On the heels my post below on work/life, gender, and families, this just in: Council on Contemporary Families co-chair Steve Mintz sent me abstracts from the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Families. Check out the following three tidbits. Now, why can’t we get more of this in the popular media convo about what’s really going on?

Title: College Women’s Plans for Different Types of Egalitarian Marriages (Francine M. Deutsch, Amy P. Kokot, and Katherine S. Binder)

This study examined college women’s plans for egalitarian marriages. One hundred and forty-four heterosexual undergraduate women completed surveys about their preferences for different life scenarios and their attitudes about work and family life. The pattern of their preferences showed a distinction between home-centered, balanced, and job-centered egalitarian families. Regressions showed that gender ideology, ideas about parenting and motherhood, career orientation, and family dynamics were associated differentially with the three types of egalitarian families, which reflected the different values that underlay the pursuit of each. The results also cast doubt on whether outsourcing is truly an egalitarian path. Outsourcing domestic labor may simply be a means for women to pursue careers without achieving real equality in families.

Title: Marriage and the Motherhood Wage Penalty Among African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites (Rebecca Glauber)

This study draws on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 5,929) to analyze the moderating effects of race and marriage on the motherhood wage penalty. Fixed-effects models reveal that for Hispanic women, motherhood is not associated with a wage penalty. For African Americans, only married mothers with more than two children pay a wage penalty. For Whites, all married mothers pay a wage penalty, as do all never-married mothers and divorced mothers with one or two children. These findings imply that racial differences in the motherhood wage penalty persist even for women with similar marital statuses, and they suggest that patterns of racial stratification shape women’s family experiences and labor market outcomes.

Title: Parental Childrearing Attitudes as Correlates of Father Involvement During Infancy (Bridget M. Gaertner, Tracy L. Spinrad, Nancy Eisenberg, and Karissa A. Greving)

Using daily diary data to document involvement with infants at 6 – 8 months of age (n = 142) and 6 months later (n = 95), we examined relations between reported childrearing attitudes and resident fathers’ relative (as compared to mothers’) involvement with children. Fathers’ authoritarian views related negatively to their relative involvement on weekdays, and this relation held over time for caregiving and playing activities. Mothers’ protective attitudes had concurrent negative associations with fathers’ relative weekend involvement. Findings suggest that fathers’ authoritarian and mothers’ protective attitudes relate to how parenting responsibilities are shared within families and may be detrimental to how much fathers become, or choose to become, directly involved in the care of their infants in comparison to mothers.