block grants or formula programs like the Title I funding that is calculated and allocated based on states’ population, poverty rates, and other sociodemographic characteristics (Afterschool Alliance, n.d.). Four general programs support after-school care access: the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC); Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF); Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); and Title I (Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965). All of these programs exclusively serve lower-income families, again exemplifying the federal government’s needs-based approach to welfare. These resources are essential for supporting poor families, but as maternal employment becomes increasingly common, more families need but cannot access after-school care. In 2014, 19.4 million children (41 percent) were unable to access an afterschool program (Afterschool Alliance 2014). When mothers cannot access

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  19

after-school care, they are often forced to restrict their working hours to accommodate their children’s school drop-off and pickup schedules. Of course, many local school districts fill this void by providing after-school care to support children of working parents. But the availability of space across local programs varies dramatically, indicating a need for states to take a comprehensive approach to child-care support, including access to spaces in after-school care within each state, a top policy priority to support working families. States are increasingly leaders in legislating innovative family policies to supplement the meager federal family legislation. Yet even among the most generous states, considerable gaps in coverage emerge, leaving many families uncovered by the state’s schemes. States are also disjointed in their family policy approaches, with only New York legislating paid parental leave (taking effect in 2018) and universal pre-K. This means that while parents may be able to access one progressive family policy, none are holistically supported by state-provided family policies across the course of childhood. Mothers without adequate support postpartum experience poor health and higher mortality rates. Further, lack of child-care resources limits mothers’ access to employment. States’ failure to legislate universal parental leave and child care, long school days, and accessible after-school care means constituents and local economies suffer. Thus, family policy discussions must be a central priority of state governors, representatives, and senators. This book clearly outlines a detailed understanding of how these policies vary across states and their connection to maternal employment to inform future federal, state, and local policies.

Why Do We Need a State-Level Analysis of Welfare in the United States? Existing research treats each nation-state as a unitary political actor, but this approach masks significant differences in social policies, governance, and social contexts across regional actors within nation-states. This is particularly problematic for the U.S. federalist system, in which U.S. states have significant, independent legislative power. In many cases, this can have direct consequences for women. For example, many conservative states have enacted legislation to weaken abortion rights (including the 2019 abortion ban in Alabama)—rights that have been protected as a constitutional right to privacy under a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Other, more liberal states have publicly advocated for more progressive federal policies, such as paid family and medical leave (Wilson 2016). These differences in statelevel policy progressiveness tend to reflect ideological differences between states’ constituents. For example, the state of California consistently votes for

20 | Chapter 1

­ emocratic political candidates, reflecting the fact that large portions of CalD ifornians consistently identify as socially progressive, on the left of the political spectrum (Gallup, n.d.). In keeping with its progressive political identity, California legislated same-sex marriage in advance of the federal government and paid parental leave to support working families. States also led the way in passing a patchwork of state unpaid family leave laws that led to the FMLA, illustrating how states can provide the foundation for federal laws. Currently, states are legislating paid family leave policies to supplement the U.S. federal government’s relatively meager welfare provisions. For example, California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island have legislated paid family and medical leave that extends beyond the federal FMLA (State of California, n.d.; State of New Jersey, n.d.; New York State, n.d.; Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, n.d.). Massachusetts, which passed a paid family leave law in 2018, also legislated the Small Necessities Leave Act, which offers employees twenty-four hours per year to participate in children’s activities or to attend routine family medical appointments (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, n.d.). These policies illustrate the power of states to legislate laws beyond the federal scope to support working families, and allude to a gap in existing welfare state literature, which tends to classify entire nationstates as subscribing to just one type of welfare state model. This book investigates these relationships by identifying how U.S. states vary in their political and institutional approaches to supporting working mothers. The heterogeneity in states’ legal, political, and demographic characteristics may explain why some states enact progressive child-care and gender policies and others do not. This book provides a broad understanding of each state relative to its economic, social, and cultural contexts. The results show that states bifurcate into two distinct groups: one group is better at facilitating mothers’ full-time work, while the other is better at advocating for women’s right to equal work. These divisions indicate states either provide child-care support (with inexpensive and widely accessible child care, and high rates of maternal employment) or gender-empowered political climates (with strong economic, legislative, and policy support for working women). The corollary of these results is that few states comprehensively support working mothers across these measures (Washington, D.C., and Hawaii are exceptions). Those states that better facilitate mothers’ return to work, by providing affordable market-based child care or by legislating long school hours, have poor family-friendly policies, limited (or no) parental or family leave policies, and low female representation in the state legislature. Likewise, states with policies supporting working families, high rates of female representation in the state legislature, and high female wages tend to have

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  21

expensive child care, short school hours, difficult-to-access child care and after-school care, and other structural barriers that make it difficult for mothers to maintain full-time work. In this respect, classifying individual U.S. states using the three worlds typology—as either liberal, social democratic, or conservative—would be misleading, since it would mask important heterogeneity in each state’s approach to welfare. Classifying the United States singularly as a liberal welfare state, as many scholars have done, doubly masks this heterogeneity, since none of the states holistically subscribe to a liberal welfare state model. This means understanding the nature of the United States as a family-supportive (or unsupportive) welfare state requires new theorization that reflects both inter- and intrastate divergence from EspingAndersen’s typology. This book is an important step in this direction. Further, by explicitly contextualizing the role of gender across states’ institutional contexts, this book addresses feminist criticisms of Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology by foregrounding gender in the analyses.

Welfare States versus Rational Actors: Weighing Rational-Choice Arguments According to feminist welfare state scholars, welfare states with more expansive family policies should help minimize women’s economic dependence on men by reducing women’s obligations to their family and equalizing labor market access (Orloff 1996). This necessarily demands dismantling socialized and institutionalized gender ideologies equating femininity with domesticity (for example, women are better at caring for children and doing housework) and masculinity with breadwinning (e.g., men are better at financially providing for the family) (Lewis 1992). Being socialized into breadwinner and homemaker norms leads married mothers to assume a larger share of unpaid housework than their husbands, often at the expense of their engagement in the labor market. Rational-choice theorists have explained this pattern by arguing that couples often exchange labor to increase household efficiency, with women typically trading domestic work for men’s wages (Becker 1991). Feminists have critiqued this rational-choice perspective as exploitative of women’s labor, failing to account for how gender norms coerce women into unpaid domestic labor at the expense of their employment and economic selfreliance (Duncan 2005; Orloff 2009; Simpson and Envy 2015). Recognizing this institutional inequality, many countries have enacted policies to reduce mothers’ dependence on their husbands by equalizing their economic opportunities and access to the labor market relative to men, including through legislating universal child care and paid parental leave. Such

22 | Chapter 1

policies are aimed at increasing mothers’ access to full-time employment as a central mechanism to supporting themselves in independent households. The United States stands alone as the only Western industrial nation that has failed to legislate paid family leave at a federal level and that offers only marginal child-care subsidies as tax breaks, with more expansive provisions reserved only for those in greatest financial need.3 In the absence of policies, mothers are often forced to reduce their employment to part time or to drop out of the labor market, reinforcing dependency on husbands and increasing mothers’ economic precarity. According to feminist welfare state scholars, the goal of married mothers’ full-time employment is to facilitate financial independence, thus reducing gender inequality in employment outcomes. Of course, some mothers prefer to work less than full time or to stay at home, in accord with their attitudes surrounding motherhood, bonding time with children, and other individual preferences. Further, other mothers are pulled into full-time work based on financial pressures to support their families. The purpose of this book is not to weigh these drivers to maternal employment, but rather to better understand the institutional contexts in which married couples make their employment decisions. Many married mothers weigh the cost of child care against their labor market earnings to decide whether to maintain or exit employment. Further, marriage and maternal employment are strongly driven by race and class, with higher-income mothers better able to utilize child-care and workplace resources to maintain employment and mothers of color expected to work following childbirth or be perceived as lazy. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (2012) argue states with high concentrations of mothers of color legislate family policies to move these mothers into the labor market. This reinforces what Mimi Abramovitz (2000) calls deserving versus undeserving motherhood, whereby poor mothers of color are forced into but middle-class mothers are forced out of paid employment. In this regard, generous family policies often have a history of racialized and gendered assumptions about motherhood and who deserves to stay at home with children. This book directly foregrounds state-to-state differences in race, poverty, and economic opportunity to illuminate these relationships.

Theorizing Maternal Employment across States: A Capabilities Perspective The previous sections summarize the literature on welfare states, including welfare state theories explicitly intended to account for gender norms and family policies in different countries. However, modeling “gendered welfare

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  23

states” within the United States requires additional investigation of state-level sociodemographic and institutional contexts. There are significant religious, political, economic, and demographic differences between U.S. states, and it is reasonable to assume that these differences have some bearing on how each state supports working mothers. Some, such as differences in each state’s political approach to welfare policy, ought to have a clear and direct effect on how the state protects working mothers. Others, such as differences in each state’s racial makeup, may have more subtle or indirect effects. To better understand these relationships, this study uses a theoretical model of institutional state contexts, which maps how gendered employment and policy outcomes are influenced by states’ religious, demographic, economic, and political characteristics. These include measurements of race-ethnicity, occupational composition, concentration of managerial positions, home ownership, economic health, church attendance, political leanings, and rural-urban divisions. The theoretical map, illustrated in Figure 1.1, demonstrates this study’s expectations for the relationships across these measures. States form distinct institutional contexts based on their cultural, dem­ ographic, economic, and political characteristics. These state institutional

Figure 1.1. Overview of the institutional state contexts theory.

24 | Chapter 1

contexts ought, in turn, to affect state-to-state differences in child-care and school-aged-care provisions and mother-friendly welfare policies (for example, parental leave) and, as a consequence, influence each state’s level of maternal employment. To understand how these measures interrelate, this book employs Amartya Sen’s (1993) “capabilities” perspective, which argues individuals are nested within institutional contexts, and that institutionalized biases extant within these contexts (for example, gender discrimination) limit individuals’ opportunities throughout their lives. Put simply, the capabilities perspective asks: What would society look like if individuals were unencumbered by institutionalized discrimination? This book’s theoretical model of institutional state contexts investigates which sociodemographic, political, religious, and economic characteristics explain states’ female-friendly legislative and child-care environments. Figure 1.1 illustrates the institutional state contexts model, which first posits that the religious, racial, economic, and political characteristics of a state will form distinct state contexts. These contexts, in turn, affect the propensity for states to offer child-care and schoolaged-care resources, which should affect married mothers’ employment. This model informs the research conducted throughout the book, but it is updated in the book’s Conclusion in response to some surprising results identified throughout the book.

Chapter Summary Esping-Andersen’s commonly used welfare state typology classifies the United States as a liberal welfare state, characterized by minimal government intervention. This welfare state classification is misleading for two reasons. First, it neglects the role of gender in structuring institutionalized resources, and second, the aggregation of the United States into a single welfare state omits significant heterogeneity in states’ child-care and gender-empowerment regimes. This book directly addresses both these limitations by investigating state-to-state differences in maternal employment, child-care and schoolaged-care resources, and female political and economic empowerment, along with variation in states’ sociodemographic, occupational, racial, cultural, and political qualities. Starting from a capabilities perspective that argues institutionalized discrimination limits individuals’ capacity to reach their potential, this book employs a theoretical model of institutional state contexts to understand the interplay between these multiple attributes within states. This framework assumes that the racial, economic, political, and religious differences across states form distinct institutional contexts. As this book shows, certain

Theorizing the United States as a Welfare State  |  25

states have institutional contexts that limit child-care and school-aged-care resources, state-level family policies, and married mothers’ employment; others have fewer institutional barriers. This means some mothers in some states face larger barriers to employment than others regardless of their own abilities, skills, and resources. Existing cross-national welfare state literature suggests that U.S. states with the most economically and politically empowered women ought to have the most expansive child-care and family policies and, therefore, the highest rates of maternal employment. In reality, the picture is more complicated. Specifically, states divide along two types: gender-empowered contexts (i.e., more expansive family and gender policies and better economic and political outcomes for women) and child-care regimes (i.e., high rates of full-time  married mothers’ employment and expansive child-care and school-aged-care resources). Across these two types, states form four clusters: (1) states with generous child-care resources but weak gender empowerment; (2) states with strong gender empowerment but poor child-care resources; (3) states that are policy voids, with support for neither child care nor gender empowerment; and (4) states with generous child-care resources and strong gender empowerment. The following chapters explain these findings, revealing which American states provide the most comprehensive support for working mothers, and which states fall short. Critically, this book reveals that the most socially progressive U.S. states, including those with the strongest institutional support for female employment, have some of the poorest child-care resources and worst maternal employment outcomes in the country. Meanwhile, a number of states with poor political female representation and few legal protections for working mothers appear to have some of the highest rates of maternal employment and most expansive child-care resources. Although this book’s findings raise various concerns outside the scope of its quantitative research— for example, whether high maternal employment in certain U.S. states leads to worse educational outcomes for children, or whether unemployed women in liberal states are typically satisfied or dissatisfied with their employment status—it also reveals obvious gaps in different states’ provisions for working mothers, and challenges welfare state theorists’ oversimplified classification of the United States as a homogenous liberal welfare state. As the first detailed investigation of gendered state-level welfare systems across the United States, this book’s institutional state contexts model offers a starting point for more nuanced and comprehensive research on American experiences of working motherhood, and of American mothers’ experiences of welfare more broadly.

26 | Chapter 1

Chapter 2 opens this investigation by first documenting which states have the highest rates of maternal employment and then examining different states’ approaches to public child-care provision. For mothers to commit to full-time employment, they require access to regular, high-quality child-care services, and as discussed above, public child-care provisions vary dramatically between states. The investigation that follows therefore provides insight into the utility, and necessity, of an institutional state contexts model to conceptualize the practical reality of the welfare state system in the United States.

2

Mapping the “United” States Maternal Employment, Child Care, and School-Aged-Care Resources

T

he narratives provided by Ava and Michelle at the start of this book indicate that each faces different barriers to employment. For Ava, child care adds a fixed expense to the family budget, but she knows her child-care center will be open during her work hours, the staff are consistent, and the curriculum is of high quality. The stress of her daughter’s child-care center rarely bleeds into Ava’s workday. For Michelle, on the other hand, the quality of her son’s child-care center is a constant worry. The staff often rotates, meaning drop-offs can be stressful as her son is often left with unfamiliar faces. What is more, close to half of Michelle’s total income is used to pay for child care. While at work, Michelle often fears that her child is unhappy or stressed, which makes it difficult for Michelle to concentrate. Michelle often discusses with her husband whether the family would function better if one of them stayed at home. As these experiences illustrate, even though Ava and Michelle look similar on paper—both employed full time, both with children in child-care centers—their child-care experiences vary dramatically because one lives in California and one lives in Nebraska, and as a consequence, their abilities to fully engage at work and have the working lifestyle they envisioned also vary greatly. Michelle’s experiences—difficult-to-access, expensive child care and short school days—take a large toll on many of her peers, with most reducing work to part time or dropping out of the labor market to care for children. California is one of the wealthiest economies in the world (fifth globally), yet it cannot fully integrate working mothers into its economy. This

28 | Chapter 2

policy failure underscores the urgency for the California state government to make child-care access, quality, and affordability a top priority. As this chapter shows, California offers working mothers some of the strictest gender discrimination protections, most progressive family policies, most lucrative labor market returns, and strongest female political representation of any state in the nation. Yet many mothers cannot access these resources because expensive and difficult-to-access child care boxes them out of employment. As Chapter 1 shows, getting children into school will not alleviate these pressures because California also has some of the shortest school day lengths and most difficult-to-access after-school care in the nation. Thus, mothers like Michelle face a paradox: living in a state with a lucrative, gender-progressive economy yet poor child-care resources boxes them out of employment. For Michelle, this contradiction weighs heavily on her as her husband does not share the same social expectations for his contributions to work and family balance. Their child-care center never calls him if their son is sick or they have a question; they always call Michelle. Thus, while her husband is strategically planning his next career move, Michelle is worrying about whether the new child-care worker knows he is allergic to peanuts.

The Precarity of Maternal Employment Women’s dramatic entry into the labor market in the 1970s posed new and pressing challenges for families and the care of children (Hiller 1984; Rapoport and Rapoport 1976; Stafford, Backman, and Dibona 1977). Within the United States, a central goal of second-wave feminism was to reduce barriers to women’s access to economic and educational equality—college degrees, full-time work, and high-status male-dominated professions (Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). While women’s employment became a deeply symbolic indicator of gender equality, gender norms tying femininity to domesticity proved more difficult to dismantle (Berk 1985; Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Lloyd 1975; Meissner et al. 1975; Stafford, Backman, and Dibona 1977). As a consequence, gender remains the strongest predictor of how child-care and housework tasks are divided, with married mothers adjusting their employment more than their husband does to accommodate their children’s needs, and performing the bulk of the housework (Craig and Mullan 2011; Sayer 2005). A large body of literature documents that mothers who remain in the labor market experience inter-role strain in balancing work and family demands (Friedman and Greenhaus 2000; Hochschild and Machung 1989; Milkie, Raley, and Bianchi 2009; Poms, Fleming, and Jacobsen 2016), along with work-family conflict, reports of which have steadily in-

Mapping the “United” States  |  29

creased in the United States since the 1970s (Nomaguchi 2009). Mothers in dual-earner households, where both partners are employed full-time, perform most of the child care without reducing work time, making them particularly vulnerable to competing work and family demands (Yavorksy, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). As a consequence of the incompatibility of work and family demands, mothers are particularly vulnerable to labor market exits when young children are present in the home. Generally, married mothers tend to reduce paid work following the birth of a child, while fathers increase their work hours (Maume 2006). This is true even for mothers earning above-average wages or working in powerful, high-profile positions, who are often still expected to act as their children’s primary carers (Hays 1996; Stone 2007). Even when mothers are the family’s primary breadwinner, earning more than their partner, they are more likely to drop out of the workforce than mothers whose spouses earn the bulk of the income (Raley, Bianchi, and Wang 2012). A lack of high-quality, reliable, and affordable child care is a key reason mothers “opt out” of employment at higher rates than men (Boushey 2008; Stone 2007). The high cost of formal child care often exceeds family budgets, leading mothers to exit employment to care for children. As the literature cited above indicates, mothers tend to take on the largest amount of “second shift” work in their families (i.e., unpaid housework and child care), and the resulting time pressures make them vulnerable to labor market exits (Hochschild and Machung 1989). This suggests that married mothers face two simultaneous institutional pressures: social norms equating good motherhood with constant, personal contact with children, and a lack of institutional resources supporting inexpensive and high-quality child care. While second-wave feminism was successful in moving more women into the labor market, it was unable to shift policies to alleviate these institutional pressures through universal child care, paid parental leave, and flexible work (McKenna 2015; Milkie, Raley, and Bianchi 2009).

A Policy Gap: The Absence of Universal Government-Subsidized Child Care The challenges faced by working mothers are particularly acute in the U.S. system, as the federal government offers parents no comprehensive child-care support. The lack of any paid maternity leave in the United States creates considerable challenges for mothers looking to stay in the labor market. Economic necessity often drives mothers to return to work as rapidly as possible after the birth of a child, particularly in poor and lower-middle-class families

30 | Chapter 2

that depend on the mother’s wages, or that hold ideologies carrying expectations of continuous maternal employment (Cotter, England, and Hermsen 2007; Damaske 2011; England, Garcia-Beaulieu, and Ross 2004; Shriver 2009; Spain and Bianchi 1996). Similar social expectations affect different ethnic groups’ propensity to take paid or unpaid maternity leave; for example, normative pressures to maintain continuous employment among black and immigrant women mean these women take less time off work before and after giving birth (Lu, Wang, and Han 2017; Greenman 2011; England, Garcia-Beaulieu, and Ross 2004; Stier and Tienda 1992). The lack of federally mandated financial compensation during family leaves mean many families are forced to find individual solutions to meet children’s care demands. When policies do emerge, they are often targeted at pushing mothers of color back into employment while deterring middle-class mothers from reentry (Abramovitz 2000; Piven and Cloward 2012). Thus, policies aimed at supporting working mothers often hold racial overtones about who deserves time with children and who should be engaged in continuous paid employment. The absence of paid parental leave is compounded by the lack of universal high-quality, government-funded child care, which forces families to make individualized child-care decisions, turning either to the market to purchase formal care (for example, from child-care centers or in-home nannies) or to informal care networks (i.e., child-care help offered by family members or friends). Only around a third of working mothers report paying for child care on a regular basis, meaning most families are relying on informal child-care networks to support employment (Laughlin 2013). Informal child care can be less reliable, susceptible to carers’ illness, schedule conflicts, and other competing demands. Parents relying on informal care exclusively may have a more difficult time maintaining full-time employment. Highly paid, highly educated urban mothers are better able to afford market-based child care and, in general, can utilize higher-quality child-care services than can those with fewer resources in nonmetropolitan areas (Smith and Glauber 2013). Mothers with better resources are also better equipped to utilize workplace resources (e.g., flexible schedules, job sharing) to maintain employment (Damaske 2011). The failure of state representatives to legislate formal subsidized child care forces parents to rely on fragmented market- or family-based child care, which can be expensive or unreliable, respectively. While many mothers leave work upon the birth of a child, the lack of federally funded paid parental leave and limited organization-provided resources means many other American mothers find themselves having to return to work quickly to maintain their family’s financial security. These mothers often find it necessary to dip into their sick and vacation leave to accommo-

Mapping the “United” States  |  31

date their intense postpartum care demands (Shriver 2009). High child-care costs consume a substantial portion of the family budget, forcing mothers to make difficult time trades to meet child-care demands (Bianchi 2000; Craig 2007; Sandberg and Hofferth 2001). Past studies have found that low- to middle-income American families who use formal child care can spend up to a quarter of their annual income on child care, while wealthier families still spend close to 10 percent (Brandon and Hofferth 2003; Brayfield and Hofferth 1995; Durfee and Meyers 2006). The financial squeeze of child care is greatest among middle-class mothers who lack sufficiently high total family incomes to afford formal care and who do not qualify for means-tested ­subsidized child care (Brandon and Hofferth 2003; Brayfield and Hofferth 1995). Faced with expensive child care that exceeds family budgets, many mothers are forced either to rely on family or friendship networks for child care or to reduce employment to personally look after their children. Informal child care, although less expensive, can also be less reliable than formal child care, often requiring working mothers to take time off work to bridge gaps in care, resulting in poor work performance. Income-based gaps in spending on children, including measures of child care, education, and consumable goods, widen with increases in family earnings, with parents in the top income bracket spending $11,000 versus $1,300 per year among those in the bottom income category (Kornrich and Furstenberg 2013; Kornrich, Ruppanner, and Lappegård 2019). Clearly, child-care costs are a major institutional barrier to maternal employment. But the cost of child care varies dramatically across states, indicating mothers are facing different child-care markets in some states than others. This serves as a prime example of how mothers’ decisions on whether, when, and in what capacity they should return to work are affected by states’ differing institutional contexts, especially in the absence of universally funded child care. The United States’ dependence on market-based child care imposes different types of costs on different members of American society, with mothers more likely than fathers to exit the labor market because of family demands. Mothers’ labor market exits also impose an economic cost on employers in terms of lost human capital, training, and investments (Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007). To mitigate this economic loss, many organizations provide employees with family-friendly resources in the form of on-site child care, paid parental leave, or flexible work arrangements. These resources have been shown to increase worker productivity, satisfaction, and employee retention postbirth (Allen 2001; Shellenback 2004). Despite this, few nonprofessional positions (for example, service roles or jobs involving manual labor), which

32 | Chapter 2

are disproportionately occupied by low-income mothers, offer an equivalent range of family-friendly workplace benefits (Clemans-Cope et al. 2008; Kerr 2016). This makes it more difficult for mothers in these jobs to commit to full-time employment, since they are often forced to give up time at work to care for their children (Hynes and Clarkberg 2005; Ruel and Hauser 2013). A global literature has documented how poorer working mothers are often forced to use informal child care—that is, child care provided by ­family members, neighbors, and friends—when they live in a context with no stateprovided child care or cannot afford market-based child-care services. Informal child care is often unreliable, and mothers are regularly required to resume the role of primary at-home carer whenever their informal childcarer is sick or busy (Argyrous, Craig, and Rahman 2017; Bonizzoni 2014; Brady 2018; Fuller et al. 1996; Li 2017; Scott, London, and Hurst 2005; Simpson and Envy 2015). This makes working mothers appear to be less reliable employees, and so poor working mothers are often more likely to be fired or denied promotions (Bonizzoni 2014; Craig, Powell, and Smyth 2014). In the United States, federal policies are almost exclusively restricted to low-income families, meaning that most families, including those in the middle class, must rely almost entirely on private, market-based or informal child care. Consequently, American mothers end up facing three cumulative pressures—limited financial resources, unreliable (informal) child care, and lower employment prospects—which push them out of the labor market (Damaske, Bratter, and Frech 2017; Stone 2007). It is within this nexus of inequality that state governments can be powerful actors in alleviating child-care burdens and increasing the odds of mothers’ employment. While existing research documents maternal employment patterns across the United States, paying careful attention to race-ethnicity, class, and child-care use (for example, Amott and Matthaei 1991; Gordon and Chase-Lansdale 2001; Gornick and Meyers 2003; Jacobs and Gerson 1998, 2004; Meyers, Gornick, and Peck 2001; Stier and Tienda 2001; Waldfogel 1998), less is known about how these patterns vary between states, and whether state institutional contexts and child-care resources influence married mothers’ employment patterns. Marcia Meyers, Janet Gornick, and Laura Peck (2001) conducted a broad analysis of variation in family-supportive welfare policies targeted at low-income families across the United States. Their analysis found that states cluster together in terms of the types of welfare they offer, and that those on the left of the political spectrum tended to be more generous with their policies than those on the right. Alesha Durfee and Marcia Meyers (2006) noted that around 40 percent of U.S. families receive some kind of child-care assistance from state or federal government policies,

Mapping the “United” States  |  33

which includes tax relief for market-based purchases. Neither study exam­ ines how these differing policy regimes affect each state’s constituents or whether some state governments are more generous than others, leaving a gap in the literature for this book to fill. This book specifically examines married mothers’ employment because heterosexual marital unions may amplify traditional gender norms, casting mothers as carers and fathers as breadwinners, leading mothers to reduce employment to part time or to drop out of the labor market altogether. Marriage provides mothers with greater employment flexibility, but mothers’ financial dependence on a husband and necessary absences from employment to care for young children are critical sources of inequality when mothers reenter the labor market or if the marriage dissolves. Indeed, divorce often drives mothers into poverty as a direct consequence of mothers’ entrenched financial dependence on a husband (Amato 2000; Belle 1990; Colletta 1979). Feminist welfare state theorists argue that increasing mothers’ financial independence, in part through encouraging continuous full-time employment, is essential to equalizing women’s life chances and reducing gender inequality. In a U.S. context, an essential first step is to map married mothers’ employment p ­ atterns—full time, part time, and staying at home—across states and then to identify the role of child-care costs, school day length, and availability of after-school care in explaining this variation. Documenting these patterns provides a clear road map for state legislators interested in equalizing gender relations and maximizing mothers’ labor by reducing barriers to their employment.

Understanding Maternal Employment: State-to-State Variation by Mothers’ Full-Time Work Figure 2.1 documents variation in the distribution of full-time dual-earner families across U.S. states. The largest numbers of full-time dual-earner households are concentrated in the West North Central states (North and South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Minnesota), three West South Central states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana), two East South Central states (Mississippi and Kentucky), three South Atlantic states (Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia), and the District of Columbia. By contrast, rates of full-time dual-earner families are lowest along the Pacific coast (California, Washington, and Oregon) and in six of the Mountain states (Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah). Already, these preliminary results appear to contradict political narratives that West Coast states are the most universally gender progressive or have the

34 | Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. Full-time working dual-earner families, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

most female-friendly working environment, and that they ought therefore to have some of the highest numbers of working mothers. Instead, dual-earner families appear to be more common in the less economically powerful midwestern and southern states, clustered in a north-to-south line through the middle of America. Chapter 1 introduces two competing frameworks for modeling maternal employment decision making across the United States: an individualistic, “rational-choice” decision-making framework, arguing that mothers make objective employment decisions on the basis of the immediate financial needs of their families, and a structuralist, “welfare state”–oriented model, arguing that mothers are more likely to work where they feel institutionally supported to do so. The results displayed in Figure 2.1 might appear to indicate an early victory for rational-choice models of American maternal employment. If mothers are more likely to be employed in less economically healthy states, it would be logical to assume that American mothers are more likely to work when faced with economic necessity, rather than when persuaded by a state-level political or social feminist agenda. As discussed above, feminist welfare state theorists have long argued that rational-choice models cannot adequately explain women’s employment decisions, so these results are somewhat surprising. As the subsequent sections demonstrate, however, many factors beyond politics and economics influence women’s employment choices,

Mapping the “United” States  |  35

and further analysis illustrates that Figure 2.1 paints an overly simplistic picture of maternal employment across the United States. As a starting point, Figures 2.2 and 2.3 (later in the chapter) illustrate state-to-state differences in married mothers’ part-time employment and rates of stay-at-home motherhood, to provide a more comprehensive picture of states’ maternal employment patterns. Including part-time work is a particularly critical dimension, as working mothers facing inter-role strain and work-family conflict might logically opt to work fewer, more flexible hours following the birth of their children. The paragraphs that follow review the history of women’s part-time work in the United States, before charting the differing rates of part-time maternal employment across U.S. states.

The Benefits and Pitfalls of Part-Time Work for Mothers The feminist movements of the 1970s sought to equalize mothers’ access to full-time employment, but many mothers found the demands of work and family to be best reconciled through part-time employment. During the baby boom of the 1950s, companies began recruiting mothers of schoolaged children into part-time work to fill a post–World War II employment gap (Coontz and Parson 1997, 444–446). For these mothers, part-time work provided flexibility to accommodate their children’s school schedules while they supplemented their family’s income. Today, part-time work remains a popular option for many working women, allowing them to reduce their time at work to care for pre-school-aged children while remaining connected to the workforce (Presser, Gornick, and Parashar 2008; Sayer and Gornick 2012; Stier 1996). Part-time work often has negative career consequences, however, including shortening women’s career trajectories, and is affected by an organizational stigma that part-time working mothers cannot be fully committed to their jobs. Part-time employment is often low-paid with few opportunities for advancement (Bukodi and Dex 2010; Tomlinson, Olsen, and Purdam 2009). This means that even if part-time working women have access to employment, they are likely to be excluded from powerful or desirable occupations that require a full-time commitment (Mandel and Semyonov 2006; Stier and Yaish 2014). As a result, part-time employment can trap women in a cycle of unstable and temporary employment (Emmenegger 2011; Kalleberg 2011). As a consequence, many college-educated women delay, or abstain from, having children so that they can maintain continuous employment, rather than transfer to part-time work (Vere 2007).

