CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024

Friday, December 8th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)

Racial-Ethnic Stratification in Work-Family Strategies among Black, Hispanic, and White Couples

Léa Pessin

Assistant Professor of Sociology, ENSAE-CREST

This presentation builds on work-family scholarship and intersectional frameworks to document racial-ethnic variation in couples’ work-family strategies, i.e., the strategies couples deploy to respond to their work and family demands.

Existing research on the division of labor finds traditional gender norms continue to dictate how couples share paid and unpaid work in the United States. Yet, this narrative relies primarily on the structural conditions and cultural expectations of white and middle-class women. Black and Hispanic women and men face different labor market opportunities and hold different cultural expectations about gendered responsibilities in families.

We use the 2017-2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu) and multi-group latent-class analysis to determine typical work-family strategies for paid work, housework, and carework among U.S. different-sex couples, as well as how the prevalence of these strategies vary across racially homogamous Black, Hispanic, and white couples.

Results illustrate the variety of work-family strategies employed by different-sex Black, Hispanic, and white couples, with some following gender traditional norms, and others sharing their domestic load more equitably. Compositional differences between couples explain little of the racial-ethnic differences in work-family strategies prevalence, though parenthood emerges as an important stratifying mechanism of how couples spend their time.

This work provides support for an intersectional, couple-level approach to explaining how racialized couples spend time in work and family domains.

Please Register Here. Thank You