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PERHAPS FEW READERS will be surprised to hear that highly educated women are marrying later and having children later than was the case a generation ago. The reasons are varied and might include: waiting until one gets a PhD, or secures a faculty job, or earns tenure, or makes partner. Meanwhile, less-educated women, on average, are also marrying later than they did a few decades ago, yet they bear children earlier and more often than their better-schooled peers — a gap that is widening. At the same time, the earnings differential between the two groups is also widening, as is the “opportunities gap” for children born to mothers under these two very different circumstances.
The fact that female graduate students, junior faculty, or young professionals might delay marriage and childbearing hardly seems newsworthy and is nothing to get worked up over, right? Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood, an economist, begs to differ.
“Although decisions about marriage and fertility are among the most personal decisions people make, they nevertheless have profound consequences for our economy and society,” says Ellwood, who has explored this issue with fellow Kennedy School professor Christopher Jencks, former Kennedy School researcher Ty Wilde, and Lily Batchelder MPP 1999. When all these individual decisions are added up, Ellwood contends, they create a consistent pattern with far-reaching consequences that bear on the well-being of American families and the future of this nation’s workforce.
For Ellwood, the recent findings have been personally gratifying, as they provide at least partial answers to questions about the roots of poverty and social inequity that he’s been grappling with for decades. A faculty member at the Kennedy School since 1980 — save for the years he spent on leave as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1993 to 1995) — Ellwood has devoted much of that time to the study of low-income issues. In recent years, he’s narrowed his focus to changes in family structure, changes in marriage and fertility patterns, and the effects of these changes on the United States.
According to Ellwood, a significant portion of the growth in poverty can be traced to the spread of single-parent households. In 1964, 30 percent of the families officially labeled as “poor” were headed by a single mother; since the late-1970s, that figure has grown to 60 percent. These families tend to be poor because they have just one potential earner, the mother, who rarely commands high wages and finds it difficult to work long hours. “If you’re concerned about poverty, you have to be concerned about single-parent families,” asserts Mary Jo Bane, a Kennedy School professor who has collaborated with Ellwood on various projects, including their 1994 book, Welfare Realities.
As for how this trend ties into the aforementioned “mommy gap,” it’s really quite simple: Women are getting married later today, regardless of their education, but only the more educated ones are having children later. As a result, more children are born to unmarried mothers and thus raised in lone-parent households. These nonmarital births, moreover, have grown faster among less-educated women.
Although this explanation may seem obvious in hindsight, social scientists and economists have struggled for years, trying to understand the dramatic rise in single-parent families. Indeed, Ellwood and Jencks write in “The Uneven Spread of Single Parent Families in the United States. What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?”: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the main contribution of empirical social science to our understanding of family change has been to show that nothing caused it. Yet despite the absence of an identifiable culprit or a smoking gun, families did change.”
There had to be some explanation for the spread of single-parent families, notes Jencks, “and it surely wasn’t sunspots.” So what was it? One puzzle researchers were trying to solve was this: From a classical economics point of view, you’d expect more poor people to be married than rich people, simply because they couldn’t afford two residences, whereas rich people can afford to live wherever they want. “What you see is the opposite,” Jencks says. “Poor people, who can’t afford to become single parents, become single parents more often than rich people, who can afford to become single parents.” The rich, he adds, are more likely to get married and stay married longer — a difference that has expanded over time.
Ellwood revisited this problem many times, approaching it from different perspectives, without finding the solution. Although he and Bane had shown in previous research that the standard explanations were not adequate, he found it frustrating that he could not provide a satisfactory answer himself. His latest attempt with Jencks has begun to generate answers, he says, “mainly because we posed the questions differently.” Instead of asking why there are more single-parent families, they looked at patterns of marriage and fertility among women — paying particular attention to how these differences varied with education. “We suddenly realized we had something different to explain,” Ellwood adds. “If we could understand why less-educated women were postponing marriage but not childbearing and why more-educated women were postponing marriage and childbearing, then we’d have an explanation for this phenomenon.”
Their main contribution was twofold, says Bane: “By separating the question of marriage from the question of having babies, they revealed an increasing disconnect between the two. The second thing they did was to focus on the timing of marriage and fertility.”