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Many industries, including the female-dominated service industry, however, have institutionalized part-time work to reduce labor costs, and to avoid paying for workers’ employment benefits, such as vacation and sick leave. Across the United States, this disproportionately affects women of color, who are most likely to be employed in low-quality, part-time service positions (Branch 2011). Many mothers are forced to work part time, simply because no other viable employment options are available to maintain their families’ financial security. The need for these mothers to take whatever work is available, and that also fits within their family-care demands, can trap them in unfulfilling part-time jobs with no career or pay advancement opportunities, entrenching economic and racial matrices of oppression. Some feminist writers argue that part-time work is also a way to “do gender” within a marriage (Berk 1985; West and Zimmerman 1987). Faced with intense child-care demands and normative pressures to be good, doting carers to their children, married mothers might take up part-time work to remain tethered to the labor market while still fulfilling socially constructed norms of “good motherhood” (Hays 1996). For married mothers, taking up part-time work might feel like a rational choice, particularly if they live in contexts where their earnings supplement their husband’s wages. However, feminists have long viewed part-time work as an extension of patriarchal gender norms, especially because part-time work can have serious long-term consequences for mothers’ careers. Part-time work particularly exacerbates gender income inequality to the extent that part-time jobs are often unstable and precarious, making mothers, especially those in low-income families, vulnerable to poverty if the marriage dissolves. Married mothers’ part-time employment may be more common in some states than others, and, as with full-time employment, it may be influenced by the cost of child care, availability of school-aged care, and a range of sociodemographic factors. Rational-choice perspectives suggest part-time work will be more common in states where child-care costs are higher and school days shorter, both of which impose institutional barriers to full-time maternal employment. Mothers may also “rationally” choose to reduce employment in affluent states where fathers’ earnings may be sufficient to maintain their families’ finances. Welfare state theories suggest that part-time work may be most common in states with ideologies, government policies, and workplaces that give preference to part-time over full-time work. These part-time work cultures may be tied to concentrations of religiously conservative constituents, suggesting Utah (with high concentrations of Mormons) and the South (with high concentrations of evangelicals) may have high rates of part-time

Mapping the “United” States  |  37

employment. The following section compares rates of part-time employment across U.S. states.

State-to-State Variation in Mothers’ Part-Time Work Figure 2.2 provides a descriptive overview of married mothers’ part-time employment rates across U.S. states. Married mothers have the highest rates of part-time employment across the East North Central states (Wisconsin and Michigan), the West North Central states (Minnesota and North Dakota), the Mountain states (Idaho and Utah) and New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island). Married mothers are least likely to work part time in the South Atlantic (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida), East South Central (Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi), West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas), the southern Mountain States (New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada), and in California. Counter to predictions, part-time maternal employment is lowest across most of the southern states from east to west coasts. The Pacific states exhibit significant heterogeneity in their maternal employment patterns, with Oregon and Wash­ ington having relatively high part-time maternal employment rates but California reporting some of the country’s lowest full- and part-time maternal

Figure 2.2. Families with full-time and part-time work, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

38 | Chapter 2

employment. Interestingly, California’s part-time maternal employment rates are closer to more politically conservative neighboring states than to its liberal neighbors, Washington and Oregon. In short, rates of part-time maternal employment vary significantly across U.S. states. Generally, while full-time employment is bifurcated from the west to the east of the country, part-time employment is divided from north to south. Applying progressive political or rational-choice explanations to part-time employment is more problematic than with full-time employment, given that maternal part-time employment can be conceived of as either exploitative or empowering. In any case, it would appear the results shown in Figure 2.2 contradict established logic that maternal employment in different U.S. states holistically clusters along political lines. The fact that California has part-time maternal employment figures closer to those of Texas than Oregon alludes to the existence of state-level employment clusters informed by factors other than states’ political attributes.

Reductions in Work Time: Why Do American Mothers “Opt Out” of the Workforce? While some mothers maintain full- or part-time employment when children are present, others drop out completely. They might be compelled to make this decision for a variety of reasons. Since women still do most of the housework and child care in American families, many mothers face greater domestic time pressures than fathers and childless women, and some drop out of the workforce to meet these demands (Cha 2013; Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Mothers also often face social pressure to invest equally in both work and family, which some find to be impossible. Mary Blair-Loy (2003) describes work and family demands in the context of competing “devotions”: often, mothers are expected by employers or families to be singularly devoted to either work or family life. Domestic work demands (i.e., child care and housework) are only one area in which mothers suffer from time pressure and overwork. Mothers often drop out of employment because workplaces are inflexible, offering little protection to working mothers balancing unexpected child-care demands (for example, sick children). Indeed, unreliable and expensive child care has been cited as a key factor driving mothers out of employment (Han and Waldfogel 2001; Misra, Budig, and Boeckmann 2011; Stier 1996; Stone 2007). These examples illustrate how mothers often leave employment based on institutional pressures rather than personal preferences (Damaske 2011; Stone 2007).

Mapping the “United” States  |  39

While much attention has been paid to these institutional barriers to maternal employment, less is known about the extent to which concentrations of stay-at-home mothers vary across U.S. states. Stay-at-home mothers are not simply unemployed mothers; they are not actively looking for employment and self-identify as homemakers. As with part-time work, married mothers’ tendencies to drop out of the labor market may be a response to traditional gender role expectations. Seventy years ago, stay-at-home mothers were valorized as representing affluence and the ideal American family, and politically or religiously conservative families that retain these norms ought logically to be more likely to have homemaker mothers and breadwinner fathers. Similar to the decision to work part time, the decision to stay at home might translate to state-level institutional contexts; for example, states like Utah or Idaho with high concentrations of Mormons, for whom traditional gender norms equate with religious piousness, might be expected to have high rates of stayat-home married mothers. Alternatively, married mothers may opt out of employment in states with strong economic health because their husbands’ earnings may be sufficient to support families on a single salary. Rationalchoice theorists might describe this as women “investing” in their husbands’ careers, and their family’s well-being, by absorbing the bulk of the child care and housework.1 Finally, high costs of child care, on top of high costs of living, may also place a barrier to maternal employment, leaving mothers to rely on middle- and low-income husbands, capturing the structural barriers to individual capabilities.

State-to-State Differences in Stay-at-Home Mothers Figure 2.3 presents state-to-state differences in the prevalence of stay-at-home mothers. This figure shows that married couples in which the husband works and the wife is not in the labor market are strongly clustered among the Pacific states (California, Washington, and Oregon), the Mountain states (Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico), and two West South Central states (Texas and Oklahoma). Since the western states are also seen to have the lowest percentages of full- and part-time maternal employment, we can conclude that married mothers in these states tend to exit the labor market rather than maintain any level of employment. By contrast, the West North Central states (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota) as well as one East North Central state (Wisconsin) cluster in having low rates of stay-at-home mothers. This shows that traditionally gendered divisions of employment tend to be clustered spatially in certain U.S. regions.

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Figure 2.3. Distribution of married mothers not in the workforce with a husband in the workforce, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

Maternal Employment: The Role of Child Care and School-Aged Care Of course, state-to-state differences in the cost of child care may directly explain differences in maternal employment. Most American families rely heavily on market-based child-care solutions to redress work-family challenges (Bassok, Fitzpatrick, and Loeb 2014; Traub 2002). A central ideology in America’s individualistic and laissez-faire economy is that individuals ought to turn to the market rather than the government for child care (for example, budgeting for a nanny rather than relying on government-­ subsidized child care). Given that the United States is usually framed as a liberal welfare state, much of the research on American child-care costs focuses on welfare-to-work schemes that provide low-income mothers with child care, to encourage them to return to the labor market (Schumacher and Greenberg 1999; Schumacher, Greenberg, and Duffy 2001). For example, one study in California showed that expanding low-income mothers’ access to state-subsidized child care to 50 percent would increase their labor market entry by 75 percent (Meyers, Heintze, and Wolf 2002). Yet the availability of market-based child care, including price, quality and open slots, structurally limits maternal employment decisions. For many mothers, reliable and inexpensive child care is difficult to access and, as a consequence, mothers reduce their employment or withdraw from the labor market altogether to

Mapping the “United” States  |  41

care for their children. These effects are strongest among low-skilled, lowincome, and single mothers (Blau and Robins 1989; Blau and Tekin 2007; Cleveland, Gunderson, and Hyatt 1996; Connelly 1992; Han and Waldfogel 2001; Hofferth and Collins 2000; Michalopoulos and Robins 2000; Ribar 1992). This is despite the fact that government-provided child-care services are often means-tested and reserved only for poorer mothers (Barnett 2010). Mothers of pre-school-aged children are also particularly vulnerable to labor market exits, the likelihood of which can be reduced through more generous child-care credits and subsidies (Connelly 1992; Gelbach 2002; Han and Waldfogel 2001; Leibowitz, Klerman, and Waite 1992; Lefebvre and ­Merrigan 2008). Collectively, these studies indicate that both childcare costs and a lack of child-care availability are key barriers to maternal employment. Child-care costs likely vary across states in part because of the availability of child-care subsidies, operating costs (e.g., rents, utilities, taxes, insurance), and the availability of cheap child-care labor from immigrant subgroups. Providing a descriptive overview of twelve states, Jeffrey Capizzano, Gina Adams, and Freya Sonenstein (2000) identify substantially different types of child care available in different states, although market-provided, centerbased formal child care is most common overall. Applying 1989–1990 data, Sandra Hofferth and Nancy Collins (2000) investigate the impact of childcare costs at the county level on maternal labor market exits and show that expensive child care and difficult-to-access child care are the most detrimental to middle-class mothers’ employment. In addition to child-care costs, school schedules may also be an important factor in maternal employment patterns. Some states legislate short, two-hour kindergarten days that are clearly out of sync with work schedules. The minimum school day length is federally mandated, but states have considerable power to expand the instructional day, and there is considerable variation across states and grades (Education Commission of the States 2011). The availability of after-school care also varies tremendously across U.S. states (Brandon and Hofferth 2003). The demand for after-school care has risen over the past few decades, but only one in four children were enrolled in an after-school care program in 2014. The demand for after-school care exceeds capacity, with one in five children currently without adult care after school. Consistent, reliable, and accessible child care is essential to facilitating continuous maternal employment. In a recent study, 83 percent of working parents reported that having access to after-school programs was essential to keeping their jobs (Afterschool Alliance 2014). This literature suggests that maternal employment and the cost and availability of child-care and

42 | Chapter 2

school-aged-care resources are linked. Specifically, states where child care is inexpensive, school days are longer, and after-school care is widely available ought to have a higher percentage of employed married mothers.

The Cost of Child Care across U.S. States Figure 2.4 provides a descriptive overview of child-care costs as a percentage of married couples’ income across U.S. states. It shows that child care is most expensive in New England (Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts) and in the Mid-Atlantic (New York and Delaware), where it absorbs 14 percent or more of married couples’ incomes. Child care is also expensive in one East North Central state (Illinois), one West North Central state (Minnesota), one Pacific state (Oregon), and one Mountain state (Colorado). By contrast, most of the West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska) have the cheapest child care. Child care is also relatively inexpensive in the West and East South Central states (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky) and the South Atlantic States (Georgia and South Carolina). Clearly, child-care costs vary dramatically across the United States, with the least expensive child care clustered from north to south in the middle of the nation, spreading east along the southern states. This pattern is similar to that identified for maternal employment drawn in the previous section.

Figure 2.4. Average child-care cost as a percentage of married couples’ income, 2011–2015. (Child Care Aware 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015; National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies 2011.)

Mapping the “United” States  |  43

In addition to child-care costs, the duration of time out of the labor market postpartum also affects women’s career trajectories. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave with the right to return to one’s current job. This means that for mothers to keep their pre-pregnancy jobs, guaranteeing that they retain the same career status, they must reenter the labor market while their children are still infants or toddlers. Long gaps in employment can also erode mothers’ job skills, and many mothers who take multiple years off work to care for their children have to reenter the labor market at lower-level positions (Cooke 2014; Waldfogel 1998; Weeden, Cha, and Bucca 2016). Thus, quick returns to work postbirth benefit mothers’ long-term career prospects. Cross-national research shows mothers have the best employment prospects postbirth (higher earnings and employment) when leaves are well paid but short (a year or less) and where child care is affordable and accessible (Boeckmann, Misra, and Budig 2015; Budig, Misra, and Boeckmann 2012; Misra, Budig, and Boeckmann 2011). These same patterns may extend to states, especially since many are legislating paid parental leaves. Mothers in different states may take different lengths of time off work to care for their children, depending on a variety of institutional factors within each state. The FMLA provides mothers with twelve weeks of unpaid parental leave and thus mothers in states with high concentrations of full-time workers may return to work quickly following childbirth. Further, since many states have tied their parental leave schemes to employment, mothers should also exhibit quick returns to work in these states as well. Figure 2.5 provides an overview of the extent to which individuals in different states return quickly to employment after childbirth. It measures this according to the percentage of mothers in each state requesting child care for their infants or toddlers. The West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas) report some of the highest requests for infant and toddler care. As identified previously, these states have the highest clustering of maternal employment (full- and part-time) and the least expensive child care in the nation and are exemplars of the child-care-regime states. High demand for ­infant/toddler care indicates that mothers of young children are more likely to remain employed after childbirth in these states. In addition to these states, one New England state (Vermont), one South Atlantic state (Delaware), one Pacific state (Hawaii), one East South Central state (Mississippi), and one West South Central state (Arkansas) also have some of the highest requests for infant/toddler care. By contrast, two Pacific coast states (California and Oregon) and most of the Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and to a lesser degree Arizona and New Mexico) have some of the lowest requests

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Figure 2.5. Requests for infant/toddler care to child-care resource and referral agencies (percentage of all referrals, 2011–2015 average). (Child Care Aware 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015; National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies 2011.)

for infant/toddler care. Chapter 1 illustrates that these states also have some of the highest percentages of stay-at-home mothers, so these results are not surprising. In addition to these Pacific and Mountain states, three South Atlantic states (Florida, West Virginia, and Maryland), one East North Central state (Michigan), and one Middle Atlantic state (Pennsylvania) also report some of the lowest requests for infant/toddler care.2 Comparing these with the employment results, it is notable that the West North Central states— North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa—appear to cluster together with high rates of full-time maternal employment, inexpensive child care, and quick returns to work postpartum. This pattern suggests that these states have a distinct approach to maternal employment and child care, perhaps informed by a unique institutional context that encourages mothers to remain in the workforce. Their combination of high rates of full-time maternal employment, quick returns to work, and inexpensive child care suggests that they are particularly good at supporting working mothers. Later in this book, these characteristics will provide the foundation for a “child-care regime” ideal type state. Nebraska is an example of this type, with its low child-care costs and high rates of maternal employment. Other states, such as California, have conspicuously expensive child care and low rates of full-time maternal employment, in spite of the generous legislative mechanisms they have in place to support working mothers.3

Mapping the “United” States  |  45

The relationship between child-care cost, quick returns to work, and mothers’ employment patterns is empirically analyzed in greater depth later in this chapter. But first, the role of school-aged care in structuring mothers’ employment opportunities is explored.

School-Aged Care The transition into parenthood knocks many women out of the labor market for short- or long-term spells (Boushey 2008; Stone 2007). It is generally assumed that these women will return to work once their children reach school age. Logically, this implies that mothers may be better equipped to return to work in states where school days are longer. School and preschool programs effectively function as formal child care, as spaces where parents can leave their children in the care of qualified adults during some portion of daily work hours. In many states, however, kindergarten days are short, designed to ease children into the routine of school. For example, Nevada, California, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont legislate two- to three-hour kindergarten days (Education Commission of the States 2011). Shorter school days mean fewer hours of child care for mothers, which might hamper their ability to return to full-time work. Short school day lengths are not isolated to kindergarten years, with short school instruction days often lingering into elementary and high school. Many schools only legislate a four-hour school day length for grades 1–12, including in Arizona, California, Missouri, and New Jersey, only a marginal extension of the kindergarten school day (Education Commission of the States 2011). For many parents, short school days, combined with the absence of childcare solutions for children after school, during school holidays, and across the summer months, serve as major structural impediments to meaningful career engagement and full-time employment. This was a major point of difference between Ava’s and Michelle’s child-care experiences. Paying for additional child care to compensate for these short school days can strain family budgets, and the costs are compounded in families with multiple children (Brandon and Hofferth 2003). This combination of scheduling and financial pressures could well impose long-term challenges to maternal employment. U.S. states are uniquely positioned to exacerbate or alleviate these strains. The states are given substantial flexibility by the federal government to set school day lengths, and some states have school days almost an hour longer than others, on average. State governments often reduce instructional days to redress budgetary crises rather than extending days and pay of teachers. In the absence of more financial investment in public schooling, school day

46 | Chapter 2

Figure 2.6. Average school-day length (in hours) across all ages. (Education Commission of the States 2011.)

length is often used to reduce budgetary dilemmas. Thus, it is no surprise that many of the states with short school days have major teacher strikes to raise pay. Figure 2.6 captures the average school day length across all school years (K–12) (see Education Commission of the States 2011 for overview). The West South Central states (Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana), East South Central states (Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee), two South Atlantic states (Georgia and South Carolina), the West North Central states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa), and four Mountain states (New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana) have some of the longest school days in the nation. By contrast, the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii), two Mountain states (Nevada, Arizona, and Utah), two Mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey), one New England state (Rhode Island), and one South Atlantic state (Florida) have some of the shortest school day lengths. Here, we see some clear regional divides, with the Pacific and New England states reporting some of the shortest average school day lengths and the South and Midwest some of the longest days.4 Notably, these are the same states that we found earlier to have the least expensive child care, and the highest rates of full-time married mothers’ employment. These results suggest that the southern and midwestern states offer the most comprehensive child-care resources of all U.S. states, and that these resources contribute to boosting maternal employment in these states.5

Mapping the “United” States  |  47

One of the biggest challenges for parents of school-aged children is that their work schedules are rarely synchronized with their children’s school hours. Many schools offer after-school care programs to address this issue, but these programs generally have limited spaces, and demand is often greater than supply. Figure 2.7 shows the percentage of parents who report wanting, but not being able to access, after-school care for their children. Once again, the West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa) stand out as having the most widely accessible after-school care programs (i.e., the fewest parents who report not being able to access after-school care). By contrast, the Mid-Atlantic states (New York and Pennsylvania), one East North Central state (Ohio), and one South Atlantic state (West Virginia) have a high percentage of parents who want, but cannot access, after-school care. Unfulfilled demand for after-school care is also high in one South Atlantic state (South Carolina), one East South Central state (Alabama), a Mountain state (Utah), and a Pacific state (California). California, in particular, stands out since our previous results showed that it has both relatively short school days and a high percentage of stay-athome mothers. Collectively, this suggests that child-care resources across all ages of children may structure maternal employment decisions.6 Californian mothers may well be more likely to stay at home and self-identify as homemakers simply because California’s institutional context is not family-friendly enough to enable them to return to work. Nebraska, meanwhile, has some of

Figure 2.7. Percentage of families that want but do not have access to after-school care. (Afterschool Alliance 2014.)

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the lowest demands for after-school care in the nation, indicating that working mothers in this state have access to inexpensive child care, long school days, and more widely available after-school care. In this regard, these states serve as exemplars at both ends of the child-care-regime spectrum.

A Comprehensive State Approach to “Child-Care Regimes”? As Figures 2.4, 2.6, and 2.7 illustrate, states vary significantly in their approach to pre-school and school-aged care. Theoretically, individual state governments ought to be able to build comprehensive family-friendly policy programs, by legislating both affordable, high-quality child care, long school days, and expansive after-school programs. We might refer to this as states having an ideal “child-care regime,” one that holistically meets all the requirements for a comprehensive and reliable child-care package stretching over all ages of childhood. To determine whether any state, in reality, actually adopts this type of comprehensive approach to child care, a reliability analysis was conducted to determine whether these four measures—affordable child care, requests for infant care, long school days, and accessible after-school programs—form a robust statistical index. The reliability analysis determines whether state values are consistently high or low to form a comprehensive index. Substantively, the reliability analysis tests whether states with more affordable child care also have longer school days, requests for quick returns to work, and accessible after-school programs. The results produced low interitem reliability (alpha = .12), meaning states with long school days and expansive after-school care do not necessarily also have inexpensive or well-utilized child care. In other words, it might be hypothetically possible for states to have a comprehensive approach to child care, but as it stands, each state falls short according to at least one of the four measures. Although these measures do not form a single index, some of them might still be correlated with one another individually. To test for these relationships, a Pearson correlation analysis was conducted across all four disaggregated state-level measures to determine whether these measures, individually, are positively or negatively associated with each other (i.e., states are consistently higher or lower across these measures). Table 2.1 shows the results of this analysis and indicates that only two measures are significantly correlated: in states where the cost of child care is high, school days are shorter (–.45; p < .01). The corollary of this result is that in states where child care is inexpensive, school days tend to be longer. This indicates that some states reflect more comprehensive child-care regimes for all ages of children, characterized

Mapping the “United” States  |  49

Table 2.1. Correlation between child-care and school-agedcare measures

Average child-care cost (% of married couples’ income) Requests for infant/ toddler care to child-care resource and referral agencies (%) Average school-day length (hours) Families that want afterschool care (%)

Average child-care cost (% of married couples’ income) 1

Requests for infant/toddler care to childcare resource and referral agencies (%) –.128

Average school-day length (hours) –.450*

Families that want after-school care (%) –.039

–.128

1

.212

–.061

–.450*

.212

1

.001

–.039

–.061

.001

1

*p < .01

by inexpensive child care and long school days. These results also illustrate, however, how mothers may still struggle to return to work and to remain in the workforce even when their children enter public school, particularly in states with weak child-care regimes.

Linking Maternal Employment to Child-Care and School-Aged-Care Resources The previous section shows that states do not cluster in their child-care and school-aged-care resources, underscoring that no state holistically provides child resources to support working parents. Yet certain child-care and schoolaged-care characteristics may be more effective in supporting mothers’ employment than others. Table 2.2 formally tests whether state-to-state variation in child-care and school-aged-care resources are significantly associated with maternal employment patterns. At first, it appears to suggest that higher child-care costs do not, in fact, lead to fewer mothers being employed at the state level. However, this effect is not statistically significant (p > .05) and may be a consequence of including all the state-level child-care regime measures simultaneously, including those that are highly correlated, such as child-care costs and school day length.7 In models not shown here, the results show that, when child-care costs are entered alone, married mothers are

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Table 2.2. OLS regression results for married mothers’ employment patterns

Constant Average child-care cost (% of married couples’ income) Requests for infant/toddler care (%) Average school-day length (hours) Families that want after-school care (%) R-squared

Full-time employment –22.629 –0.393 0.208** 7.504** 0.158 0.355***

Part-time employment 34.886*** 0.363**

Stay-at-home spouse 29.209** –0.126

0.055* –3.156** –0.226** 0.346***

–0.095 –1.382 0.048 0.014

*p < .050 **p < .010 ***p < .001

found to be less likely to be employed full time and more likely to work part time as states’ child-care costs increase. Thus, child-care costs appear empirically to be detrimental to married mothers’ full-time employment, even though in a broader statistical analysis this effect is masked by the close correlation of child-care costs with other child-care and school-aged-care metrics. Table 2.2 also shows that states with more requests for infant and toddler care have a higher percentage of employed mothers (both full- and part-time). This suggests that states where mothers return more quickly to the labor market postpartum generally have higher rates of maternal employment. Similarly, longer school days are associated with more full-time and less part-time employment. Finally, states with more families that want after-school care have lower rates of part-time work. States with higher child-care costs do have more mothers working part time, identifying that child-care costs discourage mothers’ full-time work. These results indicate that state governments must provide inexpensive child care and long school days to facilitate maternal employment. Practically, state representatives have considerable power to legislate longer school days and provide significantly greater subsidies for child care. This, of course, would require more tax dollars allocated for public schools to extend school day lengths. While extending school days is often refuted for budgetary reasons, the above results suggest states will gain tax revenue as more mothers enter employment, so that longer school days may be at best tax neutral and at worst subsidized through employed mothers’ income taxes. Parents, teachers, and school administrators could also intervene to advocate for longer school days, indicating clear policy pathways to support working families. Further, states like California with shorter school days should turn to Nebraska for

Mapping the “United” States  |  51

their tax and public school policies. The results of this chapter suggest that expanding these provisions at the state level could have a meaningful influence on maternal employment and provide a clear avenue for policy makers to mitigate the unequal economic penalties mothers shoulder. Fathers interested in assuming the primary carer role would also benefit from longer school days and inexpensive child care as these resources reduce economic barriers to care, which may facilitate more equal domestic sharing between parents.

Chapter Summary Married mothers’ full-time employment is concentrated in the West North Central states (North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota), the West South Central states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana), the East South Central states (Mississippi and Kentucky) and the South Atlantic states (Virginia and South Carolina). Broadly, maternal fulltime employment is clustered from north to south in the middle of the nation, spreading east along the southern states. By contrast, almost all of the Mountain and Pacific states report the lowest rates of full-time married mothers’ employment in the nation. The country is generally divided on the basis of full-time married mothers’ employment rates, with lower rates west of Texas and higher rates elsewhere. These descriptive data patterns counter presumptions that liberal West Coast states, including California and Washington, ought to be the leaders in women’s employment. In fact, these states have relatively heterogeneous maternal employment patterns, with low part-time employment rates in California but relatively high part-time employment rates in Washington and Oregon. Yet the Pacific states are consistent in exhibiting some of the lowest levels of full-time maternal employment in the nation. Married mothers’ part-time work is concentrated in the East North Central states and the religiously conservative states of Utah and Idaho. By contrast, part-time maternal employment is relatively uncommon in the southern half of the United States (ranging from California to Florida), with only around one in seven mothers employed part time. Finally, married mothers are most likely to stay home as child-carers and homemakers in the Mountain and Pacific states from Texas to the Pacific coast. The South also has relatively high rates of stay-at-home married mothers, illustrating a clear NorthSouth division that stretches to the Pacific states. These descriptive patterns provide some surprising findings, notably that the Pacific states are less supportive of married mothers’ employment than might be expected. In terms of child care, the West North Central (North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska) and West and East South Central (Louisiana, A ­ rkansas,

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Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky) regions once again cluster together with similar outcomes, with the least expensive child-care costs and longest school days. The West North Central states also have quick returns to work and widely available after-school care. The Pacific states (California, Oregon, and Washington) have some of the highest child-care costs, the smallest percentage of mothers returning to work quickly following the birth of a child, and the shortest school day lengths. These states also have some of the highest percentages of stay-at-home mothers. By contrast, the West North Central states have some of the lowest child-care costs, the highest percentages of families who request child care for infants/toddlers, relatively long school days, and available after-school care. These states also have some of the highest rates of full-time maternal employment. Finally, the southern states also cluster in their child-care and school-aged-care offerings. The West and East South Central states provide some of the least expensive child care, and they also require children to be in school for an above-average number of hours per day. Weighing child-care resources together, the results show that U.S. states with expensive child care also have shorter school day lengths, indicating that the institutional barriers to maternal employment linger as children age. By contrast, states with inexpensive child care have longer school days, which are associated with higher rates of married mothers’ employment. Simply getting children into public school is not an effective child-care solution for mothers in states with short instructional days and difficult-to-access after-school care, which illustrates the importance of conceptualizing child-care resources in terms of holistic regimes that continue to support parents as their children grow older. These state-to-state differences in child-care resources provide a clear policy avenue for state legislators to develop policies to support working families and mitigate gender inequality. Finally, this chapter explores the impact of child and school-aged care on married mothers’ employment. Inexpensive child care and long school day lengths are essential to facilitating maternal employment. Quick returns to work are also associated with higher rates of full- and part-time employment, indicating that some states have stronger maternal employment cultures. Ultimately, this suggests that states that work to implement stronger child-care regimes, including by lengthening school days and promoting less expensive child care, may draw more married mothers into full-time work. This would require states to more fully invest tax money into public schools, but the cost of this investment should be offset by increased tax revenue through employment. Further, greater funding to public schools may mitigate some of the disruptions to school days from teacher strikes for better conditions.

Mapping the “United” States  |  53

Child-care resources at the state level are not equally distributed across states, and this inequality has meaningful impacts on married mothers’ employment. Again, these findings indicate that child care is an important barrier to maternal employment and point to important policy directions for state and local governments and politicians. Chapter 3 explores states’ political and economic relationships with their female constituents and how these affect maternal employment.

3

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment Examining Female Social and Political Empowerment across States

W

e have begun to see that Ava’s and Michelle’s experiences are characteristic of mothers in their respective states. Ava lives in a state where child care is affordable, school days are long, and afterschool care is of good quality and widely available. Most of Ava’s friends with children work full time, and the stress of child care is less of a worry for Ava than for Michelle. The results of Chapter 2 show that Ava’s experiences are typical of mothers in her home state, Nebraska. By contrast, Michelle faces child-care challenges to her employment: expensive and difficult-to-access infant care and short day length for toddler care. While Michelle works full time, many of her friends stay at home rather than trying to navigate the challenges of child care. Michelle’s experiences, as demonstrated, are typical of many mothers in the state of California, where the majority work part time or stay at home. Michelle’s troubles will not ease when her son enters public school, as school day lengths there are some of the shortest and after-school care some of the most difficult to access in the nation. Thus, Michelle’s challenges of matching child care with work will linger into the school years. The difficulty Michelle faces accessing care for her child is particularly pernicious and frustrating in the state of California where women can earn more money, have greater access to professional positions and more robust gender discrimination and family policies, and are better represented by female politicians. Thus, stay-at-home mothers in California miss out on more lucrative labor markets than those in Nebraska. Michelle, who works full time, feels these benefits acutely. Following the birth of her child, Michelle

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  55

was able to spend the first six weeks bonding with her son with the state of California shouldering some of the cost. For Michelle, this time was invaluable, and she feels grateful to live in a state with a government that values gender equality. When asked which women in her state serve as role models, Michelle can easily name a range of politicians and leaders in industry that inspire her. She once ran into Kamala Harris at a local coffee shop, which left her motivated to invest more in her career. For Michelle, the opportunities available to women in her state are not limited by ideology, economic opportunity, or precedent. Rather, Michelle’s opportunities are limited by the high cost of living in the golden state—child care, rent, utilities, gas, food, and other daily expenses gobble up most of their family budget. While Michelle finds great value in her work, she understands why many of her friends drop out of employment—the cost of child care on top of other expenses becomes too cumbersome. Ava has the opposite experience to Michelle’s. Child care and costs of living in Nebraska are some of the most affordable in the nation, yet Ava’s career opportunities within the state are limited. There are only a few companies that would pay Ava a wage equivalent to a male worker’s, and competition for high-paid jobs is fierce. Most mothers in Ava’s state work in jobs with relatively short career ladders and fixed pay—teachers, nurses, caregivers. As Ava points out, these are good middle-class jobs but do not bring the wealth seen in other labor markets. Last year, Ava declined a higher-paying job in a coastal state because the salary was not sufficient to neutralize the increase in cost of living. For Ava, Nebraska is a wonderful place to raise a family, but she worries that her daughter will have fewer career opportunities when she gets older. Ava and her husband are already saving money in case their daughter wants to move out of state for college. Unlike Michelle, Ava sees her state as offering women greater economic security rather than unlimited ­opportunity. Ava often wonders if she would have a better career if she lived in a more economically powerful state; Michelle does not share these concerns.

