Interactions among gender norms: Evidence from US couples

Abstract A considerable body of work has shown that motherhood is accompanied by a reduction in labor market participation and hours of market work, while more recent findings indicate that women who earn more than their husbands tend to subsequently take actions that reduce their market income. Both patterns of behavior have been interpreted as women trying to conform to child‐rearing norms and to the prescription that the husband should be the main breadwinner. In this paper, we use panel data for US couples to re‐examine women's behavior when they become mothers and when they are the main breadwinner. We start by asking whether the arrival of a child affects women who are the main breadwinner and those who are not in the same way, and then turn to how mothers and childless women react when they are the main breadwinner. Our results are consistent with the breadwinner norm only affecting mothers, suggesting that the salience of gender norms may depend on the household's context, notably on whether or not children are present. Concerning the arrival of a child, we find that although the labor supply of women who earn more than their husbands initially responds to motherhood less than that of secondary earners, the two groups converge after 10 years. Moreover, women in the former category exhibit a disproportionately large increase in the share of housework they perform after becoming mothers. The latter results suggest that the presence of children pushes women to seek to compensate breaking a norm by adhering to another one.