THE KEY TO ELLWOOD AND JENCKS'S INSIGHT came from addressing the fertility decision before taking up the marriage decision. “People normally look at it the other way around, which is the traditional middle class idea — you marry and then have kids,” Ellwood explains. “Instead, we asked: When is it that people want to have children, and how does marriage fit into that?” In a sense, they assumed that the timing of fertility was more important than the timing of marriage, because if a woman knows she’s not going to have children for awhile, she can take her time in deciding who and when to marry. The timing of childbearing, Ellwood and Jencks proposed, “is driven primarily by female job opportunities or the lack thereof.”
Ellwood confirmed this hypothesis in a 2004 paper with Wilde and Batchelder (“The Mommy Track Divides”), which focuses primarily on the timing of the fertility decision and, to a lesser extent, on the marriage decision. Their analysis — which drew from a U.S. Department of Labor survey of roughly 10,000 men and women born in the late 1960s and early 1970s that’s been ongoing since 1979 — showed how a woman’s educational level influences her choices on family life. For women born between 1960 and 1964, only 20 percent of the college graduates had their first child by age 25. By contrast, 78 percent of those who never finished high school had a child by age 25. For women born 20 years earlier, the timing of childbearing for high school dropouts remained similar, but nearly half of the college graduates had children by age 25. Work habits have shifted as well: In 1968, less than 25 percent of mothers with children under five were working, whereas two-thirds of such mothers work today. And even more of these women work as their children get older.
Several things have changed since the early 1960s to account for this, Ellwood explains. First came the “sexual revolution,” which meant “good girls and boys no longer had to wait until marriage to have sex.” Having sex before marriage was not new, of course, but sexual mores had changed: Society basically became more tolerant of premarital sex and cohabitation. Second, new contraceptive technologies, such as “the pill,” gave women far more control over their own fertility than they had with previous forms of contraception, such as condoms, which were less reliable in addition to granting more control to men. Third, the women’s movement led to the creation of new opportunities in the labor market, making it both common and acceptable for mothers to pursue careers. Also, stagnating wages for men may have encouraged more married women to join the labor force.
Ironically, says Ellwood, “a set of social changes in the 1960s may have had the effect of making economic factors far more important in guiding decisions about marriage and fertility.” Highly skilled women pay a steep price for having kids, the study found, whereas there was no discernible career penalty on the fathers of these same children. That may change in time, as fathers assume greater parenting roles, Ellwood notes, but for now the consequences of childbearing fall much more heavily on women than on men.
Women’s wages over time tend to flatten once they have a baby. Women with the most education may earn $125,000 more over the course of their careers by waiting until 30, rather than 20, to have their first child. By choosing not to have children at all, they could have earned an additional $280,000.
For low-skilled women, who don’t have lucrative jobs on the line, there is less incentive to defer childbearing. “If you’re on an upward trajectory, the longer you wait, the better,” says Jencks. “But if you’re not on an upward trajectory, it doesn’t much matter.”
Meanwhile, the gap between these two groups of women is growing, mainly because college-educated women now spend more of their life working and because the earnings differential between low- and high-skilled women is also widening.
Ellwood finds it interesting that he started off thinking about single-parent families, which led him to look at women at the low end of the economic scale. “What was happening to these low-skilled women seemed unconnected to women at the top,” he says. “It turns out they are both reacting to the same economic forces, but these economic forces, predictably, lead to very different behaviors at the top and at the bottom.”
Although less-educated women are not delaying parenthood significantly, they
are marrying later, according to Ellwood and Jencks, “because their potential spouses have fared so badly in the labor market.” Many of the men these women are apt to choose among either have low-paying jobs or are unemployed, making marriage an unattractive proposition. Consequently, there has been a rapid rise in the number of poorly educated women having children out of wedlock. These children — born, by and large, to young, unmarried women earning little money — are among the most disadvantaged in the nation, Ellwood says.
At the other extreme, the “Mommy Track” paper claims, “children born to highly skilled women almost always enter the home of a married couple in their peak earning years.” As a result, the potential differences in childhood outcomes are substantial. A huge divide is forming,” says Ellwood, “which will pose questions of cohesion and challenge the success of the nation as a whole.”
THAT'S THE MOST PERNICIOUS aspect of the “mommy gap,” according to Bane, “because it is leading to a growing gap between the children of these women.” Our society is already unequal in terms of economic and educational privileges, she notes. “David’s work suggests that inequality might be exacerbated by this demographic pattern” — i.e., professional women waiting to have children until they are on firmer financial footing.