The U.S. State as a Distinct Political Actor: Progressiveness in Family-Friendly Policies and Gendered Legislative Representation Since family policies, such as paid parental leave and state-sponsored childcare provisions, are often described as progressive policies, it would make sense that progressive states might have more comprehensive family ­policies

56 | Chapter 3

than less-progressive states. Paid parental leave policies are a good case study of this phenomenon. At a federal level, the United States offers working mothers limited unpaid parental leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This provides eligible employees with unpaid leave for specific family and medical conditions for up to twelve workweeks. It can only be accessed in the first year after a child’s birth, however, and the fact that it is unpaid makes it impractical for a large proportion of American mothers. As a result, salaried employees are more likely to save their paid vacation or sick leave to ease the transition postbirth and to cope with unexpected family demands (Meyers and Gornick 2005).1 The FMLA is effectively a legal provision that prevents mothers from being fired after giving birth and is hardly a comprehensive family-supportive policy. In response to this federal gap in legislation, a handful of state governments have legislated state-level paid parental leave for working mothers. These include California, Rhode Island, Washington, New Jersey, and New York. The District of Columbia, too, legislates universal paid family leave. All these paid parental leave schemes are funded by each state’s insurance fund, indicating that states directly pay for them; thus, these states require the ongoing support of their constituents to continue to fund these policies (Steinbach and Gunzenhauser 2017), and they are driven by key political and social movement actors (Sholar 2016). All these states are typically described as progressive, consistently falling on the blue side of the American red-blue political divide (Gallup, n.d.). Parental leave is a prime example of politicians legislating within federal policy gaps to meet constituents’ demands. One of the most progressive of any of these states, California, was the very first to pass a family leave provision. It is intriguing to note, however, that, as illustrated in Chapter 2, California has some of the most expensive child care and the shortest school day lengths in the country. It also has some of the lowest rates of full-time maternal employment. Politically and institutionally, then, California appears to have two very different approaches to supporting working mothers: providing parents with paid parental leave but failing to adequately subsidize child-care expenses and extend the school day, ranking high on gender empowerment but poorly on child care. The institutional state contexts theoretical model predicts that progressive states, with stronger family-friendly policies, ought to provide more favorable institutional contexts for maternal employment, increasing the number of women in full-time work. The case of California suggests this relationship is more complex, and analyses in this chapter examine whether other typically progressive states mirror this disjointed institutional approach to supporting maternal employment.

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  57

States’ progressiveness, and their policy environments, may not be their only political influence on maternal employment. A stream of feminist literature suggests that nation-states with higher numbers of women represented in their parliaments or legislatures tend to generate more policies aimed at reducing gender inequality (Bochel and Briggs 2000; Childs 2004; Childs and Withey 2004; Phillips 1998; Stockemer 2009; Thomas 2003; Vickers 1996). Within the United States, a small body of research suggests, congressional legislatures with larger numbers of women have historically tended to legislate more family policies (Swers 2002; Thomas 2003). Female politicians are also highly visible role models with the capacity to inspire women’s greater engagement in the public sphere (Wolbrecht and Campbell 2007). It seems intuitive that female legislators would be more likely to vote for policies that support women’s interests. Other literature, however, questions this assumption, arguing that female legislators do not necessarily hold enough substantive power to enact female-supportive policies on their own, and that simply having a large number of female legislators does not guarantee that a legislature will vote in women’s interests (Beckwith 2007; Bochel and Briggs 2000; Considine and Deutchman 1996; Grey 2002; Phillips 1998; Studlar and McAllister 2002). Indeed, there could be a number of complex interactions explaining why nation-states with more female representatives tend to have stronger family-friendly policies: for example, those states might simply have a more progressive political culture, mimicking Gosta Esping-­A ndersen’s ideal-type social-democratic welfare state, or they might have instituted representational quotas to make themselves appear more female-friendly (Childs 2006).2 This is all to say that larger concentrations of female representatives may not directly result in a state instituting more family policies, but regardless, the relative numbers of female legislators in each U.S. state warrants examination as part of our institutional state contexts theoretical model. States where women are more politically empowered, both in terms of the prevalence of family policies and the concentration of women in state legislatures, ought to have institutional contexts that better facilitate maternal employment, by empowering mothers with the resources and political support they need to stay in work. We might describe these states as having more gender empowerment, or contexts where women are more holistically empowered politically, economically, and educationally. In the sections that follow, stateto-state variation in policies to support families and working women, rates of female state legislators, and antidiscrimination laws, are illustrated through a series of maps that collectively help illustrate which U.S. states exhibit gender empowerment.

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Family Leave: Enacting Progressive Gender Policy Welfare state typologies often focus on two types of family policy provisions: universal child care and paid parental leave. In the United States, however, states offer a range of provisions to support working families. The diversity in family resources reflects the United States’ “liberal” welfare state approach, whereby families must identify a range of family care solutions, including drawing on employers, the market, and family and friends to care for children. As a consequence, states provide a variety of leave policies to support families, which have been collated and summed in a state-level leave index, depicted in Figure 3.1. This leave index is a collection of family policies taken from the National Conference of State Legislatures (2016). It captures a total of seven possible leave provisions available in each state: (1) any leave provided beyond the FMLA; (2) paid parental leave, (3) policies allowing employees to transfer personal paid sick leave to parental leave, (4) policies providing small necessities law (ability to take leave to care for families), (5) leave for military families, (6) pregnancy protection as a form of disability, and (7) parental leave after an adoption. Each state’s provisions across these measures are summed. Since no state provides a comprehensive leave policy across all seven of these measures, the index ranges from zero, for states with none of these leave provisions, to the maximum of five, capturing a cumulative score for these leave policies.

Figure 3.1. Parental-leave index. (National Conference of State Legislatures 2016.)

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  59

Rhode Island has the most generous leave policies, providing parents with access to five forms of family leave. The Pacific states—California, Oregon, and Washington—also provide comprehensive family leave, with four of the denoted provisions, followed by a clustering of New England and Mid-Atlantic states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts—that offer three different policies. This shows that New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Pacific states cluster in offering the most comprehensive, progressive family policies in the United States, which supports broader public discussions about these state legislatures implementing the most politically progressive policies. While generous in their policies, these same states appear in our earlier analyses to be the ones failing to offer working mothers inexpensive child care and long school days, which suggests that the progressive policy states do not holistically support working mothers in ways consistent with welfare state theory. In regard to its policies, a state like California is among the most generous in its policies, reflecting its status as one of the most gender empowered. By contrast, a state like Nebraska has only one policy to support working families. This suggests that states with expansive child-care resources, like Nebraska, offer few resources to politically and socially empower women more broadly, in spite of having some of the highest numbers of mothers employed full time. Yet states like California that are the most gender empowered fail to institutionally support mothers through child-care regimes. This cleavage is explored in greater detail in Chapter 4.

Female Legislators: Representation across U.S. States As discussed previously, female legislators may be important power brokers for more progressive family and gender policies. As Figure 3.2 indicates, female political representation is more deeply concentrated in some states than others. First, it is important to note that in no state do women hold equal representation in state legislatures, with the highest concentration at 40 percent in Colorado. This is despite the fact that women account for half of the United States’ population (50.8 percent); women are therefore underrepresented in state legislatures across the United States, though they are less underrepresented in some states than others. After Colorado, female state legislature representation is highest in New England states (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut) and in one South Atlantic state (Maryland). High concentrations of female state legislative representatives also appear in two Pacific states (Washington and Hawaii), one West North Central state (Minnesota), one East North Central

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Figure 3.2. Average female representation in state legislature, 2010–2014. (National Conference of State Legislatures 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.)

state (Illinois), and two Mountain states (Arizona as well as Colorado). Indeed, most of the Pacific and Mountain states, with the exception of Wyoming and Utah, have relatively high concentrations of female state legislators. By contrast, the West and East South Central and South Atlantic States (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia) have some of the lowest female legislative representation, as does one Mid-Atlantic state (Pennsylvania) and one West North Central state (North Dakota). Here, the southern states cluster in their low levels of female state legislative representation, a feature typical of historically informed arguments that southern conservatism is characterized by more patriarchal political structures. By contrast, the Pacific and Mountain states have both the most progressive family leave policies and some of the highest concentrations of female legislators, confirming assumptions that these states have more progressive, female-friendly legislative contexts. This apparent correlation between female state legislative representation and progressive family leave policies suggests that female legislators do, indeed, help produce progressive family policies. Of course, it may also just be that more progressive states are more likely to elect legislators, regardless of gender, who support strong welfare regimes.3 As with all the other measures examined thus far, states cluster geographically into groups with higher and lower numbers of female state representatives, and those groups of states with both higher female state legislative representation and stronger parental leave policies are the same states typically identified as progressive (see Figures 3.1

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  61

and 3.2). Regardless of whether there is a causal relationship between female legislative representation and progressive family leave policies, then, the above results demonstrate that states have distinct, comprehensive legislative contexts, expressed by their political representation and policy outcomes, with the capacity to affect how mothers engage in the workforce. These legislative contexts appear intrinsically associated with each state’s level of progressiveness, which is not an unexpected finding. The relationship between these legislative contexts and maternal employment outcomes is explored in more detail toward the end of this chapter. First, however, the analyses explore three other state-level metrics that provide broader context on states’ levels of gender empowerment by charting (1) the number of legal claims made under the Equal Pay Act (EPA), (2) women’s wages, and (3) the number of college-educated women in each state. Rationalchoice arguments predict that maternal employment will be more common in states where antidiscrimination laws are more stringent (i.e., with stronger enforcement of EPA legislation), where mothers can earn more money (i.e., where women have higher earnings and where there are lower gender wage gaps), and where more women hold greater human capital (i.e., where they have higher rates of college education). Simply, mothers will maximize their employment in states where women have better economic outcomes. These rational-choice arguments are weighed against welfare state arguments that empowering women will encourage maternal employment. The subsequent sections assess these arguments across U.S. states.

Equal Pay Act Litigation as a Measure of Gendered Pay Discrimination The Equal Pay Act (EPA) of 1963 was an amendment to the federally mandated Fair Labor Act, and notionally outlawed gender-based pay inequality across the United States. The EPA prohibits employers from discriminating based on sex “by paying wages to employees at a rate less than the rate paid to employees of the opposite sex for equal work on jobs with equal skill, effort and responsibility and which are performed under similar working conditions” (Section 206 d). This language implies universality, but a company violates the EPA only when three specific provisions are collectively breached: when (1) male and female workers are paid different wages in (2) jobs with equal skill, effort, and responsibility and that have (3) equivalent working conditions. Particularly since men and women are often distributed into different types of work according to their gender, simultaneous violations of these three components are often hard to prove (Brown 2017;

62 | Chapter 3

­ ufarolo 2016).4 It has therefore always been difficult for women to successT fully litigate an EPA claim. While all states are bound by EPA legislation, some states have expanded its federal mandate through additional provisions, including allowing victims of gender discrimination to be financially compensated. Across all states, fifteen do not have a provision to sue for damages related to violations of the equal pay provisions (National Conference of State Legislatures 2016). These fifteen states include southern states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas), along with Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wisconsin. While the EPA is a universal federal provision, then, its application varies significantly across states. Individuals in states with weak legislation may be less likely to litigate against discrimination and workplaces that employ discriminatory practices. This might lead to state-to-state differences in levels of EPA litigation. With relation to maternal employment, states with more mothers in the labor market might have a higher percentage of EPA charges, simply because more mothers are vulnerable to workplace discrimination (see Chapter 2). States with more EPA charges may have state legislators and district attorneys who take gender equality in employment more seriously, and thus may also have legislated a range of family-friendly measures (including paid parental leave, progressive family policies, and strict and enforceable EPA legislation). In this regard, EPA charges may be one element of a state’s broader approach to overcoming economic gender inequality, an additional measure of state legislators’ disposition toward gender nondiscrimination and, more broadly, equality. To better understand the distribution of states’ anti–gender discrimination policies, Figure 3.3 provides a graphical overview of state-to-state variation in the percentage of EPA charges as a percentage of all litigation occurring within each state in a four-year period, from 2010 to 2014. States are required to record EPA charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which then calculates these charges as state-based percentages to enable cross-state comparability. The data show that the West North Central states (North and South Dakota and Nebraska) have some of the highest concentrations of state-based EPA claims. Similarly, the Mountain states (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico) exhibit considerable concentrations of EPA claims. Two West South Central states (Louisiana and Arkansas), one East South Central state (Alabama), one West North Central state (Missouri), and one South Atlantic state (West Virginia) exhibit some of the highest concentrations of EPA charges in the nation. By contrast, New England, much of the East North Central region, and the Middle and South Atlantic

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  63

Figure 3.3. States’ equal pay discrimination charges as a percentage of total state litigation, 2010–2014. (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge receipts database, at https://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/ statistics/enforcement/charges_by_state.cfm.)

states have some of the lowest concentrations of EPA claims. Figure 3.3 illustrates that the West North Central states cluster together with particularly high rates of EPA litigation. These are the same states with the cheapest child care, longest school days, most expansive after-school care, and highest rates of full-time maternal employment in the United States. In part, the relatively high claims may reflect the fact that more mothers are in the labor market in these states. Putting endogeneity aside, the concentration of claims indicates that women in these states feel empowered to challenge inequitable employment environments. That these states consistently cluster together along all these metrics suggests that they might provide an institutional context that is particularly conducive to maternal employment.

The Gender Gaps in Earnings: Variation across U.S. States While the previous sections document state-to-state differences in legislation, the following sections focus more explicitly on women’s economic status across states, an important dimension of gender empowerment. As a country with an archetypally laissez-faire economic structure, the United States incentivizes maternal employment at a federal level through market rather than government forces. This is based on a rational-choice model of liberal

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Figure 3.4. Gender wage gap as a percentage of men’s earnings by U.S. state, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

g­ overnance, which argues that individuals survey their available options and make decisions to maximize their individual resources. If mothers tend to apply rational-choice logic to their decision-making processes around employment, then their odds of employment will likely be higher in states where women earn more money, and where gender wage gaps are smaller.5 Figure 3.4 depicts the gender wage gap, which captures the percentage of women’s earnings relative to men’s and may also structure mothers’ employment decisions. Rational-choice arguments suggest that mothers will enter labor markets that are more economically favorable to women, so on an individual level, mothers may be more likely to be employed in states where gender gaps in earnings are small. Gender wage gaps may also be an important feature of legislators’ broader approach to politically and economically empowering women, and some states might holistically provide working mothers with better economic and political resources (collectively encompassing family benefits, higher earnings, stricter anti–gender discrimination legislation, and smaller gender wage gaps). Figure 3.4 depicts the gender wage gaps across states, with higher values capturing smaller gender wage gaps (i.e., a value of 78 means women earn 78 percent of men’s wages). No state reports gender parity in wages, but the gap between men and women varies substantially across states. The gender wage gap is smallest in three Pacific states (California, Hawaii, and Alaska), two Mountain states (Nevada and New Mexico), two New England states (Rhode Island and Vermont) and

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  65

two Mid- and South Atlantic states (New York and Maryland). By contrast, gender wage gaps are widest in the West South Central states (Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma), two West North Central states (North Dakota and Kansas), one South Atlantic state (West Virginia), and three Mountain states (Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah). In short, when it comes to pay, the gender gaps are smallest in the coastal states and largest in the South and some of the Midwest. Wage gaps are one component, but women’s actual wages may also factor into mothers’ propensity to remain employed. Figure 3.5 shows that women earn the most in New England (New Hampshire and Connecticut) and in the Mid-Atlantic states of New York and New Jersey. Women’s earnings are also high in the South Atlantic states of Maryland and Virginia. Indeed, the East Coast provides some of the highest-paying jobs in the nation for women. Women in California also report high wages, with high female wage rates clustering along the Pacific states, including Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and Alaska also report some of the highest average female wage rates. By contrast, women’s earnings are lowest in the center of the nation, particularly in the Mountain states (Idaho, Montana, and Utah) as well as in the South (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama). The distribution of high female earnings relative to maternal employment is stark: it suggests that mothers are less likely to be employed in the states with the highest earnings. In models

Figure 3.5. Female wages (dollars per hour) by state, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

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not shown, the relationship between women’s and men’s earnings was explored—states where women earn more money are also those where men are paid more as well.6 This suggests that states’ economic affluence may provide sufficient financial flexibility for more mothers to stay at home, but also that mothers are exiting the most lucrative job markets. Exits from employment in high-earning labor markets means mothers’ long-term economic health— accumulation of retirement savings, career ladders, and earnings potentials— may be more severely handicapped than in states where mothers’ earnings, on average, are more modest. At this stage, we can begin to see how states appear to divide into two types of clusters: those with comprehensive child-care regimes (i.e., with inexpensive, easily accessible child care and long school days), like Nebraska, and those with greater gender empowerment (i.e., expansive family policies and high female political representation), like California. The former cluster has higher rates of maternal employment, while the latter cluster has higher female wage rates. These states provide archetypes of our models of state welfare explored in greater depth later in the book.

College-Educated Women: Concentrations at the State Level In addition to women’s incomes, states may vary in their concentration of highly educated women. This is primarily worth investigating because, as discussed previously, most measures of female social, political, and economic status consider women’s educational attainment to be a crucial element of their aggregate empowerment.7 Thus, more educated mothers might be more likely to vote for, and defend, their right to work (Brewster and Padavic 2000). Beyond this, recent research has shown that more educated Americans tend to be more likely to vote for Democratic politicians than for Republicans, suggesting that they subscribe to the Democrats’ more progressive policy agenda, including their stronger record of feminist advocacy (Galston and Hendrickson 2016; Pew Research Center 2015; Silver 2016). Since our analysis so far has indicated that more progressive states have more genderempowered contexts, it follows that states with more educated women would also exhibit gender empowerment, which might lead to more mothers in those states staying in work. Figure 3.6 shows the percentage of women in each state with college or graduate degrees. New England has the highest concentration of women with college or higher degrees, particularly in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The Mid-Atlantic states of New York

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  67

Figure 3.6. Concentration of women with college or higher education by state, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

and New Jersey, and the South Atlantic states of Maryland and Virginia, also have some of the highest numbers of college-educated women. Colorado stands alone as the only Mountain state with a high concentration of ­college-educated women. The Pacific coast states (California, Washington, and Oregon) as well as two West North Central states (Minnesota and Kansas) and one East North Central state (Illinois) have relatively high concentrations of college-educated women. By contrast, most of the East and West South Central states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky), as well as one East North Central state (Indiana), two Mountain states (Idaho and Nevada), and one South Atlantic state (West Virginia), have some of the lowest concentrations of college-educated women. Again, the Pacific coast and New England cluster as the most gender and politically empowered, with the highest concentrations of college-educated and high-earning women, progressive family policies, and female state legislative representation. By contrast, the West and East South Central states have the least economically and politically empowered women. These patterns are more consistent with arguments about the “progressive” blue and “conservative” red states. But, as this book indicates, these simple divisions do not adequately capture the complicated relationships between political, economic, and educational gender empowerment on the one hand and childcare resources and maternal employment on the other.

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Comparing Figures 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6, we can clearly see that states with higher-educated women also have higher average female wages, which is not surprising. They also appear to have higher-than-average rates of female state legislature representatives, and marginally stronger-than-average family leave policies, which supports the assumption that states with stronger gender empowerment are also those with higher-educated women. In this regard, California presents the ideal case of a gender-empowered state. Nebraska, again, serves as an example of America’s “child-care-regime” states, which are generous in their child care but poor in their political and economic policy support of gender empowerment. The District of Columbia does well across both of these measures, but Idaho does poorly and thus is a policy-void state. In the following section, all these relationships are analyzed with greater statistical precision, to paint a clearer picture of which U.S. states have the most politically and socially empowered women.

The Legislative State: Policies and Representation The previous section identifies variation across U.S. states in their gender and family policies, female legislative representation, and a number of social, political, and economic empowerment metrics. Generally, they show that the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Pacific, and Mountain states cluster together with similar results across a number of these measures. These results warrant additional investigation. Do any states provide a comprehensive approach to gender issues across all of these political and social empowerment metrics, or do states exhibit more heterogeneity in their gender and family provisions than Figures 3.1–3.6 suggest? To better understand these relationships, Table 3.1 presents results from a correlation analysis examining all the above measures. Statistically significant relationships are listed in italics. These results show one particularly clear and consistent pattern: states with a higher concentration of female state legislators are more likely to have generous parental leave benefits and stricter gender pay gap legislation. This confirms our earlier preliminary analyses that suggested states with more women in state legislatures tend to have more progressive family policies and more rigorous EPA enforcement. A second clear correlation indicates that states where women earn more tend to have more expansive family policies, greater female state legislative representation, and more college-educated women, also in line with some of our preliminary analyses above. Across this analysis, however, the percentage of women in state legislatures provides most of the significant correlations. Specifically, states with higher numbers of female state legislators are also more likely to have a range

*Correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the .01 level (2-tailed).

States providing paid parental leave (0–1) Family-leave policy index Female state legislature representation (%) State-based equal-pay charges (%) Damages for gender pay discrimination Women’s earnings Women with college degree or higher (%)

States providing paid parental leave (0–1) 1 .633** .164 –.175 .213 .399** .189 Family-leave policy index .633** 1 .534** –.192 .136 .586** .520**

Female state legislature representation (%) .164 .534** 1 –.146 .280* .500** .630**

State-based equal-pay charges (%) –.175 –.192 –.146 1 .055 –.258 –.135

Damages for gender pay discrimination .213 .136 .280* .055 1 .160 .105

Women’s earnings .399** .586** .500** –.258 .160 1 .858**

Table 3.1. State-level correlations among EPA discrimination charges, family policy, women’s economic status, and female state legislature representation Women with college degree or higher (%) .189 .520** .630** –.135 .105 .858** 1

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of family and gender policies including more generous family leaves, equal pay legislation, legal protection to sue for damages in gender discrimination cases, women who earn more money, and a higher concentration of women with college degrees.8 These relationships were neither as intuitively obvious nor as immediately visible as some others in Figures 3.1–3.6 and also counter a growing body of research that argues female legislators have relatively limited power to facilitate gender-progressive policies. It is possible that the number of female legislators per state is merely the most accurate representation of how progressive a state is, but these results make it seem equally likely that female legislators have a substantive impact on the female-friendliness of states’ legislative contexts. Overall, these results lend further support to our earlier suggestion that states with holistically stronger legislative contexts that support women also lend women greater economic power. Since our earlier analyses concluded that progressive, left-leaning states—including California, Rhode Island, Washington, and New York—were those with the most gender empowerment, we can conclude that women in progressive states are the most socially, politically, and economically empowered in the United States. This might not seem surprising, given that it parallels academic and popular assumptions made about women having the strongest life-chances and opportunities in left-leaning, politically supportive states, but it is still important in lending support to the institutional state contexts theoretical model. What is more surprising, however, is the relationship between these metrics of gender empowerment and other state-level institutional support offered to working mothers. Welfare state research suggests U.S. states with more progressive political agendas may also provide more comprehensive child care and school-aged care to families. To assess these relationships, Table 3.2 shows the correlation results between state-level political, childcare, and school-aged-care measures. These results indicate that states with more progressive legislative contexts actually have poorer institutional child-care and school-aged-care environments. For example, states with more female legislators have more expensive child care and shorter school days. Similar patterns are evident for our policy measures. States with paid parental leave and more expansive family leave policies have shorter average school day lengths. States with more generous family leave policies have more expensive child-care costs. This suggests that more gender-empowered states actually have abnormally family-unfriendly child-care environments. Similar patterns emerge across the other metrics examined in this chapter. States with more expansive equal pay legislation have more expensive

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Table 3.2. State-level correlations for female parliamentary representation and child-care resources

States providing paid parental leave (0–1) Family-leave policy index Female state legislature ­representation (%) State-based equal-pay charges (%) Damages for gender pay discrimination Women’s earnings Women with college degree or higher (%)

Average child-care cost (% of married couples’ income) .231

Average schoolday length (hours) –.413**

Families that want afterschool care (%) .008

Requests for infant/toddler care to childcare resource and referral agencies (%) –.101

.552** .654**

–.470** –.417**

–.053 –.357*

.016 –.015

.244 –.179

–.082 –.267

–.048 –.390**

–.374** –.224

.216 .089

.099 .254

–.088 .206 .528** .539**

*Correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the .01 level (2-tailed).

child care and shorter school day lengths. Those that legislate damages for gender pay discrimination have fewer mothers with quick returns to work. Finally, states where women earn higher wages have more expensive child care, and shorter school days. Overall, these results paint a complex picture of U.S. states’ institutional contexts. More progressive states, with more female legislative representatives, higher wages, and more educated women, appear to be legislating for stronger family-friendly policies, such as paid parental leave. These policies, however, are countered by institutional barriers to maternal employment in these states, in the form of poor child-care resources and prohibitively short school days. States rarely offer both a strong legislative context and comprehensive child-care resources. In other words, as suggested above, U.S. states can be relatively neatly divided into those with strong child-care regimes and those with strong politically gender-empowered institutional contexts. Many states with strong child-care regimes rate poorly on metrics of gender empowerment, and vice versa. This pattern also counters the findings from Table 3.1, which show that states with more female state legislators have more expansive family leave, robust gender pay discrimination legislation, and women with higher earnings and education. That female legislators are associated with more ­progressive

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policies but poorer child-care outcomes suggests that arguments about women’s substantive (i.e., powerful) versus descriptive (i.e., symbolic) power are overly simplistic (Celis 2008). Rather, female state legislators may be more effective in representing women on certain policies (i.e., parental leave) than others (i.e., child care). Holistically, higher numbers of female state legislators are associated with more family-friendly political environments, but the fact that these legislative contexts do not translate into strong child-care regimes suggests that female state legislators might not have the influence on states’ institutional contexts that many feminist welfare state theorists would predict. For states to be truly progressive in supporting working mothers, legislators must enact policies to redress the cost and availability of child care and school day length. Legislating parental leave and other family policies, in the absence of a comprehensive child-care agenda, is inadequate to comprehensively support working mothers.

Gender Empowerment and Maternal Employment: Is There a Link? In light of the results above, we ought to ask: Do progressive states, with stronger legislative contexts and more empowered women, have lower rates of maternal employment? A breadth of cross-national research shows mothers are more likely to be employed in countries with more expansive leave and child-care policies but, given the bifurcation between political and childcare-supportive states in the United States, it is difficult to make assumptions based on this research. Instead, Table 3.3 tests for relationships between maternal employment outcomes and each one of the variables analyzed in this chapter. Table 3.3 shows that none of the political measures—the percentage of EPA charges, family leave policy index, or the percentage of women in state Table 3.3. Maternal employment by family policies, EPA charges, and female state legislators

Constant Family-leave policy index EPA charges (% of state charges) Female state legislators (%) Adjusted R-squared *p < .05

Full-time employment 38.523* –0.624 0.234 –0.113 0.02

Part-time employment 15.251* 0.394 0.317 0.041 0.073

Stay-at-home mother 16.859* –0.272 –1.159 –0.012 0.011

State Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment  |  73

legislatures—are significantly associated with maternal employment rates.9 Thus, while the EPA charges and family policy measures may be one dimension of a state’s broader female-friendly political climate, these measures are not statistically linked to maternal employment on their own. This finding confirms previous descriptive patterns documenting that states with high rates of full-time maternal employment and inexpensive child care are not the same ones with the most progressive policies or strong female political representation. Again, states bifurcate into two patterns: child-care regimes with inexpensive child care, long school days, and high rates of maternal employment; and gender-empowered regimes with high rates of female state representatives, expansive family and strict EPA policies, and high female earnings. Overall, these tables suggest there is very little association between women’s economic and political power and married mothers’ employment. Neither EPA charges nor family-friendly policies are associated with maternal employment outcomes, indicating that states’ legislative contexts are disjointed from married mothers’ employment patterns. Rational-choice theorists argue that increasing women’s human capital is the best way to overcome institutional barriers keeping women out of full-time work, while welfare state and feminist scholars focus on female-friendly policy, political representation, and empowerment. The results from this section indicate that married mothers in states where a larger segment of the female population have high human capital and greater political clout are no more likely to be employed than in those where women have poorer resources. Rather, mothers’ employment appears to be explicitly tied to the availability of inexpensive child care and long school days, as evidenced in previous chapters.

Chapter Summary States vary across a range of measures including married mothers’ employment patterns, child-care costs, school day length and after-school availability, EPA charges, family policies, and women’s political and economic status. So far, a few clusters have emerged. The first includes the West North Central states—including North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa—that exhibit high maternal employment, inexpensive child care, relatively long school days, and expansive after-school care. The demand for infant/toddler care is also highest within these states, indicating that mothers prefer to return to work as quickly as possible after their children’s birth, and they also have the United States’ highest concentrations of Equal Pay Act (EPA) claims. While these states provide mothers with greater child-care resources,

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they offer few family policies beyond the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), have some of the lowest representation of women in elected state government positions, and offer no extended or paid parental leave to new mothers. Thus, they fail to provide a female-friendly legislative context. Simply put, these states do not legislate policies beyond federal mandates, yet they have some of the best maternal employment outcomes and child-care and school-aged-care resources across the United States. As a result, these states are typical of what we describe as a “child-care-regime” type of U.S. state. In a second cluster, the Pacific and Mountain states form a distinct grouping characterized by some of the lowest rates of maternal employment. Here, many mothers stay at home while their husbands work. These states also have the most expensive child care in the United States, the shortest school day lengths, and after-school care that fails to meet demand. Mothers in these states are less likely to return to work immediately following the birth of a child than in the West North Central states. California serves as an exemplar of this gender-empowered cluster. In contrast to these relatively poor maternal employment indicators, these states also have some of the highest female earnings, the lowest gender wage gaps, the highest concentrations of female state legislators, and the most progressive parental leave policies across the country. These characteristics suggest these states are more “gender empowered” than others but, in these states, this does not translate into generous child-care resources or strong maternal employment outcomes. The patterns and clusters illustrated in this chapter suggest most states fail to provide a comprehensive approach to maternal employment. The midwestern states, like Nebraska, provide expansive child and school-age care but have no paid parental leave policies to support working families. Yet in these states, maternal employment is high. By contrast, the western states, like California, are progressive in their parental leave policies and female state legislative representation. Yet mothers in these states are more likely to stay at home than to work and must deal with expensive child care and short school day lengths. These clusters suggest that states are either progressive in their legislative contexts or expansive in their child-care regimes. In this respect, no single cluster has an ideal institutional context to support working mothers, holistically supporting working mothers and mothers’ right to work. Married mothers in states where women have above-average human capital (i.e., earnings, education, and political clout) are no more likely to be employed than in those where women have fewer political and economic resources at their disposal. Instead, mothers’ employment appears to be explicitly tied to the availability of inexpensive child care and long school days.

