The Impact of Fundamentalism on Women's Socioeconomic Attainment

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This is a study of the influence of religious affiliation on the socioeconomic attainment of women. Women's ideological beliefs about appropriate family roles for mothers and fathers and the effects of nonmaternal child care are crucial determinants of their labor market behavior. However, little research has attended to the institutional sources of those beliefs. Conservative religious institutions, in particular, promote belief systems that proscribe mothers' market behavior and support a traditional family structure in which mothers concentrate on childrearing to the exclusion of other pursuits. These fundamentalist religious institutions have been gaining rather than losing strength during the period in which mothers' labor force participation has risen dramatically in the United States overall. This research project focuses on the direct and indirect impacts of fundamentalist religious ideologies and institutional participation on mothers' labor force participation and wage attainment. This project seeks to answer several crucial questions in three general areas: (1) Does fundamentalist religiosity matter for women's labor force participation and wage attainment? Does gender ideology mediate the impact of religious participation on market outcomes, or does religious participation (and the social networks it spawns) affect behavior irrespective of individuals' gender ideology? (2) How does the life-cycle timing of fundamentalist activity affect adult behavior? Do family-of-origin religious beliefs and practices have lingering effects (perhaps through the failure to acquire marketable skills via higher education) or are current beliefs and practices most compelling? (3) How precisely does fundamentalism affect women's wages - indirectly through its effects on fertility, early family formation, and the acquisition of education or directly through its effects on the amount, gender type, and intensity of employment following motherhood? These questions will be investigated with a national longitudinal sample (The National Survey of Families and Households) to determine the strength and direction of effects of both childhood and adult fundamentalist activity on the acquisition and use of marketable skills among American women. Structural equation modeling using multiple group comparisons will be used to test the influence of fundamentalist denominational affiliation, religious beliefs, and religious activities on the likelihood of labor force participation, and the wages obtained from participation, for married and unmarried women. Because the gender wage gap has been stubbornly persistent, while the obligations of mothers to financially support their children have been increasing over time, debates about the social rather than economic causes of mothers' lower wages continue to be important. In particular, this research can shed light on the extent to which mothers' failure to achieve wages on par with fathers can be attributed to the influence of religious institutions on women's decisions to prioritize mothering over preparation for and engagement in market work. This research also addresses fundamental theoretical questions in sociology about the autonomous power of cultural ideology to mold behavior in the face of structural economic pressures to behave otherwise.