Dads work harder after sons are born

Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collectio n

Friday, June 16, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

Study: Dads work harder after sons are born

by Eric Sorensen Seattle Times science reporter

Research by two University of Washington economists strongly suggests men
not only work longer hours after the birth of a child, but they work
harder still if that child is a son.

The researchers are stumped to explain why and have witnessed some
serious head-scratching from fellow economists as well.

"Their response has been, "I love my daughter as much as I love my son,'
" said Shelly Lundberg, a UW economics professor who has done the
research with fellow UW economist Elaina Rose.

Lundberg and Rose's findings do not suggest that hard-working fathers
love a son more than a daughter, said Lundberg, the study's principal
investigator. But they may reflect how spouses interpret their roles
differently depending on whether they have a son or daughter.

The researchers also found that the birth of a boy affected how much some
men earn.

Their findings, said Lundberg, challenge the notion that we are becoming
a gender-blind society.

"It's maybe a bit of a wake-up call that fatherhood of a son is something
different from fatherhood of a daughter," said Lundberg. "That's
something that's not in our day-to-day thinking about family life these
days."

Lundberg and Rose found that, on average, men work 122 hours more a year
after the birth of their first child if it is a boy. If the first child
is a girl, men work an average of 56 more hours per year.

The study is to be presented next week to the World Conference of the
European Association of Labor Economists/Society of Labor Economists in
Milan. It is also under review for publication in the Harvard
University-based Review of Economics and Statistics.

The results are based on data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income
Dynamics on more than 1,200 men surveyed from 1968 through 1993. The
study began with a group of families and over time grew to include
additional children and spouses.

The data is self-reported, introducing a possible bias, but Lundberg said
the researchers are extremely confident of their conclusion after running
their statistical analyses past economists in Hong Kong, the Netherlands
and across the United States.

Lundberg and Rose divided the data into two samples: men born in or
before 1950 and men born after 1950. In both cases, the effect of
children is similar on hours and wage rates. But the older men had a
bigger increase in wage rates if they fathered a boy, while the younger
men had a bigger increase in the number of hours worked after having a
boy.

"In both cases we're getting significant impacts from the gender of your
child," Lundberg said.

In some cultures, male children are more valued to the point where it is
possible to imagine fathers behaving differently, said Viktor Gecas, a
Washington State University sociologist who has done long-term studies of
married couples. Children also tend to associate more with the parent of
the same sex as they grow older, he said.

But even if American fathers prefer sons to daughters, it shouldn't
affect their work, Gecas said: "I don't think it makes sense. It doesn't
fit my conceptual scheme for how things should work."

Lundberg and Rose have explored several hypotheses to account for their
findings. They've asked whether fathers expect a son to be more expensive
but concluded the dads don't. They've wondered if fathers are worried a
son is less likely than a daughter to care for them in old age, but found
no evidence of that.

They are now exploring whether a son's birth causes a man to value
marriage and family more, prompting him to invest in the marriage by
working harder at the traditional role of breadwinner.

The researchers also found that male wages go up after the birth of a
child. Women's hours decrease, as do their wage rates, Lundberg said.

This comes in part because households tend to specialize after the
arrival of children. While both men and women tend to work when they
don't have children, men continue to work after a child arrives while
women tend to scale back.

What's unclear is why men should be paid more because they have children.
The "fatherhood premium" increases men's wages by about 4.5 percent every
time they father a child. The data was controlled for the age of the men:
the researchers compared men of similar ages and whether they were having
children or not.

The researchers plan to look at job changes and promotions to see if new
fathers are working harder and going to higher-pressure or better-paying
jobs.

"Maybe the bosses like the men with kids and give them a raise," said
Lundberg.

Lundberg and Rose's study is part of a larger $150,000 project funded by
the National Science Foundation looking at the effect of family roles on
wages and work hours. It's an old topic for women but unexamined among
men.

Looking at how couples specialized after the birth of a first child, they
started looking at factors like divorce and education levels. Then Rose
suggested they look at the gender of the children.

"We stumbled on to this one," Lundberg said.

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