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The fact that these child-care resources are not universally available to all mothers but, rather, clustered in specific states suggests the failure of the liberal market-based approach to U.S. welfare to effectively encourage and support maternal employment, and underscores the need for a more holistic, government-driven approach. As explored in subsequent chapters, the cost of living is an important factor driving expensive child care and deterring maternal employment. This suggests that in expensive states, a free-market approach gives primacy to more lucrative businesses than to child-care centers, which effectively boxes mothers out of employment. It is especially in these progressive yet expensive markets that state governments must intervene to support maternal employment. In this regard, progressive U.S. states, with strong female-friendly legislative contexts, have failed to implement policies that appear to effectively encourage women’s employment. This is not to imply that paid parental leave and female legislative representation are not valuable, even vital, resources for working mothers, but they may not effectively promote maternal employment if states structurally prevent mothers from working by denying them institutional resources such as affordable, easily accessible child care, long school days, and widely available after-school care. Thus, even though many progressive states have legislated family leave beyond the federal scope, it is imperative that state legislators and policy makers expand their child-care resources if they aim to be truly progressive welfare states. Chapter 5 explores whether state-sponsored interventions are effective in developing a child-care regime. Chapter 4 synthesizes these findings and outlines a comprehensive typology of different types of U.S. welfare states. American states do not fit existing models of welfare state systems, such as Esping-Andersen’s (1990) “liberal” or “social-democratic” welfare state types, in that the most politically liberal states appear to be peculiarly poor at supporting maternal employment. This book extends feminist arguments about gender and family to states but also notes a bifurcation in state support of gender empowerment and child care. What follows is a novel, value-neutral reinterpretation of the institutional and social contexts informing American states’ approaches to maternal welfare, and a starting point for academics and public servants seeking to create a comprehensively more employment-friendly America, one in which working mothers are both politically and institutionally supported.

4

Toward a Typology of U.S. Mother-Friendly Welfare States and Its Political, Religious, and Sociodemographic Determinants

S

tates cluster into two dimensions: child-care or gender-empowerment regimes. Michelle and Ava live in states that hold different resources to support their children, employment, and women more broadly. Yet more work needs to be done to determine whether Ava’s and Michelle’s experiences are distinct to their own states—Nebraska and California—or capture broader patterns of states around them. To identify these relationships, this chapter applies more robust analysis to test whether the patterns identified in the previous chapters can be quantitatively translated into a coherent, reliable typology of U.S. welfare states. So far, the maps and descriptive statistics suggest there are two types of U.S. welfare states, with either strong child-care regimes or strong gender empowerment. An effective typology of U.S. welfare states ought to illustrate this apparent bifurcation in the way states act to support working mothers and explain why it might occur. As we see in this chapter, states actually cleave across these dimensions into four distinct policy types. To what extent do various political, religious, and sociodemographic characteristics help explain variation across states’ child-care regimes and legislative contexts? Analysis of these factors helps underscore what other characteristics of the state—concentration of racial groups, political orientations, or religious conservatism, for example—may help bring context to why Ava lives in a state where more mothers work and Michelle in one where more stay at home. The results from this rich sociodemographic data show that states’ institutional contexts supporting working mothers are structured by complex, somewhat unexpected factors.

Toward a Typology of U.S. Mother-Friendly Welfare States  |  77

Toward a More Robust State Typology: Factor Analysis To identify whether states form a distinct typology, factor analysis is applied to measures to test whether the data estimate an underlying typology, or a “latent construct,” across states. In other words, factor analyses test whether measures form one or multiple indexes that capture some distinct, and unmeasured, commonality across these measures. Nine disaggregated statelevel measures are inputted into the factor analysis model: (1) the percentage of full-time dual-earner families, (2) the percentage of requests for infant/ toddler care, (3) average child-care costs, (4) average school day lengths, (5) the percentage of parents wanting access to after-school care, (6) an index of family policies beyond the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), (7) Equal Pay Act (EPA) discrimination charges, (8) the percentage of women in state legislatures, and (9) women’s average wages. These measures are used because each was shown to have a significant impact on maternal employment across different analyses in the preceding chapters.1 This estimation statistically tests our central expectation that U.S. states can be arranged into a typology that explains how, and why, they support working mothers in different ways. In the previous chapters, the data point to two types of states: those with strong gender empowerment, supporting women’s right to work through progressive policies, and those with strong child-care regimes, supporting mothers’ ability to work through expansive child-care resources. A factor analysis enables us to test whether these types (or others) statistically emerge as factors. It also shows the degree to which each state conforms to any such factors, providing a more nuanced measure of the qualities that structure mother-friendly welfare state types across the United States. Consistent with expectations from our descriptive analyses, the measures form two distinct factors: one capturing states with empowered women and strong legislative contexts, and one capturing states with comprehensive child-care regimes and high maternal employment rates.2 Table 4.1 provides the matrix component that identifies which measures are correlated with each factor.3 Factor 1 captures states where child-care costs, female state legislative representation, the family policy index, and the average female wage rate are high, and where the average school day length and EPA charges are low. This factor captures those states previously identified as having both strong gender-empowerment and weak child-care regimes: our gender-­empoweredstate type. Factor 2 captures states where the average school day length and the percentage of women requesting infant or toddler care, as well as the rates of full-time dual-earner households, are high. This factor captures the

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Table 4.1. Rotated component matrix results for factor analysis Gender-empoweredregime (factor 1) Full-time dual-earner households (%) Average child-care costs Average school-day length Percentage requesting infant or toddler care Female state legislature representatives (%) Family-policy index beyond FMLA Average female wage rate Equal Pay Act discrimination charges (% of states’ total charges)

.775 –.605

Child-care-regime (factor 2) .855 .472 .837

.760 .816 .804 –.359

Figure 4.1. Factor analysis results: Gender-empowered-regime states.

states previously identified as having both strong child-care regimes and high maternal employment: the child-care-regime type. As suggested by the descriptive analyses in Chapter 2, these results suggest the states that provide the most comprehensive child-care support are most likely to keep women employed through their transition to motherhood.4 As mentioned previously, factor analyses enable us not only to show how states cluster across a variety of disaggregated measures but also to show the degree to which certain states do or do not fit each cluster. The degree to which U.S. states subscribe to our first factor—strong legislative contexts and weak child-care regimes—is depicted in Figure 4.1. According to this mea-

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sure, the Pacific states (California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington) feature the highest concentration of political and economic support for women. The Mountain states (Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado) are also relatively high on these measures. The New England and Mid-Atlantic states also cluster with strong female-friendly political climates, including New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Maryland is the only South Atlantic state that is relatively strong on this measure. The East and West North Central states of Minnesota and Illinois are the only other states with high ratings. By contrast, the East and West South Central states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and West Virginia) rate the lowest. Similarly, many West North Central states rank poorly, with Idaho, Wyoming, and South Dakota appearing to have the least female-friendly legislative contexts. Here, we see that California is an exemplar of the genderempowered states, while by contrast, the strong child-care-regime state of Nebraska scores poorly on this measure. Figure 4.2 illustrates conformance to our second factor—strong childcare regimes and high maternal employment. Here we see again that most states that rank poorly on the gender-empowerment measure have strong maternal employment and child-care resources. The ratings of West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin), along with two southern states, Louisiana and Mississippi, are high for this factor. Many of the West and East South Central and South Atlantic

Figure 4.2. Factor analysis results: Child-care-regime states.

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states, ranging from Texas to South Carolina, also have high ratings. The New England states of Vermont and Maine, as well as the South Atlantic states of Delaware and Maryland, also appear to have some of the most generous child-care environments. By contrast, the Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada), along with the Pacific states (California, Oregon, and Washington), cluster in having relatively poor child-care regimes and employment outcomes for mothers. Some states are notable for not conforming solely to either our childcare-regime or gender-empowerment types. The results show that one entity stands out in this analysis—Washington, D.C., receives higher scores than any American state for both the gender-empowerment factor and the child-care-regime factor (graphically depicted in Figure I.1). The descriptive analyses in Chapter 2 revealed that Washington, D.C. offered particularly poor school-aged-care services to working mothers, so its policy offerings still have room for improvement. Nevertheless, we can preliminarily classify it as an exemplar of an “ideal” site for working mothers: one where maternal employment is institutionally supported, in both political and practical terms. Meanwhile, the state of Idaho scores particularly poorly for both the child-care-regime and gender-empowerment factors. The descriptive analyses in Chapters 2 and 3 revealed Idaho to have particularly few institutional resources supporting working mothers in terms of both child-care availability and legislative representation, and so we can preliminarily classify it as an exemplar of a policy-void state, with few practical or political resources available to support working mothers. These void states are likely to require substantial public policy intervention to improve the political, economic, and policy status of mothers.

From Two Types to Four: Finalizing a New U.S. Welfare State Typology The cases of Washington, D.C., and Idaho demonstrate that although most U.S. states fall neatly into our two types of state—child-care regime or gender empowered—a more complex typology is needed to fully encapsulate all the different permutations of mother-friendly American welfare states. If we can describe Washington, D.C., as approaching an ideal type of welfare state, and Idaho as a policy-void type, based on their rankings across both our child-care-regime and gender-empowerment factors, we can start to see how a typology of U.S. welfare states might look: U.S. states are classified into four types on the basis of their relative scores across both indexes. Figure 4.3 depicts this typology on a two-axis grid. Using the results of our factor a­ nalyses

Gender-empowerment factor score

Toward a Typology of U.S. Mother-Friendly Welfare States  |  81

Gender-empowered type Ideal type Strong gender-empowerment ranking Strong gender-empowerment ranking Weak child-care-regime ranking Strong child-care-regime ranking (and low maternal employment rates) (and high maternal employment rates) Example: California Example: Washington, D.C. Policy-void type Child-care-regime type Weak gender-empowerment ranking Weak gender-empowerment ranking Weak child-care-regime ranking Strong child-care-regime ranking (and low maternal employment rates) (and high maternal employment rates) Example: Idaho Example: Nebraska

Child-care-regime factor score Rate of full-time maternal employment

Figure 4.3. A four-type typology of U.S. welfare states.

and descriptive statistics thus far, it predicts that states with stronger childcare regimes will have higher rates of full-time maternal employment, regardless of their score on the gender-empowerment factor. To interrogate whether this typology holds up to empirical scrutiny, Figure 4.4 plots each state’s gender-empowerment score against its child-care score. It shows that child-care-regime states, or those with strong support for and high rates of maternal employment but weak gender empowerment, are the most common type across the United States. These eighteen states are clustered in the West North Central and West and East South Central regions, covering most of the middle of the country and extending into the South. These states include Nebraska—the exemplar state for this cluster—but also states ranging from Virginia to North Dakota. The policy-void and gender-empowered states have equal representation, with twelve states falling within each of these clusters. The gender-empowered states fall along the East and West Coasts, with California serving as the prime example of this regime type. All of the continental Pacific coast states—California, Oregon, and Washington—are represented by the gender-empowered cluster. Several New England and MidAtlantic states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode ­Island—are also representative of this cluster. So are other economic powerhouse states like Illinois and Colorado. It is important to reiterate that while these states are the most gender empowered, they fail to support working mothers through childcare resources. Thus, these states are likely underutilizing their female labor by failing to legislate child-care support for working mothers.

82 | Chapter 4 Child-care regime

Gender empowerment

3.5 2.5 1.5 0.5 –0.5 Ideal type –1.5

–3.5

Gender empowered Child-care regime

Policy void

SD ND NE MS LA IA KS SC TN AR TX VA KY AL MO GA OK OH NC WY MT IN NM AK PA MI FL ID WV UT NJ RI NY MN CT IL CO WA NV AZ OR CA NH MA MD ME VT WI DE HI DC

–2.5

Figure 4.4. Distribution of states by child-care-regime and gender-empowerment scores.

The policy-void states are those that typically exhibit either religious or political traditionalism or have depressed labor markets. These include religiously traditional states like Utah and Idaho, the key case study of this cluster referenced above. Montana, Wyoming, and West Virginia are also included in this cluster, suggesting that it captures rural and, for West Virginia, economically depressed state markets. Whether these states are likely to introduce policies to support working mothers is a question of contemporary politics, but these states would provide an excellent test market for the impact of gender and child-care policies given their comprehensive family and gender policy void. Finally, a handful of states have supportive gender empowerment and child-care resources. These states are largely clustered in the New England states of New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. But, as Figure 4.4 illustrates, these states tend to be more gender empowered than supportive of child care. Only two places excel across both factors: the District of Columbia and Hawaii. As noted previously, the District of Columbia leads the nation across both of these measures, with the highest gender empowerment and highest child-care-regime scores. Yet the disaggregated results presented in Chapter 2 indicate that the District of Columbia, although innovative in many of its child-care policies, would benefit from policies that extend school day lengths and provide parents with after-school care. Thus, the national leader still has points of policy improvement that legislators, community leaders, and nonprofits can look to fill. What is more, only two of the fifty-one measured units (states plus D.C.) provide resources

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to support mothers’ right to work, illustrating a major policy gap for almost every U.S. state. Ultimately, employing this typology demonstrates that most states provide either child-care resources or gender empowerment but not both. Further, many states have policy voids across both measures. This analysis ought to act as a call to action for state legislators to invest in policies and practices pioneered by other states, particularly those on the opposite side of the typology, to reduce gender inequality and support working women. For example, if California mandated Nebraska’s longer school days and Nebraska offered California’s relatively accessible paid parental leave scheme, both states would move closer to being an ideal institutional context for working mothers.

Explaining the Employment and Policy Factors: An Enriched Typology Analyzing Race/Ethnicity, Employment, Politics, Culture, and Maternal Employment across States In Chapter 1, a theoretical model of institutional state contexts is proposed, predicting that a variety of state-level institutional factors and attributes structure married mothers’ employment both directly and indirectly, chiefly through economic and normative pressures. So far, this chapter has identified two distinct factors—gender-empowerment and child-care regimes— that are consistent with the descriptive patterns identified in Chapters 2 and 3. The institutional state contexts model, however, predicts not only that states’ child-care systems and political attributes help determine their rates of maternal employment but also that their distinct sociodemographic profiles influence those child-care systems and political attributes, as well as their rates of maternal employment. The next step in refining our welfare state typology is therefore to determine whether different states’ political, religious, and sociodemographic characteristics help explain states’ ascription to the factors identified previously. Thus, this section uses eight state-level measures to explain state-to-state differences in married mothers’ employment: race/ethnicity, occupational composition, concentration of managerial positions, home ownership, economic health,5 church attendance, political leanings and rural-urban divisions. These measures could interact with maternal employment patterns in a variety of ways. For example, maternal employment may be linked to the concentration of racial minorities in a state, in light of these groups’ traditionally higher workforce attachment or, alternatively, their weaker job security. Further, states

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with more expansive child-care policies may also be those with high concentrations of people of color based on the racial histories of policies aimed at moving minority mothers back into the labor market following childbirth (Abramovitz 2000; Piven and Cloward 2012). Economic characteristics of the state, including its proportion of service jobs, which are disproportionately occupied by women, may also alter the concentration of employed married mothers. The child-care-regime type, which captures states where maternal employment is high, may also be higher in states where the labor market offers more highearning jobs (i.e., where there are more professional and managerial positions), where more people own homes, and that have stronger economies, in line with the (limited) support given by the results so far to economically rationalist arguments. States with more conservative political and religious constituents might be expected to exhibit more traditional gender divisions of employment and thus may rank poorly on the gender-empowerment-regime and childcare-regime indexes. Finally, states with higher urban concentrations would seem likely to have higher rates of maternal employment, as urban centers are often economic powerhouses that supply a higher volume and wider range of jobs with the capacity to draw mothers into employment and thus should be associated with the child-care-regime measure. The institutional state contexts theoretical model predicts that states’ racial, political, economic, and religious characteristics should inform maternal employment patterns, but also that these measures ought not to function in isolation. Rather, states’ political and sociocultural characteristics may collectively form institutional contexts that structure maternal employment outcomes. For example, living in a religiously and politically conservative state with few service jobs may, overall, create economic, normative, and political barriers to maternal employment, while one of these characteristics alone may not influence maternal employment outcomes significantly. If states with similar institutional contexts appear to have similar maternal employment outcomes, this would support the institutional state contexts model’s contention that states cluster into religious, political, and sociodemographic groups, with these factors collectively structuring maternal employment outcomes in each state.

Examining the Heterogeneity of the United States: A Factor Analysis of States’ Sociodemographic Qualities To capture the extent to which states form distinct political, economic, and sociodemographic cultures, it is helpful to determine whether, and to what

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Table 4.2. Factor loadings of racial, economic, political, and religious measures Rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative factor Black (%) Non-Hispanic white (%) Asian (%) Latino (%) Service (%) Sales (%) Construction and transport (%) Professional and management (%) Home ownership (%) Economic health Church attendance (%) 2008 Republican presidential victory margin Rural (%)

.854 –.675 –.746 –.658 –.312 .528

Rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor –.356

Black and politically and religiously conservative factor .793 –.380

.383 .718 .754

–.331

Economic health factor

–.975 .771 .932 .336

.396 .509

.781

.322

.843 .460

extent, U.S. states cluster together across shared sociodemographic qualities. If states share a similar political and sociodemographic makeup, the theoretical model of institutional state contexts posits that they ought to have comparable rates of maternal employment. Thus, a factor analysis was performed across the eight state-level attributes introduced above. This analysis empirically determines whether states form distinct clusters across these eight sociodemographic measures, and which of these measures explain cluster membership. These social and political state characteristics, clustered together, may be conducive or constraining to maternal employment. As described earlier in this chapter, factor analyses also illustrate the strength of membership each state has to each cluster, which allows us to better accommodate the considerable diversity of U.S. states into our analysis. The results of the factor analysis, presented in Table 4.2, indicate that across the eight measures above, states cluster into four distinct political, religious, and demographic factors. The table shows which of the eight measures contribute to cluster membership across the factors. Only coefficients

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above the 0.3 statistical threshold, which contribute to factor membership, are presented. Positive coefficients indicate that the given cluster is more likely to have the measured state political, religious, economic, racial, or sociodemographic characteristics; negative coefficients indicate that a measure is less common for that factor. The first factor captures states characterized by a high percentage of the population that is white, rural, and politically and religiously conservative. These states are also relatively racially homogenous, with low percentages of Asians and Latinos, and have labor markets with more typically maledominated jobs—construction and transport—and fewer typically femaledominated service jobs. Home ownership in these states is also high. Figure 4.5 illustrates where these states lie, showing that those with strongest membership in this cluster include several West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska), New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont), one East South Central state (Kentucky), and one South Atlantic state (West Virginia). Indeed, most of the northern states along the Canadian border strongly correlate with this factor. By contrast, the states along the U.S.-Mexico border—California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—are not represented in this factor. The second factor captures rural, religiously and politically conservative states with fewer people engaged in professional or managerial work. These

Figure 4.5. Variation in rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative measures (factor 1). Hatched and darker shades indicate stronger concentrations of rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative constituents.

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Figure 4.6. Variation in rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional employment measures (factor 2). Hatched and darker shades indicate stronger concentrations of rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative constituents.

states also have lower concentrations of African Americans. Figure 4.6 indicates that this factor captures many of the Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona), the West South Central states (Oklahoma and Arkansas), East South Central states (Mississippi and Kentucky), and two South Atlantic states (West Virginia and Florida). The Pacific coast states (Washington, Oregon, and California), Minnesota, New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts), and three South Atlantic states (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia), have the lowest score on this factor. The third factor captures states with a higher concentration of African American than white constituents, high rates of church attendance, and high levels of political conservatism. These states also have low rates of service jobs and, as Figure 4.7 indicates, consist predominantly of southern states. The southern states include the West South Central states (Texas and Louisiana), East South Central states (Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee) and the South Atlantic states (Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina). Utah also correlates strongly with this factor, likely because of its political and religious conservatism rather than its African American representation. The final factor captures states that score high on a single measure: the average economic health index (Figure 4.8). This factor is rather heterogeneous, capturing an economic powerhouse like California but also ­clustering

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Figure 4.7. Variation in black and politically and religiously conservative measures (factor 3). Hatched and darker shades indicate stronger concentrations of black and politically and religiously conservative constituents.

Figure 4.8. Variation in economically healthy measures (factor 4). Hatched and darker shades indicate stronger concentrations of rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative constituents.

among the East North Central states (Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio). The Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, and Colorado) also rate high across this measure, as do two West North Central States (North Dakota and Indiana). By contrast, two New England states (Maine and Vermont), two South Atlantic states (Delaware and North Carolina), and a

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handful of East and West South Central states (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama) have the poorest economic health in the nation. The indexes above show that states form clusters with similar racial, political, economic, and religious characteristics. Across Figures 4.5–4.8, states in the Pacific, New England, and Mid-Atlantic regions are the least white, rural, and politically and religiously conservative (factor 1),6 rural and religious (factor 2), and black and religiously and politically conservative (factor 3). States’ economic health (factor 4) is rather heterogeneous, with states with strong economic health scattered across these racial, political, religious, and economic clusters. Figures 4.5–4.8 suggest that states in the Pacific, New England, and Mid-Atlantic regions, which are considered to be the most politically liberal (i.e., New York, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), tend to be more ethnically diverse (being less likely to have concentrations of white or African American constituents, as indicated by factors 1 and 3), more urban and less politically and religiously conservative (again, measured by factors 1 and 3). Yet these models do not formally identify clustering across these states that would reflect popular understanding of their being united by progressive politics and social norms. To visualize how these measures function together, an additional, fifth factor analysis was run that included Democratic leanings, rural density, and church attendance (Figure 4.9).7 The results show that the stereotypical coastal elite states do, in fact, form a grouping capturing their high proportions of urban, Democratic,

Figure 4.9. Variation in Democratic, urban, and secular states (factor 5). Hatched and darker shades indicate more Democratic, urban, and secular states.

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and secular constituents. These states are clustered in New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) and across the Pacific (California, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii) and also include one Mid-Atlantic state (New York) and one Mountain state (Nevada). These results confirm popular understanding of a clustering of progressive, urban, blue states along the coasts but indicate that these states are characterized by their political and religious orientations and their urban density rather than by broader measures of their economic and racial makeup. To better visualize how the five factors described above vary across U.S. states, they are illustrated together in Figure 4.10. States that are in the top quintiles for each of the five factors are graphed as representative of this factor. Some states are exemplars across multiple indexes. For example, California is in the top quintile for both economic health (factor 4) and Democratic, urban, and secular (factor 5). States that occupy multiple categories are shaded appropriately. States that do not fall into a top quintile for any of the measures are not shaded. As identified in the previous section, the West North Central states (Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota) cluster as being white, rural, and politically and religiously conservative, as do two

Figure 4.10. Summary of states rating in the top quintiles across the five factors.

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adjacent Mountain states (Wyoming and Montana). Two West South Central states (Oklahoma and Arkansas) and one Mountain state (Arizona) are exclusively rural, religiously and politically conservative, with higher rates of nonprofessional jobs. Kentucky and Virginia are high on factors 1 and 2, which are predominantly white and politically and religiously conservative. Three of the Mountain states (Utah, Idaho, and Nevada) are exemplars of the rural, religiously and politically conservative, and nonprofessional factors. Utah and Idaho also fall under the economically healthy factor, and Nevada under the urban, secular, and Democratic factor. Mississippi forms a hybrid of the southern region (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Texas) that has high concentrations of African Americans and the neighboring West South Central states (Oklahoma and Arkansas) that are predominantly white; all of the southern states are religiously and politically conservative. Finally, the Pacific and New England coasts have the most Democratic, urban, and secular constituents. By compiling the five indexes into a singular map, the regional groupings can be better clarified across these indexes.

Linking Sociodemographic Factors to the Child-Care and Gender-Empowerment Regimes The indexes outlined above measure whether states’ religious, political, racial, and economic characteristics form distinct institutional contexts. The results from a factor analysis across these indexes demonstrate that states form distinct political, religious, economic, and sociodemographic contexts. The next step is to test whether states’ institutional contexts explain state-to-state variation in the child-care and gender-empowerment indexes. These are tested in regression models in the paragraphs that follow. These models also include a measure of married-couple poverty to test these indexes against rationalchoice arguments that high levels of poverty will drive high levels of maternal employment characteristic of the child-care-regime states. Model 1 presents the results of a regression analysis in which the strong gender-empowerment-regime/weak child-care-regime factor is the dependent variable, and each of the sociodemographic indexes are independent variables. Every one of these indexes, with the exception of economic health, are negatively associated with this factor. The model is robust, with the independent variables explaining 83 percent of the variance across the dependent variable. This indicates, in simple terms, that states with a higher concentration of progressive family policies, women in state legislatures, and higher female wages do not typically have rural and politically and religiously conservative

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Table 4.3. Regression results for family-friendly legislative and mother-friendly child-care-regime factors

Constant Rural, white, conservative construction/ transportation factor Rural, conservative, and nonprofessional employment factor Black and politically and religiously conservative factor Economic health factor Married-couple poverty (%) Adjusted R-squared

Constant Rural, white, conservative construction/ transportation factor Rural, conservative, and nonprofessional employment factor Democratic, urban, and secular factor Economic health factor Married-couple poverty (%) Adjusted R-squared

Model 1: Genderempowered-regime type (factor 1) 0.164 –0.446*** –0.616*** –0.469*** 0.061 –0.022 0.828*** Model 3: Familyfriendly legislative type (factor 1) 0.216 –0.082

Model 2: Childcare-regime type (factor 2) 1.238* 0.018 –0.121 0.440** –0.182 –0.168* 0.272** Model 4: Motherfriendly childcare-regime type (factor 2) 1.229** –0.348*

–0.216**

–0.511**

0.724*** 0.090 –0.029 0.849***

–0.720*** –0.213 –0.167** 0.315**

*p < .05 **p < .010 ***p < .001

constituents. Rather, as indicated in Model 3 in Table 4.3, more Democratic, urban, and secular states have the most gender-empowered contexts. This model, too, is robust, explaining 85 percent of variance in the dependent variable. Graphical depictions in Chapter 2 show the coastal states were the most Democratic, urban, and secular, and graphical depictions in Chapters 3 and 4 indicate that these states also had the weakest child-care regimes and strongest legislative contexts, so these results are consistent with descriptive patterns previously identified in this book. The results of a regression analysis testing the strong child-care/high maternal employment factor (factor 2) against our sociodemographic measures, listed in Models 2 and 4 across Table 4.3, show a higher concentration of full-time maternal work among politically and religiously conservative states

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with high concentrations of African-American constituents. Maps in Chapter 2 show that these states are clustered in the South (see Figures 2.1–2.3). It is worth noting that these models explain a smaller, though still significant, portion of the variance across the dependent variable (adjusted R-squared = 0.27) than in our tests against the strong legislative contexts/weak child-careregimes factor (factor 1). The regression analyses in Table 4.3 illustrate that states cluster into one of our two child-care-regime/gender-empowerment factors according to their demographic qualities. This lends strong support to the institutional state contexts theoretical model, which argues the institutional contexts structuring states’ maternal employment patterns are shaped, in part, by their sociodemographic qualities. It also illustrates that U.S. states can be sorted into a welfare state typology. The two factors identified above point to two key types of U.S. welfare states: one that institutionally supports working mothers by placing them in strong economic contexts and politically advocating for their right to work; and another that institutionally supports working mothers by offering them cheaper, more widely available child care. Each of these factors points to a distinct type of gendered institutional context. As the previous descriptive analyses have also indicated, with few exceptions, most states tend to subscribe to one of these institutional contexts, but not the other. Concurrently, these factor and regression analyses have indicated that one of these two institutional contexts—the one offering women cheaper, more widely available child care—is significantly better at facilitating maternal employment than the other. The corollary of this is that progressive states appear worse at facilitating maternal employment than conservative states, and states with weak legislative contexts but strong child-care support have more women working full time. This indicates that progressive states must make child care easier to access as a top priority to facilitate maternal employment. Ultimately, the division across states is clear, as most U.S. states can broadly be classified according to a typology defined by our two factors: they have either a gender-empowered context or a strong child-care regime. At this point, it is worth taking a step back to look at exactly which individual state-level sociodemographic qualities have a significant statistical relationship with each of our two factors. In the previous models, the aggregated sociodemographic indexes are applied to help us identify which types of states subscribe to each factor, but some sociodemographic characteristics may be more important than others. For example, states with a better developed service economy may be better equipped to absorb mothers into the labor market than those with more blue-collar construction or manufacturing jobs. Because these sociodemographic measures are highly correlated (hence they

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Table 4.4. Results from regressions of disaggregated state demographics Family-friendly legislative type (factor 1) Occupational composition   Professional/management (%)   Construction and transport (%)   Service (%)   Sales (%) Race   White (%)   Black (%)   Asian (%)   Latino (%) Rural (%) Republican margin 2008 presidential election Average economic health Average church attendance Married-couple poverty Median home value (in thousands) Home-ownership rate Households receiving public assistance (%) Southern state (value = 1)

Mother-friendly child-care-regime type (factor 2)

+ – –

+ + – – – – +

– –

–

can be consolidated into a statistically robust sociodemographic factor), the sociodemographic measures cannot be estimated simultaneously, since the results would be skewed by multicollinearity (in which a collection of statistically similar variables compete for significance). Thus, Table 4.4 presents the results from a series of regression models that display each sociodemographic measure separately (i.e., race/ethnicity, occupational composition, and economic security). In addition to these previously utilized measures, additional indicators are added to provide a more holistic picture of states’ economic health. These include the percentage of married couples in poverty, the percentage of households receiving public assistance, and the average house price in each state. A dichotomous measure for living in a southern state is also included, since these states have so far revealed themselves to be more economically deprived than other states. By disaggregating these measures, the impact of each sociodemographic measure on the two factors can be independently assessed.