Since the least-educated women are reproducing above replacement levels (2.6 births on average), while the most-educated women are reproducing below replacement levels (1.6 births on average), our future workforce will draw increasingly on less-educated people. The economic impacts are hard to gauge, Ellwood notes. “We’ll either look to immigrants as a source of new workers or adapt to a different world.”
A rapid jump in immigration would, of course, raise its own set of problems, Ellwood claims. Social tensions could rise. Furthermore, policies promoting immigration may be politically unfeasible now that the events of September 11 have placed immigration under sharper scrutiny. If immigration policies become more restrictive, as appears to be the case, labor force growth would be even slower.
The decline in the workforce — aggravated by a nationwide decline in fertility that’s linked, in turn, to the trends outlined above — could not have come at a worse time, Ellwood says, “since everyone now believes we need a more highly skilled workforce to compete internationally.”
The stakes are high, he contends. “Given the changing nature of fertility, what happens to children from less-advantaged settings will have a powerful effect on the overall economic success of the nation.” Taking steps to address that is not only the right thing to do but also an essential investment, especially in a marketplace increasingly dominated by global competition.
IT'S A DIFFICULT PROBLEM to address since it stems from intensely personal decisions about whether and when to have children. Yet collectively these decisions shape the composition of the nation’s labor force. The situation may worsen as financial pressures prompt educated women to postpone childbirth even later, possibly to the point where they can no longer bear children. Fertility would then dip further, especially at the end where the most skilled workers are likely to emerge.
Finding policy answers will not be easy. The U.S. government has traditionally done little in this area, perhaps out of reluctance to intrude on private matters like fertility. Governments normally intervene only when the population declines, but the U.S. population is currently stable (with overall fertility having dropped to a replacement level of about 2.0 births per woman). Policies aimed at encouraging highly educated women (who are reproducing below replacement levels) to have more children are “nonstarters,” says Jencks, as they would smack of racism. On the other hand, better parental leave programs, the availability of high-quality child-care, and more flexible career options would surely help ease the burden on all working mothers, as would tax credits, child-care subsidies, and other policies aimed at assisting families in general.
Some countries in Western Europe, and Scandinavia in particular, offer more generous parental leave benefits, but no country that Ellwood, Jencks, or Bane is aware of yet has figured out the best way to enable women to have fulfilling careers and be good mothers at the same time. “In Japan, many women are finding they can’t do both,” says Bane. “The result has been a marked drop in fertility (down to 1.4 children per women), which is a disaster.” Over time that means a shrinking workforce will need to support a growing elderly population.
THERE SURELY ARE THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE to make the workplace more family-friendly, Ellwood suggests, through more flexible hours and better child-care. “What is far less clear is whether these policies will substantially alter fertility patterns and childbearing behavior.” If history is any guide, he adds, “there is not a lot of evidence that we’ve ever been successful at changing behavior with modest public policies.”
Perhaps that’s because the issues are more complicated than they might seem at first glance. Given that mothers pursuing professional careers are often expected to work an unrealistic number of hours, is it fair to penalize them for spending less time at work? “In the abstract, you might say no,” Jencks submits. “But if you ask somebody who has decided not to have kids to be taxed so that they can support other people having kids, that doesn’t sound fair either.”
Similarly, it makes sense to encourage low-skilled women to defer childbearing, at least until they finish high school. But how long should they wait? “Twenty-two is certainly better than 18, but is 28 better than 22?” Jencks asks. If childbearing is postponed too long, women from all economic strata will run up against the biological clock.
The trick then is to create economic opportunities that would increase the benefits of delay, without encouraging women to delay indefinitely. Generating those opportunities, moreover, is easier said than done. “We’ve been tearing our hair out over these issues for years,” Jencks admits.
For now, about the best he and Ellwood can suggest is a strong dose of realism. “For those who want to alter family structure, social science offers only one bit of advice: Treat anyone who claims to know how to do this with a high degree of skepticism.”
With the work of Ellwood and his colleagues, the goals are starting to become clearer even if the requisite policy steps are not fully mapped out. For starters, say the researchers, policymakers should begin to enhance the job prospects and education for lower-skilled men and women, as well as for their children, while also reducing the economic penalties on highly skilled women who choose to have children.
“We don’t know how to get to the top of the mountain,” Ellwood concedes, “but we know which way is uphill.” An avid hiker himself, he believes it’s high time this nation started that climb.
Steve Nadis is a writer living in Cambridge.
Additional resource:
The Spread of Single-Parent Families in the United States since 1960
By David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks
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