A girl who attends a school with classmates whose mothers work is more likely to be in the workforce when she has a child herself than a girl who grows up in local circles where most mothers stay at home, Cornell researchers have found.
"Role models pull girls in different directions in adolescence, a period when preferences are formed, when they decide what to do in their life," said Eleonora Patacchini, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. "When they decide whether to return to work after having a child, they remember the mothers and fathers of their peers."
Women trail men in the workforce largely because of the "child penalty" - women leaving work upon having a child and not returning. Social norms and culture influence a girls' later decisions about participation in the work force; when she looked into precisely how, Patacchini, with doctoral student Giulia Olivero and Henrik Kleven, professor of economics at Princeton University, found that greater exposure to working moms at a very local level - the school - decreases the child penalty for girls. Meanwhile, exposure to working fathers increases the child penalty, a "striking" asymmetric effect, Patacchini said.
Girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers work are more likely to develop a gender-role ideal that reconciles career and motherhood, they conjecture, compared with girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers stay at home.
"These ideals and expectations, in turn, are likely to shape adult choices and outcomes," they wrote in "Child Penalties and Parental Role Models: Classroom Exposure Effects," which appeared in the National Bureau of Economic Research's Working Paper Series in September.
For the study, they used National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health data, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Designed to be nationally representative of students in grades 7-12 in the U.S., the study includes data on 90,000 U.S. teens from 144 schools, linking them to their middle and high school peers and following them into adulthood as they become parents.
"The questions allow us to reconstruct their careers retrospectively," Patacchini said, "and to control for a set of factors including their parental background and family of origin, most notably whether their own mom was working or their father was working."
When studying society's impact on an individual, Patacchini said, it's important to distinguish the channel of "vertical" influence from parent to child from the "horizontal" channel of influence from community to child.
"Not many papers look at the horizontal channels, whether you are exposed to, in this case, the same role models within the school," she said. "Not your own mom, but the moms of your friends."
Girls in the top third of exposure to working mothers other than their own, the researchers found, have smaller child penalties in adulthood than girls in the bottom third - a difference of almost 11 percentage points. (For men, in contrast, "having a child is a non-event… regardless of their exposure to working mothers during middle and high school," the researchers wrote.)
Exposure to working fathers goes in the opposite direction for girls, they found, with girls in the top third, most exposure to working fathers having larger child penalties than girls in the bottom third.
"It's as if girls see fathers working to mean, 'It's OK for you to be home,'" Patacchini said.
But the negative effect of working fathers on girls is weaker than the positive effect of working mothers - 8 percentage points between most and least.
The paper supports the idea that social norms and culture shape child penalties and therefore gender equality, Patacchini said, "but changing norms is complicated."
Existing policies meant to encourage mothers to stay in the workforce, such as parental leave and child care support, have had small effects on child penalties, she said. This study suggests that campaigns or messaging to students - showcasing working mothers as role models - might make more of a difference, reaching girls when their preferences are forming.
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