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The results illustrate that states with greater gender empowerment have better developed professional/managerial economies and fewer male-­ dominated construction and transport jobs, a larger Asian population, higher home values, and fewer rural, Republican-voting, and religious constituents. These states are also less likely to be geographically located in the South. Child-care-regime states, or those with higher maternal employment rates and more developed child-care offerings, have a smaller concentration of sales jobs, a higher concentration of African Americans, and a lower concentration of Latinos. The notion that these states are the most economically deprived and, therefore, mothers move into the labor market out of economic necessity is not borne out by the data. These states do have lower homeownership rates and property values, but fewer married couples are in poverty, indicating a more complicated explanation than economic deprivation. More detailed economic measurements explored in Chapter 5 further confirm that childcare-regime states are not characteristically poor. Ultimately, these results show that variation across our two factors is explained by a range of economic, religious, racial, and political characteristics. The results from Table 4.4 are worth some further discussion, however. The relationships between state-level characteristics and the gender-empowerment index are largely consistent with the results from Chapter 2, which showed the coastal states to have a more developed professional and managerial job market but fewer stereotypically male jobs in construction and transport. A reduction in male-dominated construction and transport jobs in favor of more gender-equal professional and managerial jobs should draw more mothers into the labor market. Thus, it is surprising, and counter to ­rational-choice arguments, that married mothers are less, and not more, likely to be employed in these states. Yet these states are clearly more affluent, as characterized by their higher property values and their higher concentration of professional jobs. Indeed, California, our exemplar of gender-empowered states, is the world’s fifth largest economy, demonstrating its extreme concentration of economic productivity and wealth (Cooper 2018). For many upper-middleclass married families, fathers in these states earn sufficient wages for their wives to reduce employment or stay at home to care for children. Couples’ decision making is likely compounded by high child-care costs, with mothers weighing their partners’ earning potential, their own earning potential, and the cost of child care when making employment decisions. Since mothers’ earnings are most often earmarked for child-care costs, mothers may prefer to not work at all rather than work to pay for child care (Treas and De Ruijter 2008). The high cost of child care is compounded by a high cost of living,

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which may also push moderate-income mothers out of the labor market as wages are insufficient to cover child care but family incomes are too high to qualify for means-tested federal and state subsidies (Hofferth and Collins 2000). The relationship between purchasing power and these indexes is explored in more detail in Chapter 5, but the results suggest that mothers in more affluent states are less likely to be in the labor market. Ultimately, this book underscores that mothers in some states are more vulnerable to labor market exits than others, highlighting child-care regimes as a critical determinant of mothers’ labor market attachment. The results from this chapter show that reductions in maternal employment are geographically concentrated in states with more managerial and professional jobs. Further investigation of the gender distribution of work in Chapter 5 shows that the concentration of typically female-dominated jobs, rather than blunt measurements of general employment composition, better explains these relationships. In addition to occupational composition, constituents of more gender-empowered states are more racially heterogeneous, urban, and Democrat-voting and less religious. In this regard, the disaggregated results confirm arguments that the coastal states are more liberal, affluent, secular, and urban and that, consequently, they enact more progressive family policies. Yet as these two factors indicate, these policies do not translate into higher maternal employment, which may, in part, be a consequence of their constituents’ greater affluence. Mothers in these states are more likely to work part time or stay at home, a fact that captures patriarchal employment divisions that counteract arguments about these states’ gender progressiveness. Married mothers’ employment, meanwhile, is more common in states that have more comprehensive child-care regimes. These states tend to have higher concentrations of African Americans, but fewer Latinos. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (2012) identify, policies to facilitate maternal employment often have racial overtones, emphasizing moving mothers of color into employment but discouraging white middle-class mothers from labor market reentry. The concentration of generous child-care policies in many of the southern states—characterized by high concentrations of African Americans—may be a consequence of racialized preferences for maternal employment. This is captured in 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s description of the need to move welfare recipients, disproportionately mothers of color, back to work: “I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well, that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work.

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It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work’” (Reese 2012). Child-care states also have a lower concentration of sales jobs but are no more likely to have a larger segment of their economy occupied by stereotypically male or female employment (i.e., service sector versus construction/ transport). Once again, rational-choice arguments do not adequately explain maternal employment patterns in these states, as states with higher maternal employment (factor 2) have lower rates of poverty among married couples. Thus, the movement of married mothers into the labor market does not appear to be driven by high rates of financial insecurity.8 Property values are lower in these states, suggesting that more families may be able to achieve a middle-class lifestyle with two income streams, especially if purchasing power is higher, which might be an incentive for mothers to stay in work. These results lend themselves to further analysis, but they point to a number of ways, some predictable and some unexpected, in which different U.S. states, with different political and sociodemographic qualities, have starkly different approaches to supporting working mothers. The role of state childcare policies, gendered economic opportunity, affluence, and family norms is explored in more detail in the next chapter.

Chapter Summary U.S. states fit into a distinct typology according to their differing familyfriendly institutional contexts. The models used draw on nine measures that capture variation across a range of analyses conducted throughout the previous chapters, ranging from the percentage of full-time dual-earner families, to average child-care costs, to the percentage of women in state legislatures in each state. Two types of welfare states emerge: those with greater ­gender-empowerment regimes and those with strong child-care regimes. This chapter has explored whether the child-care-regime and gender-­ empowerment-regime types are better represented in some political, religious, and sociodemographic contexts than others. Finally, this chapter illustrates how states’ religious, political, racial, and urban social makeup help explain variation in states’ child-care and gender-empowerment measures. This factor analysis supports patterns documented descriptively in the previous chapters: states tend to feature either strong gender-empowerment regimes and weak child-care regimes, or strong child-care regimes and higher rates of maternal employment. The former type of state is clustered along the Pacific coast and the East Coast but also includes Colorado and Minnesota (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4). By contrast, much of the South, along with Idaho

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and South Dakota, receive low scores against the gender-empowered regime/weak child-care-regime factor. States were then graphed based on their scores on two indexes—the gender-empowerment regime and the child-care regime—to identify clustering. Four types emerged: (1) states with strong child-care resources but weak gender empowerment—the most common across all U.S. states; (2) states supporting gender empowerment but with poor child-care resources, which tend to cluster along the Pacific coast and in the South Atlantic region; (3) ideal policy states, with strong child-care resources and gender empowerment—which include only the District of Columbia and Hawaii; and (4) states that are policy void, supporting neither gender empowerment nor child-care resources. Ultimately, these results illustrate that most states fail to comprehensively support maternal employment. States have distinct institutional contexts that influence their levels of child-care resources and gender empowerment. Across a range of political, economic, religious, and racial measures, four latent factors representing state institutional contexts were identified: (1) rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative states; (2) rural, religiously and politically conservative, and poor professional/managerial employment states; (3) black, politically and religiously conservative states; and (4) economically healthy states. These aggregated indexes show that states’ economies, race/­ethnicity, religion, and political orientations collate to form distinct institutional contexts. Regression results show each factor to be significantly associated with married mothers’ employment patterns, demonstrating an urgent need to investigate these as holistic institutional contexts, rather than as disaggregated, single measures. The Pacific and New England states, representative of the East and West Coasts, were low across all of these measures. To capture these states’ constituents, a fifth measure shows the Pacific, New England, and Mid-Atlantic states to be more urban, Democratic, and secular than the rest of the nation. This index supports arguments that there is a political, religious, and urban divide across the United States, but it situates this divide within a broader, and arguably more accurate, picture of the political, racial, economic, and religious demographics of the nation as a whole. Ultimately, these distinctions support the institutional state contexts theory that posits states’ economic, racial, religious, and political characteristics collectively form distinct state institutional contexts. These political, religious, and racial factors also contextualize the genderempowerment-regime and child-care-regime indexes identified at the start of this chapter. The gender-empowerment factor is associated with higher concentrations of professional/managerial jobs, urban living environments, Democratic-leaning voters, and higher property values. Thus, these states

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tend to be more affluent, more progressive, and more urban and have better economic opportunities for their constituents. While these states are progressive across their policies, they fail to provide child-care resources to parents, exhibited by their expensive child care and short school day lengths. Taken together, state governments’ family policies are less comprehensively progressive than might be expected, a policy gap for politicians to investigate. Mothers are also less likely to be employed full time in these states, suggesting that child-care costs are an important barrier to maternal employment. Yet these states also have higher property values and more developed professional and managerial job markets, suggesting that families in these states tend to be more affluent, potentially dissuading mothers from reentering the labor market. The subsequent chapter explores the notion that subsidizing child care could be an effective policy mechanism to increase maternal employment. At this stage, however, these results suggest that the combination of expensive child care and greater affluence discourages maternal employment. The second factor captures states with strong child-care regimes and high maternal employment. States that score higher on this factor have a larger percentage of full-time dual-earner couples, longer average school days, and more mothers returning to work when children are infants or toddlers. The ratings of West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa) are high on this factor, clustering in ways similar to those described in the previous chapters. Indeed, much of the Midwest scores high on this factor. By contrast, the Pacific and Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and California) score lowest on this measure. The demographic indexes are not very predictive of variation in the child-care index, but states with more generous child-care offerings tend to have a higher concentration of blacks and politically and religiously conservative constituents. Importantly, child-care-regime states have lower levels of married-couple poverty, countering the arguments that poverty is driving maternal employment. Taken together, these analyses illustrate how U.S. states can be classified according to the progressiveness of their genderempowerment regimes or the comprehensiveness of their child-care regimes. Since the states that rate high for the child-care-regime factor tend to rate poorly for the gender-empowerment factor, it would be easy to conclude simply that less progressive states are better at facilitating maternal employment. Disaggregating and individually investigating each sociodemographic factor, however, paints a more complex picture. These analyses show that full-time maternal employment is more common in states with more non-Hispanic whites and African American constituents, fewer Latinos, and fewer sales jobs. These states are no more likely to have higher concentrations of service

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or construction/transport jobs, occupational categories typically conceived as female- and male-dominated, respectively. Thus, mothers’ employment in these states does not appear to be tied to a more developed service economy. Counter to expectations, these states do not exhibit lower levels of economic insecurity, as fewer married couples live in poverty. House prices are lower on average in states where mothers’ employment is higher and child care is less expensive. It is plausible that since home ownership is necessarily more achievable in regions where property prices are lower, mothers in states with low property values might be better incentivized to work to contribute to purchasing a family home. In these cases, maternal employment may be viewed as an effective mechanism to maintaining a family’s middle-class lifestyle, by keeping married couples out of poverty and making home ownership a realistic aspiration. Ultimately, all of this implies that although most U.S. states are providing some kind of family-friendly institutional resources, most states are not doing enough to holistically support working mothers structurally, politically, and economically. The District of Columbia and Hawaii are exceptions to this theme, but even these two contexts fail to provide adequate schoolaged-care resources. This chapter supports the descriptive statistical results presented throughout this book so far, however, which suggest that those states providing more comprehensive child-care regimes are the ones with higher rates of maternal employment, irrespective of their overall economic health, rates of family poverty, or any other state-level economic indexes. This conclusion—that it is state-level approaches to child care, rather than family policy measures or a state’s political orientation, that result in higher maternal employment—has the potential to disrupt how we think about mother-friendly welfare in the United States. Rather than looking to politically progressive states like California for models of welfare to support working mothers, politicians and scholars might investigate the child-care regimes in more conservative states, like Nebraska, for directions for future policies. Chapter 5 extends this analysis by investigating whether specific gendered qualities of each state affect their rates of maternal employment. In particular, it considers the nature of each state’s public child-care-support frameworks, the family structure, and the conduciveness of states’ different job markets to maternal employment. This analysis helps clarify why certain institutional contexts are more supportive of maternal employment than others across the United States. It will also help establish what specific publicly provided child-care resources and employment-supportive policies are demonstrably best placed to support working mothers.

5

Gendered Institutional State Contexts and Gender-Empowered and Child-Care Regimes

C

hapter 4 explores how the broader social contexts of a state correlate with the ways those states address the challenges of working motherhood for women like Ava and Michelle, including the racial, political, economic, and religious contexts in which they live. For Ava, who lives in a state with relatively plentiful access to child-care resources, most people living in her state are non-Hispanic white or black, work in blue-collar service jobs or construction, and have less value tied to their home than the national average. These states also tend to be more religiously and politically conservative. Moms in Ava’s state are more likely to be employed, and fewer married couples are below the poverty line. Thus, while Nebraska, Ava’s home state, is not an economic powerhouse, it does afford mothers more labor market opportunities and access to a middle-class lifestyle. By contrast, Michelle’s home state of California is an exemplar of the gender-empowerment type. Michelle has access to more lucrative labor markets, more progressive gender policies, and more women representing her in the state legislature. Michelle also lives in a state that is more affluent—characterized by higher home values and more professional/managerial jobs—and more urban and left-leaning than the national average. More women in Michelle’s state hold college degrees, meaning the constituents are highly educated. Yet in spite of these resources, many mothers in Michelle’s states are out of the labor market, in part, because child care is expensive and difficult to access and school days are short with limited after-school care. The strains Michelle describes in accessing employment are shared by many mothers in her home state in

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spite of the promise of living in one of the most economically lucrative states in the nation. Thus far, this book applies the institutional state contexts model to explain these indexes on the basis of the assumption that states’ political, economic, racial, and religious composition explain these two types. These measures, however, do not comprehensively account for variation in policy provisions for child care, the gender distribution of employment, and norms about families and gender roles. The factors Ava and Michelle weighed in their decisions to return to work after the birth of their children were not limited to their demographics, political orientation, or even to the market for their labor and their children’s child care. They also had to weigh the childcare options the state made available, the contribution of an additional work income toward meeting the cost of living in their state, and the gendered meanings of work and homemaking. They are not only weighing income against costs but also weighing a working lifestyle against a homemaking lifestyle in their particular state context. For Ava, this manifests in constantly wondering what her life would be like if she lived in a big city. She often muses, much to the chagrin of her family, that she could be the first female president if she had been born in New York. For Michelle and her family, however, the tensions of living in a high-cost-of-living state like California confront them more directly. Sitting at their kitchen table, Michelle and her husband often discuss the unrelenting stress of long commutes and work hours to just make ends meet. They know they are lucky—owning their own townhouse and living in coastal California. But this also means any reductions in Michelle’s work time would put them in a precarious financial position. On particularly stressful days, Michelle wonders if their lives would be better in a state with more affordable property costs and where money goes further.

States’ Child-Care Provisions: The Role of State and Federal Resources Welfare state theories posit that states help equalize citizens’ life chances by providing direct services that mitigate disadvantage and increase individuals’ autonomy (Esping-Andersen 1990). In part, this captures the decoupling of women’s financial independence from their husbands (Orloff 1993) and equalizing domestic work (Sainsbury 1999). As highlighted earlier, U.S. state legislatures have a unique capacity to legislate direct services to their citizens or withhold services. In the previous chapters, the child-care-regime states are shown to have the least expensive child care. Whether child-care costs

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are exclusively relegated to market forces or whether state policies structure cost is directly explored here. All U.S. states have some capacity to drive down child-care costs, which may result in higher maternal employment. Some states, however, provide better child-care resources than others. In the United States, state governments can provide access to child care through three mechanisms. The first involves policies that supplement the cost of child care, with states assuming a portion of the cost of children’s enrollment. This can include tax-based incentives that are either provided directly to families or to child-care providers. The second involves policies that provide direct child-care services (i.e., universal pre-kindergarten [pre-K]). The third involves states offering no provisions beyond the federal mandate, exclusively relying on limited funding programs such as the federally managed Head Start initiative. Although funding for Head Start is allocated at the federal level, state providers determine how to structure care, investing in either expanded enrollment (i.e., available spaces for eligible children), longer duration, or higher staff salaries (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016). Thus, Head Start enrollment varies dramatically across states. Shedding light on whether one strategy—funding pre-K care well, providing direct services, or increasing access for vulnerable populations—better explains state-to-state variation in child-care resources and maternal employment ought to provide some much-needed direction for state policy makers. Funding pre-K care well should increase the quality of the care and also reduce parents’ out-of-pocket costs so they are better equipped to put children into care and return to the labor market. U.S. states and the District of Columbia vary dramatically in their subsidies for pre-K care; for example, Washington, D.C., contributed an average of $15,606 a year per child for pre-K care, compared to Mississippi, which contributed only $593 per child (2012–2015 averaged). Of course, child care may simply be more expensive in Washington, D.C., than in Mississippi, and so states’ child-care subsidies must be calculated net of the average out-of-pocket child-care costs. Figure 5.1 compares state contributions to pre-K care as a percentage of the average cost of in-home and center-based child care. States offering pre-K funding closer to the market rate should better incentivize parents to enroll their children in a program, allowing mothers to return to work. New Jersey and Washington, D.C., in the Middle and South Atlantic, provide the most generous public contributions to child care. That the District of Columbia is one of the most generous child-care cost contributors is another example of its status as an ideal policy example. A handful of Middle Atlantic and New England states also provide substantial contributions to their pre-K programs, including New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, as does ­Michigan, an

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Figure 5.1. State contribution to pre-K as a percentage of the average childcare costs. (State contribution data from National Institute for Early Education Research 2016; average child-care costs from New America 2016.)

East North Central state. Two West North Central States, Minnesota and Iowa, offer generous pre-K provisions. Notably, the Pacific states of Oregon, Washington, and (to a lesser degree) California also contribute a large share to pre-K costs relative to other states in the nation. California is the representative of the gender-empowerment type of state, which ranks poorly both on child-care offerings and maternal employment but extends generous policies to parents. In addition to being politically progressive, California is also an affluent state, which translates here into larger pre-K subsidies to its constituents. Yet, as the previous chapters demonstrate, California has some of the lowest rates of maternal employment in the nation. Its high ranking on pre-K contributions suggests that expanding financial provision without increasing enrollment is not adequate to move mothers into full-time work. The value of space versus resources across all of the states is explored in more detail throughout this chapter. States with limited pre-K provisions characterize the child-care-regime and policy-void-regime types. Many of the West North Central States— North and South Dakota—offer no state-provided cash transfers to pre-K care, and Nebraska, a child-care-regime exemplary, has some of the least generous cash contributions to state subsidies for pre-K. Their clustering based on minimal government subsidies suggests that providing cash transfers to pre-K care may be less valuable to maternal employment than reducing child-care costs across the market and guaranteeing enrollment in high-

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quality care. Most of the Mountain states—Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah—offer no state-sponsored cash to pre-K care. These states are notable as many of them represent the policy-void state type documented in the previous chapter. Thus, the failure to provide pre-K care to families marks another way that state legislators fail to support their constituents. Whether generous state subsidies for pre-K care are actually associated with higher rates of maternal employment are explored in more detail in this chapter. Yet the preliminary results suggest that generous pre-K provisions are not characteristic of the states with high maternal employment and a child-care regime but rather are more common in the gender-empowerment regimes. State-level contributions to fees are only one dimension through which state governments can support maternal employment via child care. State legislatures can also directly provide state-managed child-care services to parents, or fund privately operated child-care programs. Most states have focused on providing child care in the pre-kindergarten (age four) year to prepare children for school. Yet for many states, these provisions are far from universal or free. Only two states—Vermont and Florida—and the District of Columbia provide free universal care to all eligible four-year-olds, but as noted in Figure 5.1, the level of funding relative to cost varies dramatically across states (Parker, Diffey, and Atchison 2018). Others, like New York, Illinois, Georgia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Iowa have child-care provisions that, although intended to be universal, only cover a portion of the eligible population. For example, in 1998, the state of New York passed a Universal Prekindergarten Program (UPK) to provide preschool education to all four-year-olds in the state regardless of their socioeconomic status. In 2014–2015, New York increased investment in pre-kindergarten care through an additional program, the Statewide Universal Full-Day Pre-Kindergarten program, to provide universal full-day child care to all children up to five years of age. Yet the available spaces in New York’s universal pre-K are not yet sufficient to meet the demand, limiting claims about universality (Shroff et al. 2014). Other states have enacted policies that restrict state-provided child care only to those in greatest need. For example, Nebraska in 1992 passed the Early Childhood Education Grant Program, which today reserves 70 percent of the state’s child-care funding to centers providing care to children with disabilities, those living with a non-English speaking parent, those eligible for free school lunch programs, those who have a teen parent without a high school education, and those born prematurely. Nebraska’s approach to childhood welfare is consistent with Gosta Esping-Andersen’s model of a liberal means-tested approach, while New York’s more resembles a universalist social-democratic form of welfare distribution. According to

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Esping-Andersen’s (1990) “three worlds of welfare” model, the latter should be more conducive to facilitating maternal employment. But as this book has consistently highlighted, states are more complicated than a simple liberal and social-democratic divide. States have made the largest push to increase child-care enrollment in the year preceding kindergarten to prepare children for full-time schooling. Thus, state-sponsored child-care enrollments are highest among children aged four years. The concentration of resources to pre-K is consistent with liberal ideologies of self-reliance whereby government-subsidized child-care programs are implemented for school readiness rather than to support working parents. Thus, child-care resources are targeted to the pre-K year as an educational investment to close class-based educational gaps. Delaying child care for the first four years of a child’s life, however, can have major adverse consequences for mothers’ capacity to return to work. Only a handful of states have legislated programs to increase child-care enrollment for children three years or younger. Here, the District of Columbia leads the nation, being one of the first to invest in preschool programs, with the expressed vision of achieving universally accessible preschool education services. Roughly 70 percent of all eligible three- and four-year-olds in the District are now enrolled in this program. Maternal employment increased 10 percentage points as a direct result of this program (Malik 2018). In this regard, D.C. serves as the model for child-care provisions for preschool-aged children, another example of a policy that supports working mothers. Since the District of Columbia also has some of the highest rates of maternal employment and is representative of the child-care and gender-empowerment regimes, states should look to this policy explicitly for ways to provide direct child-care services to their constituents. Even this policy can be improved by extending universal statesponsored care to parents of toddlers and infants to support those requiring quick returns to employment. These resources would be a welcome reprieve to many working families as the District of Columbia has some of the most expensive child care in the nation. Although D.C. demonstrably boasts one of the most gender-empowered and best child-care regimes in the country, it has important policy voids that could be improved through strategic legislation. To better understand how these provisions vary across states, Figures 5.2 and 5.3 show the enrollment levels of three- and four-year-olds in state-sponsored preschool care. The District of Columbia has the highest enrollment rates of three- and four-year-olds, with 71 percent of all three-year-olds and 93 percent of all four-year-olds enrolled in government-sponsored child care. Here, the District of Columbia is an outlier, providing an “ideal” policy case for child-care enrollment that no other states come close to matching.

Figure 5.2. Enrollment of three-year-olds in state-sponsored child care as a percentage of three-year-olds in the state, 2011–2015 average. (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016.)

Figure 5.3. Enrollment of four-year-olds in state-sponsored child care as a percentage of four-year-olds in the state, 2011–2015 average. (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016.)

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For three-year-old children, the second highest rates of enrollment are in Vermont, where 22 percent of all three-year-olds are in state-sponsored child care, followed by Illinois and New Jersey at 19 percent. Nebraska, Arkansas, and West Virginia also have high enrollment rates at this age. Half of U.S. states offer no state-sponsored child care for three-year-olds. These include two of the East South Central states, Alabama and Mississippi, and many of the West North and South Central States, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. The absence of state-sponsored programs in these states is intriguing, given their higher-than-average maternal full-time employment rates and mothers’ quick returns to work postpartum. Figures 5.2 and 5.3 indicate that working mothers in these states are not relying on the state to sponsor their young children’s child care but rather utilizing more affordable market-provided care. This provides two policy pathways through which states can increase child-care resources: subsidize market costs and increase child-care spaces or directly provide low-cost government-sponsored child care for eligible children. Across both of these policy solutions, two key elements are illuminated—child care needs to be affordable and widely available to facilitate maternal employment. States are more likely to sponsor a child-care program for four-year-olds, since these programs are often aimed at preparing children for school and closing class-based educational gaps. Figure 5.2 shows that only eight states have no state-sponsored preschool program for four-year-olds, including two states that rank high on the maternal employment index: North and South Dakota. Although child care is relatively inexpensive in these states and mothers are likely to return to full-time work, state-sponsored pre-K care does not appear to be driving these relationships. Introducing statesponsored pre-K care in these states would improve the diversity of their child-care offerings, further strengthening these child-care-regime states. In addition to these two West North Central states, the Mountain states of Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming also fail to directly sponsor child-care services for four-year-olds, again illustrating their status as policy-void states. Indiana, an East North Central state, and New Hampshire, a New England state, also fail to legislate child-care services. By contrast, most of the West South Central states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas, have high numbers of four-year-olds enrolled in state-sponsored programs. The South Atlantic states—Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—also have high concentrations of four-year-olds in state-sponsored child care, as do a number of states in the East North Central corridor, including Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. Iowa and Nebraska—two West North Central states

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representative of the child-care regime—also have relatively high enrollment of four-year-olds in state-sponsored care, indicating government-provided services are one mechanism to support working parents for child-care-regime states. Again, the Pacific states and many states in the West have relatively low numbers of children in state-sponsored child care, illustrating how these states, although typically gender progressive in their policies and ranking as the most gender empowered, fail to ensure working mothers have access to child care. The Pacific states are particularly notable, as their governments offer parents relatively generous cash contributions for pre-K services, yet those states display low rates of child-care enrollment. This suggests that generous cash transfers to pre-K care without an adequate number of child-care spaces are not sufficient to facilitate maternal employment. As illustrated in Chapter 2, these states also have some of the highest national concentrations of parents unable to access after-school care, indicating that these states fail to meet parents’ child-care demands for preschool- and school-aged children. The compounding impact of poor child care, school-aged care, and ­government-subsidized care may create an institutional environment particularly detrimental to maternal employment. This requires politicians to examine child-care resources as a crucial step toward mitigating the penalties young children have on mothers’ employment.

Federal Child-Care Resources Allocated at the State Level: State-to-State Differences in Head Start Enrollment Other states offer no state-funded pre-kindergarten provisions but rather rely exclusively on federal programs, like Head Start, to subsidize child care for constituents in financial need. Head Start is a federally funded program aimed at providing high-quality child care for children between three and five years old. While Head Start is federally funded, the allocation of this money is determined by state-level agencies and local providers. Since Head Start funding is limited, states and state child-care providers make decisions about how to prioritize the money (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016). Thus, although Head Start should, in theory, be universally available to all children in poverty, the numbers of children enrolled in Head Start programs vary dramatically across states. Once again, these provisions capture variation in states’ policy approaches to child care. According to proponents of liberal welfare state models, having a higher concentration of children enrolled in Head Start programs ought to facilitate maternal employment. Since Head Start funding is meant to be reserved for families in financial difficulty,

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Figure 5.4. Enrollment of three-year-olds in Head Start as a percentage of three-year-olds in poverty, 2011–2015 average. (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016.)

providing mothers in these families respite from child care might encourage them to return to work to increase their family’s financial security. Figure 5.4 provides an overview of state-level rates of enrollment among eligible three-year-olds into Head Start programs.1 North Dakota has the highest percentage of three-year-olds enrolled in Head Start, with 97 percent of eligible children enrolled in the program (100 percent of North Dakota’s eligible four-year-olds are enrolled in Head Start). Other West North Central states, including South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa, have relatively high enrollment of three-year-olds in Head Start programs. As indicated in previous chapters, these states capture the child-care-regime type with some of the highest concentrations of maternal employment, least expensive child care, and quickest returns to work postpartum. Maternal employment in these states may be higher, in part, as a result of strong state-level support for facilitating access to child care among poor families through the Head Start program. The East North Central states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois also have high numbers of three-year-olds enrolled in Head Start programs, as do the West South Central states of Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Mississippi, an East South Central state, and Rhode Island, a New England state, also exhibit some of the highest enrollment rates relative to the nation. By contrast, the Mountain and Pacific states—Idaho, Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington—have some of the lowest enrollments of eligible three-year-olds in Head Start programs. These states form a com-

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bination of the policy-void and gender-empowered states, indicating that an initial first step for many of the state legislators in these states would be to utilize federal resources to increase Head Start enrollment.

State-Funded Child Care and the Gender-Empowered and Child-Care Index The welfare state literature suggests that any form of government support or funding for child care ought to increase maternal employment. The results from Table 5.1, however, show that only Head Start enrollments are positively associated with living in states with more generous child-care regimes.2 This finding is consistent with welfare states’ arguments that providing direct access to child care, rather than simply reducing the cost of child care, is the most effective mechanism to alleviate barriers to child care and increase maternal employment. Liberal welfare state arguments posit that reducing barriers to maternal employment among those in greatest need will facilitate labor market entry. The results from Table 5.1 for the child-care index appear to support this claim. Table 5.1 also shows that more gender-empowered states also offer more generous state pre-K contributions. The most genderempowered states are also the most affluent and politically progressive. Thus, it is not surprising that these state governments provide more generous ­contributions to pre-K care as they also offer more family policies, have more women in the state legislature, and have the most expensive child care Table 5.1. Regression results for politically and economically empowered and state child-care support

Constant State contribution to pre-K (% of average child-care cost) Three-year-old enrollment in Head Start (% of three-year-olds in poverty) Three-year-old enrollment in state-sponsored child care (% of three-year-olds) Four-year-old enrollment in state-sponsored child-care (% of four-year-olds) Adjusted R-squared *p < .05 **p < .010 ***p < .001

Model 1: Genderempowered-regime type (factor 1) –0.225 0.024** –0.007

Model 2: Childcare-regime type (factor 2) –1.457*** 0.005 0.030***

0.024

–0.007

–0.008

0.009

0.146*

0.223***

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in the nation. Thus, ideologically and economically, generous contributions to pre-K programs are essential for their success. Yet a disconnect emerges in that these states legislate the most progressive policies but fail to provide adequate child-care spaces and have the lowest maternal employment rates. This theme—generous policies but poor child-care services—is further exemplified by the measure of child-care worker availability in the next section. Previous national-level research suggests that governments play an essential role in reducing child-care costs and increasing child-care availability to reduce barriers to maternal employment (Esping-Andersen 1990; Gornick and Meyers 2003; Sainsbury 1999). In the United States, the relationship between child-care support and maternal outcomes is evidently more nuanced. The results in Table 5.1 indicate that state governments, policy makers, and nonprofits must make child-care cost and access a top priority to ensure mothers’ equal access to the labor market. It also helps explain the key finding repeated in statistical analyses throughout this book: that states with generous gender and family policies—gender-empowered states—are worse at facilitating maternal employment than child-care-regime states. Even with a mother-friendly political environment, states cannot expect to see rates of maternal employment increase if they do not ensure readily available access to high-quality, consistent, and reliable child-care services for infants and preschool- and school-aged children.

Jobs for Mothers? How the Prevalence of “Pink-Collar Jobs” and Child-Care Workers Influences Maternal Employment across U.S. States The previous section identifies the links between providing child care and the gender-empowerment and child-care indexes identified in Chapter 4. Another possible explanation for state-to-state variation across these measures relates to the makeup of each state’s labor market. Chapter 4 explores whether the availability of work across different employment sectors (such as professional and managerial, service, sales, and construction/transport jobs) may pull mothers into work. This categorization does not fully account for how states’ labor markets structure maternal employment. Specifically, married mothers may also be more likely to work in states with industries that employ more women. Labor markets are intrinsically gendered, meaning that certain types of jobs are more likely to be male- or female-dominated than others. In states with more female-dominated industries, measured across broad occupational categories, maternal employment should be higher.

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Figure 5.5. Concentration of female-dominated industries as a percentage of the state’s employment, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

Figure 5.5 illustrates the distribution of female-dominated jobs across states. For the sake of this analysis, a job industry is classed as female dominated if more than 50 percent of the people working in that industry across the United States are women. To calculate the concentration of female-­ dominated industries, the percentages of women working in the following industries were summed: (1) personal care and service; (2) education, training, and library services; (3) health-care support; (4) food preparation and service; (5) office and administrative support; (6) business and financial operations; (7) community and social service; and (8) health diagnosis and health assistance. These professions capture the majority of the “pink-collar jobs” that women are more likely to occupy, including those in child care, education, nursing, and administrative support, and were all identified as employing more women than men across the national average. As Figure 5.5 shows, the distribution of female-dominated professions varies dramatically across states, with the West and East South Central states—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky—clustering with some of the highest concentrations of female-dominated professions. The West North Central states—South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri—also have relatively high concentrations of female-dominated industries. Parts of New England—Maine and Vermont—and the Middle Atlantic—New York and Pennsylvania—also have relatively high concentrations of female-­ dominated industries. The South Atlantic states of Delaware, Maryland,

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and West Virginia also have larger segments of their economy dominated by women. These patterns indicate that many of the child-care-regime states have more developed female labor markets. By contrast, the Pacific and Mountain states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, California, Oregon, and Washington, which are characteristic of the gender-empowered and policy-void states—have some of the lowest concentrations of femaledominated industries in the nation. This suggests that the gender-empowered and policy-void states may ultimately have fewer employment prospects for married mothers, regardless of whether they have mother-friendly legislative contexts. Again, Nebraska and California are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with the former having high concentrations and the latter low concentrations of pink-collar jobs. In addition to the prevalence of work in female-dominated professions, the quality and availability of child care may also act as an important factor pulling mothers into work. The previous section explored the role of the state in subsidizing and directly providing child care; this section focuses on market forces. Figures 5.6 and 5.7 identify the concentration of child-care workers relative to the national average3 and the quality of care by state. Figure 5.6 shows which states have a more concentrated child-care workforce relative to the national average. Rational-choice arguments posit that states with higher concentrations of child-care workers will have more mothers employed overall, as finding child care ought to be easier, and higher competition for child-care

Figure 5.6. Concentration of child-care workers relative to the national average (location quotient, averaged across 2011–2015). (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016.)

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Figure 5.7. Child-care quality based on accreditation and in-home ratings. (New America 2016.)

work ought to drive down prices. Figure 5.6 shows that child-care worker concentration is particularly high in number in our child-care-regime states across the West North Central states, notably in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri. Child-care workers are also common across the West South Central states of Arkansas and Texas, the East South Central states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, the South Atlantic states of Georgia and North Carolina, in New York, a Middle Atlantic state, and in Rhode Island, a New England state. The Pacific and Mountain states stand out for having some of the lowest concentrations of child-care workers. Again, these states have some of highest rates of stay-at-home parents, the most expensive child care, and the shortest school days with California representing these trends. By contrast, the child-care-regime states—North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska—have the least expensive child care, the longest school days, and the highest rates of full-time maternal employment. Their unusually high numbers of child-care workers (1.24 to 1.63 times the national average) acts as a further example of their above-average child-care resources to maternal employment. The causal relationship—whether more expansive child care allows mothers to work, or whether higher numbers of working mothers draw in more child-care workers—is unclear, but these descriptive patterns once again reinforce the intrinsic relationship between child-care accessibility and maternal employment. Further, whether the influx of child-care workers captures lower costs of living across these states that allow women to work in child care to pay the bills is explored in more detail in the subsequent section.

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Variations in the quality of child care across states may also encourage or deter mothers from entering the labor market. Figure 5.7 provides a ranking of quality of child-care services across the United States. These are based on evaluations of accredited child-care centers and in-home rankings, so the child-care-quality measure used here captures the quality of both formal and informal care in different states.4 The West North Central states have inconsistent child-care-quality rankings; half provide some of the highest child-care quality (Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri), but half have some of the lowest-quality child care in the nation (North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska). That Nebraska, a key example of the child-careregime type, has poor child-care quality identifies a policy area for further refinement. Child care is also ranked as high quality in the East North Central state of Indiana, in the East South Central state of Alabama, and across much of the South Atlantic (in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). New England also offers high-quality child-care services, with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and, to a lesser extent, Maine providing high-quality child care. Given the heterogeneity of these results, the question of whether child-care quality is linked to the gender-empowerment-regime and child-care-regime measures requires more robust statistical analysis, provided in Table 5.2 and discussed in more detail in the next section. Table 5.2. Regression results for politically and economically empowered factor and market characteristics of the state

Constant Child-care worker concentration relative to the nation (location quotient) Child-care quality (accreditation and in-home ratings) Concentration of female-dominated industries (% of state’s economy) Regional price parities Per-capita personal income adjusted by regional price parity (in $1,000 USD) Adjusted R-squared *p < .05 **p < .010 ***p < .001

Model 1: Genderempowered regime (factor 1) –9.282*** –0.773*

Model 2: Childcare regime (factor 2) –15.283*** 0.250

0.003

0.040***

0.005

0.283***

0.091*** 0.015 0.655**

–0.008 0.069** 0.474***

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Push and Pull Factors: Do Economic Circumstances Force American Mothers into Work? As noted previously, female-dominated industries and widely available, highquality child care often pull mothers into employment. States’ economic conditions may simultaneously push mothers into employment. Rational-choice theorists posit that mothers in poorer states will be more likely to work because they are driven by economic necessity, a push into the labor market. Results from Chapter 4 counter this claim as states with high rates of maternal employment have lower, not higher, rates of married-couple poverty. But more detailed measurement of states’ economic conditions is warranted. Here, the results identify whether cost of living and relative purchasing power help explain states’ levels of gender empowerment and child-care resources. Rational-choice arguments predict that mothers’ employment will be higher in states with a higher cost of living and lower purchasing power. This would imply that mothers are pushed into employment based on economic necessity to keep their families out of poverty. Simply, more mothers will work in states where costs of living are higher, and where wages buy less and thus second incomes are essential to family budgets. Figure 5.8 shows the regional price parity for all goods (rent and purchased goods) across states. The regional price parity captures individual buying power across the states and is measured as a percentage of the n ­ ational

Figure 5.8. Regional price parity for all goods, 2011–2015 average. (Bureau of Economic Analysis, n.d.)

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mean. For example, New York’s regional price parity is 115 percent, which means that goods cost 15 percent more than the national average (100 percent). Not surprisingly, the coastal states have the highest cost of living, with regional price parity including the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska), New England (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), a handful of Middle and South Atlantic states (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia), one South Atlantic state (Florida), and one Mountain state (Colorado). Regional price parity is lowest across the West North Central States (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Indiana, and Missouri), the West and East South Central states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky) and into one East North Central state (Ohio) and one South Atlantic state (West Virginia). These patterns indicate that the central and southern states exhibit lower-than-average costs of living and the coastal states are the most expensive. The East and West Coast states are also the most affluent and urban and offer women the highest earnings, which helps explain their high cost of living. While these states are the most gender empowered, they have some of the lowest rates of maternal employment, countering rational-choice arguments that maternal employment is driven by economic deprivation. Rather, mothers are more likely to work in states with lower costs of living, suggesting a different rational trade: maternal employment for a middle-class lifestyle. These patterns are further reinforced when we weigh relative purchasing power against average per capita income. This distinction is important because mothers may weigh their earnings against purchasing power when making employment decisions. Mothers in states where they can get more for their money—where average earnings are high and the cost of living is low— may be incentivized to maintain continuous employment. In these states, middle-class lifestyles may be more easily accessed from dual-earner wages. By contrast, mothers in states with a high cost of living but low earnings may reduce employment to care for children, especially because child care is also expensive. In other words, mothers cannot out-earn the cost of living and thus reduce employment to mitigate the additional cost of child care. Figure 5.9 depicts variation in per capita income adjusted for regional price parity across states.5 Again, the child-care-regime states clustered in the West North Central region (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota) report higher relative earnings. A few other states scattered around the nation, including Wyoming, Ohio, and a few of the northeastern states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island), also have higher per capita earnings relative to the cost of living. By contrast, most

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Figure 5.9. Per capita income adjusted by regional price parity, 2011–2015 average. (Bureau of Economic Analysis, n.d.)

of the high cost-of-living states identified in Figure 5.8 do not have adequate income to mitigate these costs, and thus the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii), Florida, New York, and Maine have some of the lowest earnings relative to the cost of living. Furthermore, most of the Mountain states—Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—have costs of living that reduce per capita incomes. In this regard, many of the gender-empowered and policy-void states have high costs of living relative to earnings, suggesting another mechanism through which mothers exit the labor market. Ultimately, these results show that the affluent, gender-empowered states have citizens whose earnings are not sufficient to meet the high cost of living. Interestingly, mothers in these states are less, rather than more, likely to work, which counters rational-choice arguments about economic necessity pushing mothers into the labor market. Rather, the high cost of living and low relative purchasing power appear to pull mothers into the home. These states also have some of the highest child-care costs, shortest school days, most difficultto-access after-school care, and least developed female-dominated markets, suggesting a confluence of institutional barriers to maternal employment. By contrast, the child-care-regime states in the West North Central region exhibit the highest maternal employment rates and the most generous childcare regimes. These states also have higher-than-average per capita income relative to the cost of living, suggesting that mothers may work because their earnings buy more. It is important to note that these states also have some of

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the highest rates of Head Start enrollment, highest concentrations of childcare workers, least expensive child care, longest school days, and most developed female-dominated industries, suggesting that a combination of market, child-care, and income effects help explain their higher-than-average maternal employment rates and generous child-care resources. The subsequent section statistically measures these relationships.

Linking Market Characteristics to Family-Friendly-Policy and Child-Care Indexes The previous section provides a descriptive overview of labor market characteristics affecting maternal employment, considering the percentage of workers in female-dominated industries, the concentration of child-care workers, the quality of child care across U.S. states, the relative price parity, and per capita income adjusted for purchasing power. On the basis of the evidence presented in this book thus far, rational-choice perspectives, or arguments about individuals making decisions based on individualistic cost-benefit analyses, would argue that states with more female-dominated industries, higher concentrations of child-care workers, higher-quality child care, higher costs of living, and higher relative earnings ought to have higher rates of maternal employment. Simply, economic necessity should push, and highquality, widely available child care should pull, mothers into the labor market. Since the child-care-regime index captures contexts supporting maternal employment, these expected differences should be most pronounced in states ranking high across these measures. Table 5.2 applies regression analysis to show that states belonging to our child-care-regime index tend to have higher-quality child care, a larger concentration of female-dominated industries, and greater per capita income relative to the cost of living. This indicates that states where more mothers are working full time tend to have better child-care resources and job markets that pull women into the workforce. Interestingly, rather than economic deprivation pushing mothers into employment, states with more female-­ dominated professions and better child-care resources appear to pull mothers into employment. These states also have some of the lowest levels of marriedcouple poverty (see Tables 4.3 and 4.4) and have high per capita income adjusted for cost of living, indicating middle-class lifestyles are more accessible in these contexts. States with greater gender empowerment but lower rates of maternal employment, meanwhile, have fewer numbers of child-care workers and higher costs of living. Although more gender-empowered states have greater affluence—higher median home values, a larger managerial/

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professional economic sector, and higher female earnings (see Tables 4.1 and 4.4)—it is also expensive to live in these states. This may, in part, explain why child-care costs are high relative to other states, as child-care providers must compete for rents, goods, and services in expensive markets. Yet the exorbitant cost of child care has serious consequences, notably driving mothers out of the labor market. The results support rational-choice arguments about market characteristics pushing and pulling mothers into employment, but rather than being driven by poverty and economic necessity, mothers are more likely to work in states where the purchasing power of average wages is greater and more married couples are middle class (i.e., less married-couple poverty). These results point to the need for policy makers and state politicians to step in to regulate child care in high cost-of-living markets, to ensure high-quality, widely available care at a subsidized cost. Further, by developing a more female-friendly job market, both by incentivizing the growth of pink-collar industries and by targeting systematic gender discrimination in male-dominated workplaces, and by directly providing free (or heavily subsidized), government-managed, high-quality child-care options for working mothers at all income levels, U.S. state governments ought to be able to demonstrably increase the number of mothers prepared to return to work. State economies would benefit from this larger pool of labor both in diversity of choice and higher taxation and economic spending. Thus, investments in child care would stimulate spending and increase tax revenue, underscoring the benefit of this type of investment.

Explaining the Indexes: Gender Norms The previous sections assessed how state-level child-care provisions and market forces structure membership in our gender-empowerment and child-care regimes. This section adds another piece to the puzzle, by exploring how gender norms also help explain variation in states’ levels of gender empowerment and child-care resources. An ideal way to assess variation between different states’ cultural attitudes to gender roles would be to use self-reported attitudinal measures, aggregated at the state level, reflecting whether each state’s constituents see women largely as homemakers or as having equal financial power and agency to their husbands. However, no such data are available.6 Thus, we must infer measures of gender through proxies of religiosity, fertility, and college education. Since these are typically treated as explanatory factors to justify why some people hold more traditional conceptions of gender roles than others, they ought to capture some degree of variability in cultural attitudes toward women between states. In the United

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States, religiosity, ­especially among more conservative Christian groups, is typically associated with more traditional gender role expectations, where mothers are treated as homemakers and fathers as breadwinners. In their book Red Families v. Blue Families, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone (2010) document the social differences between states that typically vote for Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) political representatives. Blue families typically support equality in employment, egalitarian gender roles, and delayed fertility. By contrast, red families tend to hold conservative religious beliefs and view changing social norms around gender roles as a moral crisis. As a consequence, families in typically red states tend to support traditional gender roles and sexual abstinence (although these states also have some of the highest teen births and divorce rates, which results in cyclical clamoring for increased gender traditionalism). Extending this logic would imply that states with higher concentrations of Christians ought to place greater cumulative social pressure on mothers to stay at home and care for their children rather than reenter the workforce. The previous chapters explored religion through frequency of church attendance, but here we directly measure the concentration of Christians in each state. Given the emphasis on traditional gender roles throughout Christian tradition, we expect states with a higher concentration of Christians will have higher total fertility rates (i.e., mothers will have more children). The impact of mothers having multiple children could have divergent effects. On the one hand, rational-choice arguments might suggest that the cost of child care for multiple children will be a major deterrent to maternal employment. When weighing the cost of child care for multiple children versus mothers’ wages, mothers will be more likely to drop out of the labor market to care for their children. These actions ought to be reinforced by religious ideologies that emphasize breadwinner and homemaker norms and, as a result, maternal employment in more religiously conservative states ought to be lower. Welfare state arguments, however, posit a different outcome: by reducing the cost of child care through more expansive child-care provisions (i.e., less expensive child care, larger government subsidies, and more child-care slots), the cost of multiple children would be reduced, and mothers will be able to maintain both relatively high rates of fertility and high rates of workforce attachment. As a case study, Sweden has some of the highest fertility rates in Europe, in part based on its generous parental leave offerings (Andersson, Duvander, and Hank 2004). By contrast, Italy, a country with strong Catholic traditions and traditional gender norms, has some of the lowest fertility rates in Europe (Del Boca 2002). Of course, U.S. states may not follow this European model, but it is worth noting that existing welfare state scholarship suggests

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Figure 5.10. Percentage of the state identifying as Christian, 2013–2015 average. (Cox and Jones 2017.)

that fertility and maternal employment rates may be higher in states with less expensive child care, which, in the United States, are states that are more religious (see Figures 2.4 and 5.10). Figure 5.10 displays the percentage of the population identifying as Christian within each state. It shows that populations with high concentrations of Christians are clustered among states with high ratings on our childcare-regime index (i.e., states where mothers are more likely to be employed and child care is less expensive). These include the West North Central states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas, as well as the West South Central States of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The East South Central and South Atlantic states (often referred to as the Bible Belt states) also, unsurprisingly, have some of the highest concentrations of Christians, including Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. Rhode Island is the only New England state with a high concentration of Christians. The Pacific and Mountain states—­ California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado—have some of the lowest concentrations of Christians.7 The Pacific states, including California, were shown to be the most secular in the previous chapter, a result supported here. It is important to note that in addition to providing a place to worship, churches often provide relatively inexpensive child care. Thus, mothers, regardless of religion, may benefit from living in more religious states by gaining access to relatively inexpensive (i.e., church subsidized), widely available child-care facilities.

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Figure 5.11. Total fertility rate by state. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017.)

To assess our prediction that more Christian states ought to have higher fertility rates, Figure 5.11 depicts the total fertility rate in each state. Consistent with this expectation, Figures 5.10 and 5.11 appear relatively similar. Figure 5.11 indicates fertility rates are highest in the West North Central states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas) and the West South Central states (Oklahoma and Texas). These states also consistently group together on the child-care-regime measure—having the highest concentration of full-time working mothers, least expensive child care, longest school day lengths, quickest returns to work, highest concentrations of female-­ dominated industries and child-care workers, and in providing the highest rates of direct child-care services to poor families through the Head Start program. Descriptively, the results lend support to European-centric welfare state arguments that providing families with more child-care resources ought to lead to both higher fertility and higher rates of maternal employment. They also counter strict rational-choice arguments that suggest families with higher fertility rates will weigh the benefits of female employment against the cost of placing those children in child care, and consequently mothers will drop out of the labor market. Idaho and Utah, two Mountain states with high concentrations of Mormons, also have high fertility rates, as do Hawaii and Alaska, two Pacific states. The Northeast and Middle Atlantic states (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) cluster together with the lowest fertility rates in the nation. The Middle Atlantic states (New

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Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania) also have some of the lowest fertility rates in the nation. This suggests that the clustering of low fertility rates is largely centered around the East Coast, a region that ranks high on the gender-empowerment-regime index but low on the child-care-regime index. Thus, fertility rates are higher in states like Nebraska where more mothers work and child care is inexpensive, but lower in states like California with more progressive policies that theoretically support working families. Figure 5.12 expands on these results by showing how many births in each state between 2012 and 2015 can be attributed to women employed at the time they gave birth. The results show that a higher percentage of the births in the child-care-regime states clustered in the West North Central states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri are to employed women. Wisconsin, an East North Central state, also has some of the highest rates of employed women giving birth. These results are consistent with our earlier findings that mothers in these West North Central states like Nebraska have the highest requests for infant care, indicating that they are able to continue employment postpartum at higher rates than elsewhere in the nation (see Figure 2.5). The Pacific and Mountain states, including the gender-empowered state of California and the policy-void state of Idaho, also cluster together in exhibiting the lowest rates of births to employed mothers in the nation. Whether mothers were

Figure 5.12. Births to employed women in previous twelve months as a percentage of all births, 2011–2015 average. (U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder database, available at http://factfinder2.census.gov.)

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unemployed prior to their pregnancy or unable to reenter the labor market ­postpartum is unclear from these data, but the results indicate that mothers in these states are less able to maintain employment during and after birth than in the child-care-regime states clustered in the West North Central region. Figures 5.10, 5.11, and 5.12 focus on large-scale social norms that contribute to state-level gender traditionalism. States’ concentration of women with tertiary education, however, may also structure their gender norms and maternal employment patterns (see Figure 3.6). College-educated women tend to hold more egalitarian gender role ideologies and, as a consequence, are less likely to support traditional divisions of labor in their own family lives. Similarly, college-educated women have lower and delayed fertility rates, in part, to allow themselves more time to accrue status in their chosen career path.8 States with more college-educated women ought, therefore, to have more gender-egalitarian social expectations for mothers, which might result in higher rates of maternal employment. Simply put, if college-educated women act to maximize their own self-interest, as rational-choice arguments would suggest, then states with more college-educated women should have higher employment rates. Theories of marital homogamy, however, teach us that college-educated women are more likely to marry college-educated men with stronger career prospects. As a consequence, college-educated women may opt out of their professional careers to manage child-care demands if they lack adequate policy, employment, and spousal support. These women are also more likely to be employed in highly demanding professions, and the role strain between their commitments as employees and as mothers might increase inter-role strain and force them out of work (Stone 2007). Supported by high-earning fathers, college-educated mothers are financially better equipped to make a wider range of employment decisions “for the family” (Damaske 2011). Chapter 4 illustrated how states divide into having either female-friendly policies or strong child-care regimes that practically support working mothers. Since college-educated women tend to have more gender-egalitarian political opinions, they ought to be more likely to vote in favor of family policies. Our analysis suggests, however, that if college-educated women are concentrated in states with progressive family policies, they are also likely concentrated in states with poor employment prospects for mothers. To test these claims, we can return to data for concentrations of college-educated women discussed in Chapter 3. Figure 3.6 indicates that women’s college education is concentrated along the coasts—in New England, New York, and New Jersey and along the Pacific coast. By contrast, most of the South

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Central states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky) and West Virginia have some of the lowest concentrations of college-educated women. These patterns are interesting in light of rational-choice arguments that raising women’s human capital, through granting them higher educational qualifications, will mitigate gender inequality in employment. Women with college degrees are concentrated in states with more generous family policies, more women in state legislatures, and better-paying jobs, but child care in these states is expensive, school days are shorter than average, and, as a consequence, fewer mothers are employed in these states. This begs the question of whether reducing child-care costs and lengthening school days in states with more college-educated women would allow more mothers in those states to reenter the labor market. Figures 2.1–2.3 suggest maternal employment is lowest in states where mothers hold the most human capital, indicating states are not maximizing their talent pool. The loss to states’ GDP from having highly skilled, highly educated mothers out of the labor market provides further justification for making child care a first-order policy priority.

Linking Structural Barriers to Employment and Gender Norms with the Family-Friendly-Policy and Child-Care Indexes The previous section considers state-to-state variation in fertility rates, Christianity, and the percentage of women with college education. States with the highest concentration of Christians are also those with the highest fertility rates and the lowest concentration of women with college degrees. Yet these states—especially North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska—are also those with the highest concentrations of full-time working women, the lowest-cost child care, and the longest school days. By contrast, the states with more progressive family and gender policies, females in state legislatures, high-earning women, and equal pay discrimination claims are also those where women have fewer children, are more highly educated, and are less likely to be Christian, but where child care is more expensive and school days are shorter. As we know, these states also have the lowest rates of maternal employment. It seems unlikely that these states’ progressive gender policies, their above-average rates of highly paid women and female politicians, their comparatively smaller family sizes, their secularity, and their higher levels of female education are discouraging mothers in these states from employment after childbirth. All these qualities point to an institutional context where

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women are more empowered to equalize their life chances with comparison to their male counterparts. So why are married mothers not working in these states? The only remaining answer is, again, child-care availability; on the basis of these data, easy access to child care appears to be the most important factor structuring maternal employment across the United States. In addition, mothers in these states have relatively poor options for care of children of all ages. These states are unique in their concentration of expensive child care, short school day lengths, difficult-to-access after-school care, and limited availability of child-care workers. While they are often the most generous in tax subsidies and family policy provisions, these resources are insufficient to facilitate maternal employment. Further, their high cost of living and weak purchasing power relative to per capita income suggests that only the most affluent mothers are financially able to pay the child-care costs necessary for full-time employment. Again, these structural impediments underscore the need for policy solutions, as markets are incapable of removing these barriers; only state governments can reduce child-care costs to support maternal employment. This conclusion is worth formally testing through a regression analysis, the results of which are displayed in Table 5.3. This tests the relationship of each measure discussed in this chapter with the child-care and gender-­ empowerment regimes. For the child-care regime, only one measure is significantly associated with regime-type membership: the percentage of all births to employed women. States where child care is less expensive and mothers are more likely to work full time also have a higher average concentration of births to employed women. Again, this supports our conclusion that these institutional contexts are conducive to maternal employment. States with more gender-empowered contexts have lower fertility rates and higher concentrations of college-educated women. As predicted, this demonstrates that states with more progressive family policies, but poorer child-care resources, have smaller family sizes and a larger concentration of women with greater human capital. Notably, the concentration of Christians within each state is not significantly associated with either the gender-empowered or child-care institutional context, countering assumptions that socially egalitarian gender norms ought to lead to greater maternal employment. To the extent that the data used throughout this book can offer definitive conclusions about why rates of maternal employment vary between states, these results present the strongest evidence yet that access to child care structures maternal employment decision making in the United States. There is some nuance to this conclusion—for example, mothers are more likely to be employed in states where child care is offered by state governments, rather

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Table 5.3. Regression results for politically and economically empowered factor and gender and religious norms of the state

Constant Total fertility rate Births to employed women in previous twelve months (% of all births) % of women with college degree or higher % of state identifying as Christian Adjusted R-squared

Model 1: Genderempowermentregime type (factor 1) 0.527 –1.562* –0.012

Model 2: Childcare-regime type (factor 2) –9.063** 0.874 0.134**

0.112** –0.002 0.587*

0.004 –0.018 0.405**

*p < .010 **p < .001

than merely subsidized—and of course, individual mothers’ employment decisions are determined by a wide range of personal factors outside the scope of this study. On the whole, though, these trends offer a clear message to U.S. state policy makers: to increase maternal employment, states must make accessible child care a first-order priority.

Chapter Summary This chapter has explored three potential explanations for why U.S. states divide into gender-empowered-regime and child-care-regime “types”: state generosity in offering or investing in pre-K care, state-to-state gendered labor market pull and push factors, and variance in states’ cultural attitudes toward women. Welfare state arguments posit that states that offer more child-care provisions to mothers, where employment is more readily available, and where gender norms are more progressive will rank higher on the mother-friendly employment index. Yet, as with the previous chapters, the results are more complicated than existing welfare state models would predict. Specifically, child-care-regime/high maternal employment regime states are characterized by providing more generous direct services to the poor through Head Start enrollment, having a higher concentration of female-dominated industries and child-care workers, higher-quality child care, a higher concentration of births to employed women in the past twelve months, and higher per capita income. Put simply, these states have greater opportunities for maternal employment (i.e., they offer more female-dominated jobs), stronger labor

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­ arket attachment among new mothers, more developed child-care offerings m (as measured through child-care worker availability and child-care-service quality), and greater economic returns to mothers’ earnings (i.e., higher per capita purchasing power). In part, these results are consistent with liberal welfare state ideologies that promote allowing market forces to intervene to meet constituents’ welfare demands. Yet it is too presumptive to dismiss the capacity of the state to increase maternal employment rates, as many of these states also have some of the highest enrollments of eligible children in Head Start programs, and child-care quality is often affected by state legislation and political influence. Furthermore, these states exhibit some characteristics typical of more progressive welfare nation-states, including high rates of fertility and inexpensive child care (like Sweden), and, of course, high rates of maternal employment. Even though many of these states have some of the highest concentrations of Christians in the nation, traditional gender role expectations do not appear to deter mothers from work. Rather, churches likely offer another location for parents to access inexpensive child care, which may unintentionally reduce child-care costs, increase access, and facilitate maternal employment. As Chapter 4 indicates, these states, although not the most affluent, have some of the lowest levels of married-couple poverty in the nation. This chapter builds a fuller picture of the economic fortunes of child-care-regime constituents, showing these states also have the lowest cost of living and highest per capita incomes when adjusted for purchasing power. The cumulation of these results indicates families are better situated to achieve a middle-class lifestyle in these states, a factor likely driving maternal employment and likely stabilizing the child-care markets by allowing more women to work as child-care providers. Across the book, the results indicate a dynamic interplay between sociodemographic, cultural, market, normative, and political forces that structure maternal employment. For the gender-empowered states, the results are equally complex. States with progressive policies and greater political and economic gender equality also appear to be those with more expensive child care and shorter school day lengths. These states tend to have the highest numbers of secular, affluent, and Democratic-voting constituents but consistently low maternal employment rates. This chapter shows that these states also provide more generous pre-K cash subsidies but do not directly offer state-provided childcare services. The availability of child-care workers is also low. As proxies for their constituents’ attitudes toward gender roles, these states tend to have below-­average fertility rates, fewer Christian constituents, and higher concentrations of college-educated women. The consequence of living in these ideologically liberal states is that progressive female-friendly policies, including

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parental leave policies, are more likely to be passed, and state-based financial support for child care is more generous. In many ways, these states behave like Esping-Andersen’s archetypal social-democratic welfare states, but crucially, they fail to ensure all working mothers actually have access to child care. Although these states offer higher female wages than the national average and mothers are better educated, mothers in these states are locked out of the labor market because of a structural lack of inexpensive, widely available, and high-quality child-care resources. Equalizing child-care availability may therefore be the linchpin to increasing mothers’ access to employment in these states, since they otherwise appear to possess the key attributes of an archetypally progressive gendered welfare state.

Conclusion Policy Recommendations for the Future

A

va’s and Michelle’s child-care experiences provide personal examples of American married mothers facing very different opportunities for employment. Ava lives in a state where, after childbirth, mothers tend to return quickly to work, have inexpensive child care, long school days, and widely available after-school care. Ava, like most married mothers in her state, works full time. She reflects the experiences of women living in states with expansive maternal employment and generous child-care offerings. Prior to reading this book, one might anticipate that Ava lives in the politically progressive state of California. However, Ava actually lives in Nebraska. While Ava has access to inexpensive child care and long school days that facilitate her employment, women in states that approach working motherhood as Nebraska does are less likely to be well paid or to see their concerns represented by women in state legislatures, and Ava has no access to paid parental leave. Child-care-regime states such as this are far from the most politically progressive in the United States but provide a range of other institutional supports to working mothers that demonstrably encourage them to work full time. Michelle’s experiences differ starkly from Ava’s. Following the birth of a child, few mothers in Michelle’s state return to work, with many staying at home to care for young children. Michelle faces serious institutional barriers to employment because child care in her state is expensive, school days are short, and after-school care is difficult to access. Michelle lives in California, a state considered one of the most gender progressive in the nation. Married mothers in such states have some of the lowest rates of full-time employment

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and many, instead, stay home as full-time carers for their children. Yet unlike Ava, Michelle lives in a state where women are more empowered. The concentration of women in state government is higher, women’s pay is closer to parity with men’s, the state economy offers more lucrative employment, and mothers have access to more progressive parental leave policies. This leads to a central conclusion: states offer bifurcated gender environments to mothers, with most either providing more generous child-care provisions or more political and economic gender empowerment. Notably, the environments with better child-care resources appear to be more conducive to maternal employment. From this state of affairs, clear policy solutions emerge: (1) mothers need high-quality, low-cost, and widely available child care to maintain employment following childbirth, and (2) states need to better synchronize work and school schedules by lengthening school days and broadening after-school spaces to support maternal employment but also by offering more parents flexible work and shortened workweeks. To better understand why states vary in their child-care provisions and levels of gender empowerment, a range of racial, economic, policy, cultural, and religious measures were investigated (see Table C.1 for a summary of results). A cluster of states, mostly in the center and the South, offer mothers broad child-care assistance and have high rates of maternal employment. In these states, female-dominated industries account for a larger share of employment, child-care workers are more densely concentrated relative to the national average, and enrollment rates in Head Start, a federal program aimed at providing poor children with access to child care, are among the highest in the nation. Child-care quality is also higher in these states than in states with lower levels of maternal employment. Finally, while these states are less affluent than those with more progressive gender policies, fewer married couples live in poverty, costs of living are lower, and per capita incomes adjusted for purchasing power are higher, suggesting mothers’ employment may help families achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Overall, the combination of less expensive, widely available, and high-quality child care; direct childcare assistance offered to poorer families; more developed female-friendly job markets; and greater purchasing power are associated with higher rates of maternal employment. A second cluster of states offers institutional contexts that lead to more gender empowerment, demonstrated by their more robust antidiscrimination legislation, expanded family leave policies, higher female wage rates, and higher numbers of female state legislators. These states with strong legislative contexts include the Pacific (California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington) and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states (Connecticut, New

Table C.1. Results from regressions of disaggregated state sociodemographic, child-care, gendered market, and normative characteristics Factor 1: Genderempowerment type Occupational composition   Professional/management (%)   Construction and transport (%)   Sales (%) Race   Black (%)   Asian (%)   Latino (%) Rural (%) Republican margin 2008 presidential election Average church attendance Married-couple poverty Median home value (in thousands) Home-ownership rate Southern state (value = 1) State child-care services  State contribution to pre-K care (% of average child-care cost)  Three-year-old enrollment in Head Start (% of three-year-olds in poverty) Market characteristics  Child-care worker concentration relative to the nation (location quotient)  Child-care quality (accreditation and in-home ratings)  Concentration of female-dominated industries (% of state’s economy)   Regional price parities  Per-capita personal income adjusted by regional price parity (in $1,000 USD) Gender norms   Total fertility rate  Births to employed women in previous twelve months (% of all births)   % of women with college degree or higher   % Christian

Factor 2: Child-care type

+ – – + + – – – – +

– – –

– + +

– + + + +

– + +

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­ ampshire, New Jersey, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, H and Vermont). These states tend to have more Democratic-voting, urban-­ dwelling, secular, and affluent constituents, with more college-educated women and lower fertility rates. State governments more generously provide for state-sponsored pre-kindergarten (pre-K) care, but these states have fewer child-care workers, fewer poor children enrolled in care, more expensive childcare costs, and more mothers who need after-school care but cannot find it. As a resident of California, then, Michelle might be less likely to be employed full time, in spite of the fact that she lives in an institutional context with strong anti–gender discrimination legislation and comprehensive family leave policies, is surrounded by highly educated women who have smaller families, and is likely to be paid more than most American women. Ava, meanwhile, might be more likely to work full time—in large part because she has greater institutional child-care support—but is also likely to earn less than her male counterparts, to experience workplace discrimination, and to be denied paid parental leave. In this regard, all the states have room for improvement in their family policies, with some in more dire need than others. These divisions based on states’ child-care regimes and levels of gender empowerment form four types: (1) child-care-regime states with expansive child-care and school-aged-care resources that support married mothers’ employment but weak gender empowerment supporting women’s rights to work; (2) gender-empowerment states that offer policies to protect women from workplace discrimination, economic rewards for women’s work, and more expansive female state legislature representation but offer too few child-care resources; (3) policy-void states that have neither gender-empowerment nor child-care policies; and (4) a handful of ideal states and a district that support mothers through child care and women through gender empowerment. Even among the ideal policy states, important policy gaps in terms of child-care cost and school-aged-care resources remain. For example, while Washington, D.C., provides clear policy directions to support working mothers, including its universal child-care provisions, there remain areas for improvement including child-care assistance for school-aged children and the cost of marketbased child care. Most states fail to holistically support working mothers, and thus, most American mothers live in environments with considerable institutional barriers to maternal employment. These barriers impose a tremendous cost to local economies—closing gender gaps at work would add $4.3 trillion to the gross domestic product (GDP) (Ellingrund et al. 2016). Not only is gender empowerment divorced from child-care resources in most states, but at the state level, child-care resources have a greater impact on maternal employment outcomes than economic and political empowerment.

136 | Conclusion

This has real-world implications for state-level family policy within the United States. Clearly, policies designed to increase maternal employment, such as paid parental leave and anti–gender discrimination legislation, are not as effective as they ought to be, and child-care policies that drive down cost and increase quality of and access to pre-K child care are essential for supporting working mothers. Further, lengthening school days and providing children with after-school care must be top priorities of policy makers to support working mothers, as well as tackling organizational and corporate cultures that value presence and long work hours instead of flexibility and schedule control for all workers. Finally, creating institutional contexts that support fathers in sharing the burden and joys of caregiving is crucial to equalizing gendered divisions of paid and domestic time. These gaps in current policies provide a clear call to action for state politicians to redress these sources of gender inequality and equalize opportunities for mothers to work.

Theorizing Welfare States: The Child-Care and Gender-Empowered Typology This book seeks to address two main questions: Is it possible to develop a “welfare state” typology of U.S. states that is consistent with the models identified through cross-national analysis? And what type of U.S. welfare state is best for facilitating married mothers’ employment? Two existing theoretical traditions have weighed in on these questions: Gosta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) “three worlds of welfare” and a variety of rational-choice arguments. In his seminal piece, Esping-Andersen (1990) develops a typology of welfare states that models liberal, conservative, and social-democratic types of welfare states. Within this typology, the United States is classified as a liberal welfare state, based on its market-oriented and needs-based approach to federal government–provided welfare. Esping-Andersen’s typology is often applied to studies of welfare states around the world, particularly those focusing on governmental provision of child-care resources or family leave policies. In the United States, federally funded child-care resources are generally restricted to the poor, with benefits distributed based on established income thresholds. For most American families, child-care requirements are either absorbed by the family, friends, or other informal networks or met by market-provided child-care and day care services. Consequently, mothers often reduce employment to care for their children, and the cost of child care is identified by many mothers as a major barrier to their employment prospects (Brandon and Hofferth 2003; Brayfield and Hofferth 1995; Damaske, Bratter, and Frech 2017; Durfee and Meyers 2006; Stone 2007). By dropping out or re-

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ducing their working hours, married mothers are often left financially dependent on their husbands, which increases their economic vulnerability during economic downturns or if their spouse becomes ill or their marriage ends. Thus, from an economic perspective, equalizing mothers’ ability to work is central in reducing circumstances that contribute to gender inequality. To mitigate the negative impact of children on mothers’ careers, many politically progressive U.S. states—including California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island—have legislated paid parental leave. In doing so, they appear to be following models set by Esping-Andersen’s “ideal-type” socialdemocratic welfare state, typified by Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden. These states offer strong political and institutional support for working mothers, chiefly through policies and practices aiming to eliminate institutionalized gender discrimination and equalize economic opportunities. This includes providing policies to support working mothers and to elevate mothers’ economic and political status, and, increasingly, encouraging and supporting men to share in caregiving, specifically with “daddy quotas” for paid leave and other policies. For mothers, child-care resources and antidiscrimination policies that help equalize mothers’ employment postpartum are key to creating a gendered welfare state. The major impetus for writing this book was that some U.S. states—in particular California, Massachusetts, and New York—appeared to be crafting their own, distinct welfare state identities that resembled the social-democratic welfare states, meaning that classifying the entire United States as a single, liberal welfare state seemed an oversimplification of the state of welfare across the United States. This study focused on maternal employment as a key indicator of gender inequality, choosing to specifically examine married mothers. One might have expected U.S. states to reflect the three holistic categories identified in Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology. Under this model, politically progressive states in the Pacific (California, Oregon, and Washington) and in New England and the Middle Atlantic (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York) would have clustered as social-democratic welfare states, offering their constituents the most generous family policies, economic opportunities, and child-care offerings. Under this model, mothers in these states, like their European counterparts, would have the greatest labor market attachment. Following Esping-Andersen’s logic, one might also have expected the southern and West North Central states to resemble liberal welfare states, with poor child-care and school-aged-care resources and low rates of maternal employment. This book’s analysis has suggested something more complex: the states with generous family policies and economic opportunities for mothers do not have particularly supportive child-care regimes, and the states

138 | Conclusion

that offer the most comprehensive child-care and school-aged-care resources have unsupportive political and economic contexts. Esping-Andersen’s typology of three worlds of welfare, therefore, cannot be applied to U.S. states, since most statistically bifurcate into two types of welfare state, each of which possesses some—but not all—the characteristics of Esping-Andersen’s socialdemocratic and liberal welfare state models. This book also draws on rational-choice theory to explain married mothers’ employment patterns, but like the three worlds typology, it was unable to fully explain the child-care and gender-empowerment regimes revealed by the book’s analysis. Rational-choice theories posit that individuals make decisions by weighing their available resources and individual skills to achieve the best possible outcomes for themselves and their families. According to this perspective, mothers in states with higher-paying jobs and less expensive child care should have higher rates of employment. Simply put, mothers’ employment should be structured according to the opportunity costs of staying at home (Becker 1991). This book, however, paints a more complex picture: married mothers are more likely to be employed full time in states where child-care costs are low, but these states also tend to have some of the lowest female wage rates. By contrast, stay-at-home mothers are more prevalent in states with some of the highest female earnings and smallest gender wage gaps. States with high maternal employment do have a lower cost of living and higher purchasing power (incomes adjusted for cost of living). As others argue (Damaske 2011), mothers’ employment is driven less by economic need and more by returns to employment, notably easier access to middleclass standards of living. Although mothers’ employment decisions might be influenced by some degree of rational-choice thinking, it certainly cannot comprehensively explain their employment decisions and not necessarily in ways we might expect. Both these theories informed the institutional state contexts theoretical model, used to explain and justify the statistical analyses throughout this book. Given these somewhat unexpected results, however, the model needs updating so that it can adequately explain the two-state typology of U.S. states revealed by the data. This is addressed below.

Toward a New Theoretical Understanding of States: An Update of the Institutional State Contexts Theory The theory of institutional state contexts is rooted in the capabilities perspective (Sen 1993) that argues individuals are nested within institutional contexts, and that institutionalized biases (for example, gender or racial

Conclusion | 139 Religion

Race

Economic

Political

State institutional contexts

Affluent states with higher costs of living

Democratic, urban, and secular

More state pre-K contributions but fewer child-care workers

Lower fertility and highly educated women

Black and politically and religiously conservative

Femaledominated employment opportunities

Quality child care and higher Head Start enrollment

Gender-empowerment regimes

Child-care resources

Stay-at-home mothers

Full-time maternal employment

More purchasing power and less marriedcouple poverty

Figure C.1. Revised theoretical map of state institutional contexts.

­ iscrimination) limit individuals’ opportunities throughout their lives. Put d simply, the capabilities perspective asks: What would society look like if individuals were unencumbered by institutionalized discrimination? Building on this theory, the institutional state contexts perspective posits that states’ racial, occupational, political, and religious characteristics would form distinct institutional contexts, and that these characteristics would create child-care and gender cultures that structure maternal employment. In effect, it predicts that more women will be employed in states with the most female-friendly workplaces, the most family-friendly policies, and the most gender-­empowering religious attitudes. The results, however, painted a more complex picture, necessitating an update of the institutional state contexts model. Figure C.1 illustrates a revised theoretical model that better explains the results from this study. States’ racial, economic, political, and religious characteristics cluster to form an index of five distinct sociodemographic factors, but only one appears to affect child-care outcomes. Notably, states with a high concentration of non-Hispanic whites and African Americans and constituents who tend to be politically and religiously conservative are more likely to have mother-friendly employment environments (i.e., inexpensive child care, long school days, and accessible after-school care), and mothers in these states are more likely to return to work quickly after birth and work full time. Most of these states, however, have weak gender empowerment (i.e., they offer few progressive

140 | Conclusion

gender or family policies at the state legislature level) and thus do not offer policies to support mothers postpartum. To close these policy gaps, childcare-regime states should enact paid parental leave policies to equalize access across racial and class groups. Although these racial, religious, economic, and political indexes are important, measures of women’s status, fertility, state investments in pre-K care, and women’s human capital are equally important. Statistical results of these measures disaggregated underscore that child-care regimes are more common in states where women have more employment opportunities, where child care is of higher quality and is more widely available, including through federal programs like Head Start, and where more couples can enter the middle class through their greater purchasing power and lower married-­couple poverty. These patterns counter rational-choice arguments that poverty is driving maternal employment. Rather, mothers are more likely to work in states where employment opportunities are more readily available, child care is less expensive and easier to access, and their wages go further in real purchasing power for the family. In this regard, married mothers’ participation in the workforce is an important dimension of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in states where these lifestyles are more accessible. Ultimately, childcare-regime states largely capture a culturally valued model of American selfreliance, whereby children have access to long school days and inexpensive child care and mothers have the ability to enter employment for a wage that, although not as high as in other parts of the country, allows families greater purchasing power. The gender-empowerment index follows a different pattern. Mothers in urban, secular, Democratic-voting states are more likely to have access to more economic and political power but find weak child-care regimes and, as a consequence, are more likely to stay at home than return to work. This suggests that poor child-care and school-aged-care resources are a key barrier to maternal employment, a finding that accords with prior research. These states tend to be more affluent—women in these states earn higher wages. Housing prices and other costs of living are also higher. While these states provide more money for state-sponsored pre-K programs and women have fewer babies, these incentives are not sufficient to move mothers into the labor market. These states have fewer child-care workers relative to the national average, suggesting child care, in addition to being more expensive, is difficult to access. Of course, these measures of child-care workers likely underestimate the prevalence of informal, gray-market child care being done by women of color, including immigrant workers, which is more prevalent in affluent states like California. But gray-market nanny and au pair work mostly

Conclusion | 141

benefits upper-middle-class women and thus cannot explain the employment experiences of all mothers in these states. These states also have high rates of human capital waste because women in gender-empowered states are highly educated. Existing research shows mothers with higher socioeconomic status continue to be employed up to a point when work and family burdens become too challenging (Damaske 2011; Landivar 2017; Percheski 2008). In part, this reflects the challenges for highly educated mothers married to men who work long hours (Cha 2010; Stone 2007). Regardless of the mechanisms that keep mothers out of work, by failing to effectively incorporate mothers into the labor market, state economies are wasting high-quality talent and boxing out low-income mothers from the labor market. Indeed, closing the gender gap in employment would contribute $4.3 trillion to the GDP, indicating a huge economic cost of gender inequality (Ellingrund et al. 2016). Addressing the child-care gap should be a top priority of state legislatures not only to reduce gender inequality but also to boost productivity and GDP.

Directions for Future Research States form two types in ways that are distinct from the welfare state typologies developed across Europe. More work needs to be done linking these typologies to individual outcomes. Initial inquiry into this area confirms that mothers are more likely to be employed—full and part time—in states where child care is less expensive and school days are longer. Mothers also spend more time as child carers in states where child care is more expensive and as costs increase over time (Ruppanner, Moller, and Sayer 2019). Housework time is also sensitive to state levels of gender empowerment and to expectations of families, with mothers in more gender-traditional states vulnerable to greater time in housework (Ruppanner and Maume 2016). Future scholarship should expand use of this typology to investigate individuals’ experiences of inequality that are central to sociological inquiry—time use, economic resources, and health, to name a few. Further, scholars should extend an intersectionalist approach to understand how these state typologies, or their separate components, affect mothers’ experiences stratified by race and class. These data provide a powerful framework to contextualize child care and gender empowerment as a geographical component of inequality. By linking these state-level data to existing datasets like the American Time Use Survey, the American Community Survey, or the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, researchers have an opportunity to establish powerful analyses of how state-level child-care resources or gender empowerment help structure more equal and just divisions of time, health, and economic d ­ isadvantage.

142 | Conclusion

While much research on these topics has been conducted across nations, an equivalent comparison of U.S. states is conspicuously absent from the literature. This book argues that states vary in their level of resources and gendered opportunities and constraints. More work needs to be done to extend these analyses at the state and individual levels. Finally, additional work must be done to understand geographical sources of inequality at lower levels of analysis, including at the city and county levels. Here, William Scarborough (2018) provides clear direction forward with his innovative methods and measurements of the gender distribution of resources across cities and neighborhoods. Given the intensified polarization in attitudes and outcomes across U.S. states and cities, more work on these topics needs to be done.

Policy Solutions to Better Integrate Mothers into Work The results of this book point to clear policy solutions that state legislators should enact to support working families. From these findings, a handful of clear policy solutions emerge: (1) reducing child-care costs and increasing child-care spaces, especially in states with a high cost of living; (2) more effectively maximizing enrollment in the federal Head Start program; (3) lengthening school days to better synchronize with work schedules; (4) legislating well-paid parental leave to both parents; (5) investing in femaledominated professions; (6) restricting work to enable more flexibility and schedule control for women and men to handle caregiving roles; (7) opening male-dominated higher-paying professions, including blue-collar work, to women; and (8) reducing the structural barriers to men taking on more paid and unpaid caregiving. Fortunately, many states are exemplars across these dimensions, and already offer clear policy frameworks and political templates for these agendas. States like California, Oregon, and Washington, which pride themselves on being politically progressive, should look to states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota for demonstrably effective policy solutions to support working mothers. This might involve a comprehensive review of their child-care resources and school timetables to determine whether politically progressive states can legislate measures consistent with their more politically conservative neighbors. Progressive states also need to take child-care cost and availability seriously to reduce barriers to maternal employment. States like Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota illustrate that utilizing federal provisions offered by the Head Start program to increase child-care enrollment, and increasing the concentration of child-care workers, are perhaps overlooked policy options that can assist mothers looking to return to full-time work. States

Conclusion | 143

can help facilitate female-friendly job markets by creating tax incentives for investing in specific industries. While these are often implemented to support typically male-dominated work (i.e., mining, construction, or farming), legislating state budgets to incentivize female-dominated professions generally, particularly child-care work, may have the twofold benefit of increasing mothers’ full-time employment rates and reducing married-couple poverty. Incentivizing men to enter these professions as well could ensure an adequate supply of workers and may have a positive spillover effect to reduce gender stereotypes, model caring behavior among men, and help equalize domestic relations within families. Importantly, these jobs need to be well paid and well resourced to allow people to invest long term in these types of roles and reduce high employee turnover. Given that states with female-friendly legislative institutional contexts have some of the highest concentrations of female human capital both in potential earnings and college education, the loss of maternal employment to child-rearing is a greater economic cost in these states than others. These states also hold the most progressive approaches to gender, suggesting a strong appetite to legislate policies to more fully incorporate mothers into employment. Legislating equal access to low-cost, widely available, and high-quality child care for all eligible children is an important policy step toward equalizing child-care resources. As it stands, access to high-quality child care reinforces class divisions, with high-income parents most able to absorb the cost of high-quality child care and low-income families eligible for government programs. This leaves many middle-class families financially strained, underscoring the need to universalize child-care programs. States could look to Washington, D.C., for policies aimed at closing the income gap in access to high-quality, affordable care. Clearly, expensive, low-quality, and difficult-toaccess child care is a major barrier to maternal employment. In the same vein, states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota should look to California and New York for models to elevate women’s political status, including by supporting comprehensive family leave policies. Families in these states are most likely to be balancing competing demands of family and full-time employment. The stress of two parents working full time can increase time pressure and role strain, ultimately leading to poor mental and physical health. As more Americans are reporting feeling overworked, families in states where maternal employment is more common may disproportionately experience fatigue, irreconcilable time pressure, and chronic stress. European welfare states have been active in legislating policies to reduce the strain of balancing work and family, including legislating maximum work hours, health and work protections, flexible work time, and limits on

144 | Conclusion

o­ vertime.1 Legislating work hour limits and flexible work runs counter to liberal welfare state arguments that open markets are best placed to resolve health and welfare needs. But as governments and health-care industries are faced with growing health-care costs, the need to investigate inventive ways to improve constituents’ health and well-being are increasingly important. Further, flexible work and shorter workweeks are essential for many parents balancing the demands of children with special needs. Finally, Americans must reconceptualize the child-care/maternal employment problem beyond its current status as a woman’s issue. States where child care is expensive and school days are longer deny their constituents advantages that other state legislatures may be facilitating. This disadvantage is disproportionately shouldered by mothers who, because of gender norms, are more likely to reduce full-time employment to care for children. Consequently, the right to care and the right to equal work are often conceptualized as a woman’s problem. Yet as more men step into caring roles and assume a larger share of child-care responsibilities, the issue of child care becomes a larger social problem that requires joint solutions to reduce institutional barriers to employment and care. We must stop framing child care and mothers’ employment as a problem for women to solve alone. Fathers today wish to have a more active role in raising their children, but to provide them the space and financial security to do this, we must eliminate institutional barriers, including a lack of paid paternal leave, a lack of affordable and accessible child care, and short school days, which all hinder equal access to employment. This is not a story about affluence—quite the opposite, since mothers in states with the greatest financial resources have some of the lowest rates of employment. Rather, this is an issue of access—of providing women with opportunities to enter the labor market and men with opportunities to spend more time at home through policies that promote inexpensive, easily accessible, and high-quality child care. Only by combining the strengths of both types of states in our U.S. welfare state typology can we begin to build an America-wide institutional context that comprehensively supports working parents.

Notes

Chapter 1

1.  For example, poor and working-poor mothers wait in line for hours and provide copious amounts of documentation to access Washington, D.C.’s child-care subsidy (Schulte 2013). 2.  Esping-Andersen’s three worlds typology has been further refined to include other nations including the “Latin rim” and southern European nations (Leibfried 2002) and the Asian nations (Gould 1993). 3.  See, for example, welfare-to-work provisions (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 1998). Chapter 2

1.  This parallels Sarah Damaske’s (2011) identification of “need” narratives, whereby mothers’ financial contributions, through employment, are deemed less necessary than their emotional contributions, through child care, to families’ perceived needs. 2.  Alabama failed to report on this measure, and so it is not mapped in this graphic. 3.  For further discussion, see Chapter 3. 4.  While the differences across these states may appear to be marginal (roughly one hour per day difference between the shortest and longest school day length), these aggregate into roughly 180 hours per year, which is the equivalent of 22.5 work days (8 hours per day). This dramatically exceeds most salaried employees’ vacation time, indicating a significant barrier to full-time employment. 5.  This reflects Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers’s (2003) findings that countries offering the broadest range of “family-responsive resources,” across a range of categories including child care, are best equipped to support maternal employment.

146  |  Notes to Chapter 2

6.  Existing research, led by Peter Brandon and Sandra Hofferth (2003), has also indicated that a lack of child-care resources across the United States often compels women to exit the workforce. 7.  This would be an example of multicollinearity: including a collection of overly similar variables in a regression model, thereby amplifying the weight of those variables in the model, and distorting the results of the analysis. Chapter 3

1.  It is important to note that many American employees do not have access to these kinds of benefits. As of the mid-1990s, only 43 percent of women in the United States had access to any kind of leave—including pooled sick leave/vacation leave— directly after birth (Meyers and Gornick 2005). This indicates that the FMLA does little to protect the most vulnerable employees—those in low-wage and temporary positions—from the damaging effects that family emergencies or childbirth have on their career trajectories. 2.  This is often referred to as a “descriptive” mode of female empowerment, in which select groups of women are placed in positions of power to create an illusion of structural gender equality. There are debates over whether this type of descriptive representation ultimately contributes to any structural change in women’s social, political, and economic empowerment (Beckwith 2007). 3.  This is an issue of reverse causality: the causal direction may run either way, and which direction cannot be resolved with the data at hand. 4.  The EPA was also only extended to cover employees in professional or managerial positions in 1972 (McDonagh and Nackenoff 2016). This indicates that it has always itself been inherently subject to gendered biases about what constitutes men’s and women’s work. 5.  It is worth noting that this is not a commonly advanced theory in the literature, but it is an assumption held by many Americans today about why mothers reenter the labor market (Jacobs and Gerson 2016). 6.  In no state do men and women have wage parity—meaning, on average, men earn more money than women in all U.S. states. 7.  See, for example, the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which is often applied to measure the capability perspective across nations. The GEM captures women’s political and economic power and forms a robust index for measuring losses in productivity due to gender inequality. 8.  Interestingly, a higher concentration of female state legislators is not associated with paid parental leave policies, although this is likely an issue of sample size with only five states legislating this leave. As more states legislate paid parental leave, more robust analyses will be able to confirm these relationships. States with more expansive family leave policies are more likely to have paid parental leave. 9.  The percentage of women with college degrees and the female wage measures were dropped from the analysis because they were highly correlated with the female state legislators measure. As a robustness check, I also ran separate models with the percentage of women with a college degree and female wage measures separately to see if they were significantly associated with women’s employment. Only one signifi-

Notes to Chapter 5  |  147

cant relationship emerged: mothers are more likely to work part time in states with higher concentrations of college-educated women. Women’s college education and part-time work are concentrated in New England; these models statistically confirm this association. Chapter 4

1.  Factor analyses are superior to computing a mean of a given selection of measures to form an index because, rather than relying on preexisting theory to determine which measures the researcher should directly compare, they use latent variation that already exists in the data to determine which of a group of measures form the most statistically robust index or indexes. 2.  Across both factors, the variance statistics have adequate sampling and variance to perform a factor analysis (KMO = 0.76). 3.  Only the measures that are above 0.3 (an established threshold of significance) are presented. 4.  Child-care cost, which is shown to cluster with these measures in the previous chapter, fails to reach the 0.3 statistically significant threshold. However, the negative relationship is consistent with previous findings. 5.  The index is created by Bloomberg and combines statistics on tax collections, personal income, employment, home prices, mortgage foreclosures, and the stock performance of companies located in a state into a single index. The six components are equally weighted. 6.  The only exceptions are Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, which are deeply rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative. 7.  A series of factor analyses including racial composition, industry, and economics were also run for sensitivity tests. Race, measured as distinct categories (white, Latino, African American and Asian) and as racial diversity (average nonwhite) was also included, but this measure did not load onto the Democratic, secular, and urban measure. Rather, racial diversity forms its own cluster (associated with religiosity). Including the industry characteristics weakened the reliability of the model. The inclusion of the economic dimensions (industry, economic health, and home ownership and cost) produced factors largely equivalent to Figures 4.5 through 4.7. These are excluded to contextualize the distinct political, religious, urban, and gendered characteristics of these states. 8.  As mentioned previously, this is not a commonly advanced theory in the welfare state literature but is a belief held by many Americans today (Jacobs and Gerson 2016). Chapter 5

1.  Because the trends are nearly identical for Head Start enrollment among eligible three- and four-year-olds, only the map for three-year-olds is presented here. The fact that the patterns exhibited in this map can be extrapolated to enrollment rates for four-year-olds indicates that states are equally committed to Head Start enrollment across both age groups.

148  |  Notes to Chapter 5

2.  The percentage of four-year-old enrollment in state-sponsored care is also positively associated with the child-care-regime measure but is only significant at a p < 0.10 threshold and thus is not reported. 3.  The concentration of child-care workers is measured through the location quotient that captures the concentration of child-care workers relative to the national average. A number of 2.0 indicates two times as many child-care workers in a given state as the national average. The location quotient is used to identify the concentration of industries within states. 4.  These data are derived from the New America Childcare Index as a collaboration between New America and Care.com. To evaluate child-care quality, researchers combined three data points: the average Care.com rating of in-home care providers, the percentage of accredited family care providers, and the percentage of accredited child-care centers. Each measure is multiplied by the percentage of children accessing that type of care and then the three are aggregated to measure quality. 5.  The per capita income is reduced in states where the cost of living is higher than the national average, by the percentage increase. The per capita income is increased in states where the cost of living is lower than the national average, by the percentage decrease. Thus, the per capita income standardizes earnings relative to purchasing power. 6.  The General Social Survey collects Americans’ attitudes about gender roles over time, but this is not representative at the state level. 7.  Utah and Idaho have a high concentration of Mormons and thus are not secular but rather exhibit a strong concentration of Christian faith that is not included in this index. 8.  See the discussion in Chapter 3. Conclusion

1.  See the International Labour Organization’s Working Conditions Laws Database, at https://www.ilo.org/dyn/travail.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures or tables. abortion rights, 19 Abramovitz, Mimi, 22 Administration of Children and Families, 15 adoption, parental leave after, 58 affluent states, lack of child-care access in, 3, 9, 36, 39, 66, 95–99, 101, 104, 111, 118–121, 128, 130, 135, 140, 144 African American population, 3, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 134, 139, 147n7; black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 76, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 92–93, 98, 99, 139 after-school care, 1–2, 71, 101, 109, 140; California shortages of, 2, 27–28, 101; demand for, 18, 47, 47–48; needs-based approach to, 18; in Washington, D.C., 80, 82, 135 AmeriCorps, 18 antidiscrimination laws, 4, 28, 54, 57, 61–63, 63, 133 Asian population, 85, 86, 94, 95, 134, 147n7 autonomy/independence of mothers, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 102; and divorce and poverty, 33, 36; as essential to equalizing women’s

life chances, 33; nation-state differences in, 21–22 baby boom of the 1950s, 35 before-school care, 1–2 births to employed mothers, 125, 125–126, 128, 129, 134 black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 76, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 92–93, 98, 99, 139 Blair-Loy, Mary, 38 block grants/formula programs, 18 budgetary crises, 18, 45–46, 50 bureaucracies, 17 Cahn, Naomi, 122 California, 7, 11; actual wages in, 65, 65; after-school care shortages in, 2, 27–28, 101; contributions of, to pre-K programs, 104; cost of child care in, 1–2, 44, 101; cost of living in, 55, 101; as Democratic, urban, and secular, 89, 90, 90; femalefriendly political climate of, 78, 79; as gender-empowered state, 68, 74, 76, 80, 81, 81, 101; lack of child-care regime in, 59, 101–102; length of school day in, 2,

164 | Index

California (continued ) 28, 47, 54; paid family and medical leave in, 17, 19, 20, 56; and Paid Family Leave Act, 17, 20; part-time employment in, 37, 37–38; size of economy of, 27–28; voting patterns in, 19–20 California State Disability Insurance program, 17 Canadian border, states along, 86 capabilities perspective, 7, 12, 22–24, 138–141, 139 Carbone, June, 122 caregiving roles, men and, 9, 51, 136, 142, 144 center-based child care, 1–2 child-care access, 1–2, 28–29, 39, 115, 144; costs of, 1, 29, 31, 42, 42–45, 44; as most important factor in maternal employment, 128; state mechanisms for, 103–109, 104, 107 Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), 18 child-care centers, gender-based policies at, 28 child-care-quality rankings, 116, 116, 134, 139, 148n4 child-care-regime states, 4, 5, 8–9, 25, 66, 73, 76, 82, 132–133, 139, 139–140; as comprehensive approach, 48–49, 49; and high maternal employment, 79, 79–80; as ideal type states, 44, 48; and limited pre-K provisions, 104–105; linking sociodemographic factors to, 91–97, 92, 94; and married-couple poverty, 3, 91, 92, 94, 99, 117, 121, 130, 134, 140, 143; as most common type, 8, 98; and mother-friendly factors, 92; and political, economic, and religious factors, 129; requests for child care in, 43–44, 44, 52, 71; subsidies for Head Start and pre-K in, 3. See also conservative (red) states; Nebraska; religious composition of states child-care subsidies as tax breaks, 22 child-care workers, concentration of, 2, 3, 114, 114–115, 115, 148n3 Christians, concentration of, 123, 123– 124, 127, 128, 129, 134, 148n7 class-based differences in family support, 13, 16, 106; costs of child care

as percentage of income, 31; and lack of government-subsidized child care, 29–30; and school readiness programs, 106, 108 Cloward, Richard, 22, 96 coastal states, 3, 4, 55, 65, 95–96; affluence in, 118; cost of living in, 117, 118; as Democratic, urban, and secular, 89, 89–90, 90, 92, 96, 98; as gender-­ empowered, 81. See also California college-educated women, 61, 66–68, 67, 69, 71, 129, 134, 139, 146–147n9; fertility rates of, 126–127 Colorado: child-care-regime and gender empowerment scores of, 81; college degrees in, 67; female legislative representatives in, 59; as gender-empowered regime, 81, 97 conservative (red) states, 2–3; maternal employment in, 93; part-time employment in, 36–37. See also child-care-regime states; policy-void states conservative welfare states, 12, 13, 21, 136 cost of child care, 1, 29, 31, 71, 78, 95–96, 147n4; direct child-care services, 102–104, 129; market-based resources, 13, 15, 30, 103, 108; maternal employment as linked to, 49–51, 50; part-time work as linked to, 50; policy solutions for, 9; state-to-state differences in, 42, 42–45, 44; supplementing, 103 cost of living, 3, 9, 55, 75, 95–96, 133, 139, 148n5; and per capita income, 118–120, 119; and price parity, 117, 117–118; and purchasing power, 3, 96–97, 117–121, 118, 128, 130, 133, 138–140, 139, 148n5 cross-national research, 25, 43, 72, 112, 122, 145n5. See also nation-states cultural attitudes. See gender norms “daddy quotas,” 137 Damaske, Sarah, 145n1 (chap. 2) decentralized approaches, 15–16 Democratic, urban, and secular states, 89, 89–90, 90, 92, 92, 96, 98–99, 130, 134, 139 Department of Health and Human Services, 15

Index | 165

dependency, as reinforced by federal policy, 22 descriptive representation, 146n2 deserving versus undeserving motherhood, 22, 30 devotions, competing, 39 disability, pregnancy protection as, 58 discretionary programs, 18 discrimination: antidiscrimination laws, 4, 28, 54, 57, 61–63, 63, 133; institutionalized, 24–25; workplace, 62 divisions of labor, gendered, 141; breadwinner and homemaker norms, 13, 21, 28, 38; and inter-role strain, 28, 35, 126, 143; and part-time work as “good motherhood,” 36; and work-family conflict, 28, 35 divorce, poverty as linked to, 33, 36 dual-earner families, 2, 11, 29, 97, 117, 118; north-to-south line of, 34, 34 Durfee, Alesha, 32–33 Early Childhood Education Grant Program (Nebraska), 105 East Coast states, 81; actual wages in, 65; fertility rates in, 125; as gender-­ empowered, 81; gender pay gap in, 65 East North Central states, 8; after-school care in, 47, 47; births to employed mothers in, 125, 125; child-care-quality rankings of, 116, 116; college degrees in, 67, 67; contributions of, to pre-K programs, 103–104; cost of child care in, 42, 42; economic health factor of, 85, 87–89, 88; female-friendly political climate of, 78, 79; female legislative representatives in, 59–60, 60; and Head Start program, 110, 133; part-time employment in, 37, 37, 51; pre-K in, 108; requests for infant and toddler care in, 44, 44; state-based EPA claims of, 62–63, 63; stay-at-home mothers in, 39, 40 East South Central states, 8; after-school care in, 47, 47; and black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 87, 88; child-care-quality rankings of, 116, 116; child-care regimes of, 79, 79, 81; child-care workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 67, 67, 126–127;

cost of child care in, 42, 42, 51–52; and economic health factor, 85, 88, 88–89; female-dominated professions in, 113, 133; female legislative representatives in, 60, 60; full-time work in, 33, 34, 51; length of school day in, 51–52; part-time employment in, 37, 37; political climates of, 78, 79; preschool education services in, 108; religious composition of, 123, 123; and religious, political, and professional factors, 85, 86–87, 87, 92, 98; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63 economic health: of mothers, 66; of states, 23, 23, 39, 85, 87–89, 88, 90, 92, 98 economic powerhouse states, 81, 84, 87–88 educational level. See college-educated women Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965), 18 Ellingrud, Kweilin, 4 employers, family-friendly resources offered by, 31–32 entitlement programs, 18 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 62 Equal Pay Act (EPA) claims, 61–63, 63, 69, 71, 72, 78, 146n4 Esping-Andersen, Gosta, 12–14, 21, 24, 57, 75, 105–106, 131, 135; U.S. differences from model of, 14, 137–138 European welfare states, 122–123, 124, 137, 143–144 factor analysis, 8, 77–80, 147n1 (chap. 4); black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 92–93, 98; Democratic, urban, and secular factor, 89, 89–90, 90, 92, 92, 96, 98–99; economic health factor, 85, 87– 89, 88, 90, 92; four political, religious, and demographic factors, 85, 85–89, 86, 92, 98, 135; rotated component matrix results, 78; rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86–87, 87, 92, 98; rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 86, 86, 90, 92, 98; of states’ sociodemographic qualities, 84–91, 85–90; strong child-care regimes

166 | Index

factor analysis (continued ) and high maternal employment, 79, 79–80; strong legislative contexts and weak child-care regimes, 78, 78–79 Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), 16, 20, 43, 56, 74, 146n1 family-friendly resources: factors affecting, 92; offered by employers, 31–32; progressive policies, 55–57, 130–131; and women in legislature, 57 family leave: enacting progressive gender policy, 58, 58–59; gender-based leave penalties, 9; index of, 58, 58–59, 69, 71, 72, 78; leave provisions, 58; partially paid leave, 17; as tied to insurance, 17, 56; unpaid leave, 16. See also parental leave family structure, 100 federal government: length of school day and, 45–46; states’ legislation beyond requirements of, 17, 62 federalist approaches, 18–19 federal spending: on Head Start program at state level, 109–111, 110; on K–12 education, 17–18; on states’ child-care provisions, 102–109, 104, 107 federated governments, 13, 14 female-dominated professions, 9, 10, 86, 96, 99–100, 112–116, 113, 133, 134, 139; development of, 121; industries of, 113; and institutionalization of part-time work, 36; recommendations for, 142; service-sector jobs, 36, 84, 86, 87, 93 feminist movements of the 1970s, 28, 35 feminist welfare state scholars, 21, 22, 33, 36 fertility rates, 122, 129, 134, 139; of college-educated women, 126–127 full-time dual-earner families, 2, 34, 78, 99 full-time work, 33–35, 34, 50, 50–51, 72, 92–93, 139 gender-based leave penalties, 9 gendered divisions of employment in progressive states, 96 gender-empowered states, 4–5, 5, 9, 25, 57, 66, 73, 76, 82, 132–133, 139; female legislative representatives in, 60–61;

lack of child-care resources in, 2–3, 78, 78–79, 128; linking sociodemographic factors to, 91–97, 92, 94; and political, economic, and religious factors, 129; progressive family-friendly policies in, 55–57, 130–131; recommendations for, 142–143; sociodemographic qualities of, 93–95, 94; state-funded child care in, 111, 111–112. See also California gender norms, 14, 21–23, 121–127, 144; structural barriers as linked to, 127, 129, 129 gender wage gap, 64, 64–65 Georgia, 15 Germany, 13 Gornick, Janet, 14, 32, 145n5 gray-market child care, 140–141 gross domestic product (GDP), 4, 135, 141 guaranteed return to work, 13 Harris, Kamala, 55 Hawaii, 5, 20, 82, 98, 100 Head Start program, 3, 9, 15, 124, 133, 139, 147n1 (chap. 5); as allocated at state level, 109–111, 110; recommendations for maximizing enrollment in, 142; state structuring of, 103 home ownership factor, 23, 83, 85, 86, 94, 95, 147n7; and property values, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 human capital of mothers, 31, 61, 73–75, 140–143; structural barriers and, 127– 128; waste of, in affluent states, 140–141 Idaho, 7, 39; as policy-void type, 80, 81, 82; poor gender-empowerment factor and child-care-regime factor in, 80 ideal child-care and gender-empowered states, 5, 5, 25, 44, 80, 81, 82, 98, 133. See also Washington, D.C. ideology: individualist, 12, 34, 106, 140; across states, 4, 19–20. See also liberal welfare state ideologies Illinois, 81 individualist ideology, 12, 34, 106, 140 infant and toddler care, 1, 71; requests for, by state, 43–44, 44, 52, 73, 78, 125 informal child care, 30–32, 136 in-home child-care centers, 1

Index | 167

institutional state contexts model, 34, 101–131; in California, 47, 56; and capabilities perspective, 7, 12, 22–24, 138–141, 139; and decision to stay at home, 38–39; gender norms as explanation for, 121–127; and Head Start program, 109–111, 110; linking market characteristics to family-friendly-policy and child-care indexes, 120–121; linking structural barriers to employment and gender norms to family-friendly-policy and child-care indexes, 127–129; and part-time employment, 36; and pre-K education services, 103–109, 104, 107, 111, 111–112; push and pull factors in, 117–120, 129; and racial, political, economic, and religious characteristics, 84–86, 85; regression models tested by, 91, 92; and sociodemographic qualities of states, 93; state and federal funding for child-care, 102–109, 104, 107, 111, 111–112; theory of, 23, 23–25; typology of state regimes and, 83; update of, 138–141; value-neutral reinterpretation of, 75; and women legislators’ influence, 57, 72 insurance, leave as tied to, 17, 43, 56 Italy, 122 job markets, 100 job skills, 43 Johnson, Lyndon B., 15 kindergarten, 45 labor market participation: middle-class mothers as forced out of, 22, 30; mothers of color as moved into, 22, 30; 1970s increase in, 28, 35. See also maternal employment laissez-faire economics, 63–64 Latino population, 3, 85, 86, 94, 95, 96, 99, 134, 147n7 left-leaning (blue) states: assumptions about, 32, 70; as better at facilitating maternal employment, 32, 93, 101. See also gender-empowered states legislation and politics, women in, 68–72, 69, 71, 74, 78; family-friendly policies

legislated by, 57; representation of, across states, 59–61, 60; as role models, 57 length of school day, 5, 45–48, 46, 71, 78, 145n4; in California, 1–2, 28; recommendations for, 142; states’ power to legislate, 41, 45, 50 liberal welfare state ideologies, 12–13, 58, 75, 105, 130, 135; Head Start and, 109– 111, 110; heterogeneous, 21, 25; overview of state approaches to policy, 14–19 lottery programs, 15 low-income mothers: as forced into labor market, 22, 30; informal child care used by, 30–32; lack of family-friendly workplace benefits for, 31–32 male-dominated professions, 9, 10, 99–100; construction and transport, 85, 86, 92, 134; opening, 142 market-based resources, 13, 15, 30, 103, 108, 130 marriage, class differences in, 6 married mothers, 6–7; in heterosexual marital unions, 7, 33; low employment of, in gender-progressive states, 3 Maryland, female-friendly political climate of, 59, 78, 79 Massachusetts: and Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, 17; and Small Necessities Leave Act, 20 maternal employment: and child-care and school-aged-care resources, 49–51, 50; by family policies, EPA charges, and female state legislators, 72, 72–73; in full-time work, 33–35, 34, 50, 50–51, 72, 92–93; gender empowerment and, 72, 72–73; in part-time work, 36–38, 37, 50, 72; precarity of, 28–29; rates, 2, 25, 26; state-to-state variations bin, 33–35, 34. See also labor market participation maternity leave in Germany, 13 men, caregiving roles and, 9, 51, 136, 142, 144 Meyers, Marcia, 14, 32–33, 145n5 Mid-Atlantic states: actual wages in, 65, 65; after-school care in, 47, 47; childcare-regime and gender-empowerment scores of, 81; child-care workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 66–67, 67;

168 | Index

Mid-Atlantic states (continued ) ­contributions of, to pre-K programs, 103; cost of child care in, 42, 42; cost of living in, 117, 118; as Democratic, urban, and secular, 89, 89–90, 90, 98, 133, 135; and economic health factor, 85, 88, 89; family leave in, 59; female-dominated professions in, 113; female legislative representatives in, 60, 60, 68; fertility rates in, 124, 124–125; gender-empowered regimes of, 78, 79, 81, 133–134; gender wage gap in, 64, 65; state-based EPA claims of, 62–63, 63 Middle Atlantic Central states, 8, 37; requests for infant and toddler care in, 44, 44 middle class, 3, 11, 32, 120–121, 130; dual-earner families in, 2, 11, 29, 97, 100, 101, 118, 133; marriage more likely among, 6; and mothers forced out of labor market, 22, 30, 41, 96 Midwest states, 3, 34, 99; length of school day in, 46, 46 military families, leave for, 58 Mormons, 36, 39, 124, 148n7 mortality, infant and maternal, 16, 19 mother-friendly child-care-regimes, 92 mothers of color, 6; as moved into labor market by state policies, 22, 96–97; parttime work as trap for, 36. See also African American population; racial issues Mountain states, 8, 37; actual wages in, 65, 65; births to employed mothers in, 125, 125; child-care workers in, 115, 115; as clustered with Pacific states, 74, 79; college degrees in, 67, 67; cost of child care in, 42, 42; cost of living in, 117, 118; and economic health factor, 85, 87–88, 88; female-dominated professions in, 114; female-friendly political climates of, 78, 79; female legislative representatives in, 60, 60, 68; fertility rates in, 124, 124; full-time work in, 33, 34, 51; genderempowered regimes of, 78, 79; gender wage gap in, 64, 64, 65; and Head Start program, 110; length of school day in, 46, 46; limited pre-K provisions in, 104, 108; Nevada as Democratic, urban,

and secular, 89, 89–90, 90; part-time employment in, 37, 37; per capita income in, 119, 119; poor child-care regimes of, 79, 79; religious composition of, 123, 123; requests for infant and toddler care in, 44, 44; and rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86–87, 87, 90, 91; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63; stay-at-home mothers in, 39, 40 multicollinearity, 94, 146n7 (chap. 2) National Conference of State Legislatures, 58 National School Lunch Program, 18 nation-states, 19, 57, 130; with higher numbers of women legislators, 57; three worlds of welfare among, 12–14. See also cross-national research Nebraska, 2, 3, 7, 11, 27, 100, 101; afterschool care in, 47–48; in child-care-­ quality rankings, 116; as child-careregime ideal type state, 44, 54, 74, 76, 81, 81; and Early Childhood Education Grant Program, 105; family leave in, 59; as liberal means-tested model, 105; poor female-friendly political climate of, 78, 79; tax and public school policies in, 50–51 need-based policies, 12, 15, 18, 136 “need” narratives, 145n1 (chap. 2) New England states, 8, 37; child-carequality rankings of, 116, 116; childcare-regime and gender-empowerment scores of, 81; child-care workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 66, 67, 126; cost of child care in, 42, 42; cost of living in, 117, 118; as Democratic, urban, and secular, 89, 89–90, 90, 91, 98, 133, 135; and economic health factor, 85, 87–88, 88, 89; family leave in, 59; femaledominated professions in, 113; female legislative representatives in, 59, 60, 68; fertility rates in, 124, 124; genderempowered regimes of, 78, 79, 81, 133; gender wage gap in, 64, 64; and Head Start program, 110; length of school day in, 46, 46; part-time employment in, 37,

Index | 169

37; preschool education services in, 108; and rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86, 86–87, 87; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63 New York, 19; as universalist social-­ democratic model, 105 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 18 nonprofessional employment factor, 85, 86–87, 87, 92 Nordic countries, 13 Office of Head Start, 15 Oklahoma, 15–16 old-age benefits, 12 Oregon, 37–38 Orloff, Ann Shola, 14 Pacific states, 8, 37; actual wages in, 65, 65; after-school care in, 47, 47, 109; births to employed mothers in, 125, 125; childcare workers in, 115, 115; as clustered with Mountain states, 74, 79; college degrees in, 67, 67, 126; contributions of, to pre-K programs, 104; cost of living in, 117, 118; as Democratic, urban, and secular, 89, 89–90, 90, 91; and economic health factor, 85, 88, 89; family leave in, 59; female-dominated professions in, 114; female legislative representatives in, 59, 60, 60, 68; fertility rates in, 124, 124; full-time work in, 33, 34, 51; gender-empowered regimes of, 78, 79, 81, 97, 133; gender wage gap in, 64, 64; and Head Start program, 110; length of school day in, 46, 46; low rates of full-time married mothers’ employment in, 51; part-time employment in, 37, 37; poor child-care regimes of, 79, 79; pre-K in, 109; religious composition of, 123, 123; requests for infant and toddler care in, 43–44, 44; and rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86–87, 87; stay-at-home mothers in, 39, 40 Paid Family and Medical Leave Act (Massachusetts), 17 Paid Family Leave Act (California), 17, 20

parental leave: at federal level, 57; lack of access to, 146n1; paid, 9, 17, 19–22, 29, 31, 43, 55, 58, 69, 71; policy solutions for, 9; sick leave transferred to, 58; at state level, 57. See also family leave part-time work, 37, 50, 72; benefits and pitfalls of, 35–37; negative career consequences of, 35; state-to-state variation in, 37–38; as way to avoid paying for workers’ benefits, 36 path-dependency, 17 Peck, Laura, 32 per capita income, 118–120, 119, 148n5 Perkins, Frances, 12 pink-collar jobs. See female-dominated professions Piven, Frances Fox, 22, 96 policy clusters, 4–5, 5, 25, 76, 85, 85–89, 86, 92; from two to four types, 80–83, 81, 82 policy gaps, 29–33 policy recommendations, 9, 132–144; for child-care provisions, 133; directions for future research, 141–142; for paid parental leave policies, 139–140; solutions to better integrate mothers into work, 142–144; for synchronized work and school schedules, 133 policy-void states, 5, 5, 25, 68, 80, 81, 82, 82, 98, 133; limited pre-K provisions in, 104–105, 108. See also Idaho political composition of states, 3, 9, 23. See also conservative (red) states; left-leaning (blue) states post–World War II employment gap, 35 poverty: and Head Start, 109–111, 110; married-couple, 3, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99, 117, 121, 130, 134, 140, 143 precarity of maternal employment, 28–29, 36 pre-K programs, 3, 9, 15, 19, 103–109, 104, 111, 111–112, 129, 135–136, 139, 140 preschool education services, 15, 105–109, 107, 112 presidential voting across states, 7, 9, 19–20, 66, 95–96, 122, 130 price parity, 117, 117–118; per capita income adjusted for, 118–120, 119, 134

170 | Index

professional and managerial positions: and EPA coverage, 146n4; and gender empowerment, 95, 98, 134; in hypotheticals, 11, 101; and maternal employment, 96, 99, 112; in model of institutional state contexts, 23, 83, 84, 98; and rural, politically and religiously conservative states, 86, 87 progressive family-friendly policies, 55–57, 130–131 progressive states. See gender-empowered states property values, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 134 public assistance, households receiving, 94, 94 purchasing power, 3, 96–97, 117–121, 128, 130, 133, 138–140, 139, 148n5 racial issues: deserving and undeserving mothers, 22, 30; mothers of color as moved into employment, 22, 30, 96–97 racial profiles of states, 3, 23, 23, 147n7 rational-choice theories, 73, 91, 135; and costs of child care, 11–12, 95; and earnings versus purchasing power, 118, 121; economic deprivation as driving women to work, 34, 99–100, 117–121, 140; EPA legislation enforcement and, 61; gender role reasons for dropping out of workforce, 21–22, 39; laissez-faire economics and, 63–64; limitations of, 34–35, 138, 140; part-time employment and, 36, 38; in states with male-dominated employment, 95 red and blue state model, 3, 7, 56, 90, 122. See also conservative (red) states; leftleaning (blue) states Red Families v. Blue Families (Cahn and Carbone), 122 reduction in work time, 2, 19, 22, 28–29; reasons for, 38–39 regression results, 91; disaggregated state demographics, 93–94, 94, 96, 133, 134; for family-friendly legislative and mother-friendly child-care-regime fac­ tors, 92; for gender and religious norms of state, 129, 134; linking market char­ acteristics to family-friendly-policy and

child-care indexes, 120–121, 121; for market characteristics of state, 111, 134; for married mothers’ employment patterns, 50; for state child-care support, 111 reliability analysis, 9, 48, 91 religious composition of states, 3, 9, 23, 86, 86–87; Christians, 123, 123–124, 127, 128, 129, 134, 148n7; and church-based child-care facilities, 123, 130; fertility rates and, 122–127, 124, 125; and parttime employment, 36–37, 51; policy-void states, 82 representational quotas, 57 Republican voting factor, 85, 94, 134 restricted work, 1, 9, 11–12, 19, 21, 22, 31–33, 136–137; recommendations for, 143–144. See also part-time work restricting work, recommendations for, 142 Rhode Island: five forms of family leave in, 59; paid family and medical leave in, 19 Romney, Mitt, 96–97 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 12 rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional employment factor, 85, 86–87, 87, 90, 92, 98 rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 86, 86, 90, 92, 98 Sainsbury, Diane, 14 sales jobs, 85, 94, 95, 97, 134 Scarborough, William, 142 school-aged care, 1–2, 40–42; state-to-state differences in, 45–48, 49. See also afterschool care second incomes. See dual-earner families “second shift” of housework, 14, 29 Sen, Amartya, 24, 138 service-sector jobs, 84 sick and vacation leave used for postpartum care demands, 30–31, 58 single mothers, 6 small necessities laws, 20, 58 Small Necessities Leave Act (Massachusetts), 20 social-democratic welfare states, 12, 13, 57, 75, 131, 135, 137 Social Security Act, 12 sociodemographic profiles, 9, 18, 23–24, 36, 76, 83; factor analysis of, 84–91,

Index | 171

85–90, 86–90; and child-care and gender-empowerment regimes, 91–97, 92, 94 South Atlantic states, 8; after-school care in, 47, 47; and black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 87, 88; child-care-quality rankings of, 116, 116; child-care regimes of, 79, 79–80; childcare workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 67, 67; contributions of, to pre-K programs, 103; cost of child care in, 42, 42; cost of living in, 117, 118; and economic health factor, 85, 87–88, 88; femaledominated professions in, 113–114, 133; female legislative representatives in, 60, 60; full-time work in, 51; gender wage gap in, 64, 65; length of school day in, 46, 46; Maryland’s female-friendly political climate, 59, 78, 79; part-time employment in, 37, 37; pre-K in, 108; religious composition of, 123, 123; and rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86, 86–87, 87, 91; state-based EPA claims of, 62–63, 63. See also southern states; Washington, D.C. southern states, 4, 34, 36, 51; actual wages in, 65, 65; child-care regimes of, 81, 97–98; college-educated women in, 126–127; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63. See also South Atlantic states states: budgetary crises of, 18, 45–46, 50; descriptive overview of, 7–8, 27–53; as distinct political actors, 55–57; distribution of, by child-care-regime and gender-empowerment scores, 81–82, 82; in family leave index, 58, 58–59; four distinct policy clusters of, 4–5, 5, 25, 76, 85, 85–89, 86, 92, 98, 135; ideological fissures across, 4, 19–20; legislation of, beyond federal requirements, 17, 20, 62; need for state-level analysis, 19–21; political and cultural autonomy of, 4; power of, to legislate, 4, 19–20, 41, 45, 50, 102, 130; public child-care-support frameworks of, 100; regionality across, 7, 8; and requests for child care, 43–44, 44; resources and child-care provisions of, 102–109; and responsibility for K–12

education, 17–18; school-aged care in, 40–42; sociodemographic profiles of, 9, 18, 23–24, 36, 76, 83, 84–91, 85–90 Statewide Universal Full-Day Pre-­ Kindergarten (New York), 105 stay-at-home mothers, 40, 72, 139; as concentrated in Mountain and Pacific states, 51; state-to-state differences in, 38–39, 40 structural barriers, 9, 11, 39–40, 133, 142; linking employment and gender norms with family-friendly-policy and child-care indexes, 127–129; markets as incapable of removing, 128 Supreme Court decisions, 19 Sweden, 11, 122, 130, 137 teacher strikes, 18, 46, 52 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), 18 three worlds of welfare, 12–13, 21, 24, 57, 75, 105–106, 135; criticisms of, 13–14; U.S. differences from model of, 14, 137–138 time pressure and overwork, 29, 38, 143 time use surveys, 141 Title I (Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965), 18 toddler care, 1–2 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), 18 typology of U.S. welfare states, 76–100; employment and policy factors, 83–84; factor loadings of racial, economic, political, and religious measures, 83; heterogeneity of, 84–91, 85–90; individual outcomes, 141; linking sociodemographic factors to child-care and gender-­empow­ erment regimes, 91–97; two key types of U.S. welfare states, 2, 93; from two to four types, 80–83, 81, 82. See also United States; welfare states, U.S. United States: federalist system of, 18–19; and federal-level paid family leave, 22; gendered welfare states within, 22–23; heterogeneity of, 84–91, 85–90; laissezfaire economic structure of, 63–64; as liberal welfare state, 12–14, 58, 136;

172 | Index

United States (continued ) models for maternal employment in, 3, 100, 142; multiple liberal welfare types in, 14, 137; two key types of welfare states in, 3, 25, 58, 66, 76–78, 80, 93, 97, 101–102, 141. See also typology of U.S. welfare states “universal” policies, 15–17; policy gaps in, 29–33; and state child-care funding, 105 Universal Prekindergarten Program (UPK, New York), 105 unpaid leave, 16, 43, 56. See also Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) urban centers, 9; Democratic, urban, and secular states, 89, 89–90, 90, 92, 96, 98; as economic powerhouses, 84 U.S. Census Bureau data: on dual-earner families, 34; regional clusters in, 7, 8 U.S. Constitution, 17 U.S.-Mexico border states, 86 Utah, 36, 39 wages, 61, 69, 71; average rates in, 64–65, 65, 78; gender wage gap, 64, 64–65; parity of, 64, 133, 146n6 (chap. 3) Washington, D.C., 5, 7, 20, 82, 100; afterschool care in, 80, 82, 135; contributions of, to child care, 103; and Head Start program, 15; as ideal type site, 80, 81, 98, 103, 106; length of school day in, 82; maternal employment in, 16, 106; preschool education services in, 106–108 Washington state, 37–38 welfare state literature, 6, 11–26, 102; cross-national research, 25; gender as not considered in, 13–14; and need for state-level analysis, 19–21; and rationalchoice approach, 11–12, 21–22; and three worlds of welfare, 12–14, 21, 24, 75, 105–106, 135 welfare state–oriented model, 34 welfare states, U.S.: four types of, 4–5, 5, 7, 25, 76, 80–83, 81, 82, 85, 85–89, 86, 92, 98, 135; two key types of, 3, 25, 58, 66, 76–78, 80, 93, 97, 101–102, 141. See also typology of U.S. welfare states

West Coast states, 7, 33–34, 51, 81, 98, 118. See also California; Pacific states Western industrial nations, 13, 22 West North Central states, 8, 37, 73–74; after-school care in, 47, 47; births to employed mothers in, 125, 125, 126; child-care-quality rankings of, 116, 116; child-care regimes of, 73–74, 78, 79, 79, 81, 99; child-care workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 67, 67; contributions of, to pre-K programs, 104–105; cost of child care in, 42, 42, 51–52; cost of living in, 117, 118; and economic health factor, 85, 87–88, 88; female-­dominated professions in, 113, 133; female legislative representatives in, 59, 60, 60; fertility rates in, 124, 124; full-time work in, 33, 34, 51; in gender-empowerment measure, 78, 79; gender wage gap in, 64, 65; and Head Start program, 110, 133; length of school day in, 46, 46, 51–52; maternal employment in, 99; part-time employment in, 37, 37; per capita income in, 118, 119, 119–120; political climates of, 78, 79; pre-K in, 108–109; religious composition of, 123, 123; requests for infant and toddler care in, 43–44, 44, 52, 73, 78, 125; and rural, white, and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 86, 86, 90; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63, 63, 73; stay-at-home mothers in, 39, 40 West South Central states, 8, 37; and black and politically and religiously conservative factor, 85, 87, 88; child-care regimes of, 79, 79, 81; child-care workers in, 115, 115; college degrees in, 67, 67; cost of child care in, 51–52; and economic health factor, 85, 88, 88–89; femaledominated professions in, 113, 133; female legislative representatives in, 60, 60; fertility rates in, 124, 124; full-time work in, 33, 34, 51; gender wage gap in, 64, 65; and Head Start program, 110, 133; length of school day in, 46, 46, 51–52; part-time employment in, 37, 37; political climates of, 78, 79; preschool education services in, 108; religious

Index | 173

composition of, 123, 123; and rural, religious, and politically conservative and nonprofessional factor, 85, 86–87, 87, 90, 91; state-based EPA claims of, 62, 63; stay-at-home mothers in, 39, 40

white population, 85, 86, 86, 90, 92, 98 work-family conflict, 28, 35 workforce attachment, 3, 83–84, 96, 122, 127

Leah Ruppanner is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Codirector of the Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne. She is also a Fellow at the ARC Centre for Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course and an international collaborator in the Social Policy and Family Dynamics of Europe program at Stockholm University.