Variation in Women's Economic Tradeoffs and Risk Preferences

该奖项是美国国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后进行独立研究。美国国家科学基金会寻求促进科学界各阶层的科学家，包括那些未被充分代表的群体的科学家，参与其研究项目和活动；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的一个重要的专业发展阶段。每个博士后必须解决各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在新墨西哥大学的梅丽莎·埃默里·汤普森博士的赞助下，这个博士后奖学金奖支持一位早期职业科学家调查女性职业差异对家庭经济和生理状态的影响，以及她们自己和孩子的健康。在美国和世界各地，大多数女性从事的职业比男性的职业更适合照顾孩子，而且经济风险也比男性的职业小。然而，有些女性确实选择了既不适合照顾孩子也不风险低的职业，但人们对导致女性选择这些职业的原因以及对女性及其家庭的影响知之甚少。为了更好地理解为什么有些女性选择这些类型的职业，而另一些则选择更传统的职业，这个项目将对主要职业代表这一范围的女性进行研究。该项目的目标是了解不同女性职业可能产生的积极和消极结果，以了解不同文化背景下女性的经济选择。在这样做的过程中，还将探讨可能使妇女及其子女免受更多消极潜在后果影响的因素。随着妇女在家庭、地方和全球经济中的作用不断扩大，该项目的成果将至关重要。它还将通过在社会科学和实验室科学领域雇用和培训来自代表性不足社区的妇女来促进这种扩大。性别分工是人类社会的一个标志，它要求男性和女性在生产工作和照顾孩子之间权衡个人的时间和精力分配。虽然对这些活动的性别差异的进化解释植根于男性和女性的不同生殖角色，表明女性的灵活性不如男性，但经验证据表明女性的行为有很大的可变性。该项目将强调妇女在生产性工作和风险偏好方面的可变性，在一个社会中，妇女表现出更多的职业可变性，并从事重大的冒险经济行为。我们将采用稳健的个体间和个体内研究设计，采用混合数据收集方法，以表征行为和生理灵活性以及采用特定工作和儿童保育策略的成本和收益。本项目的范围将在三个具体方面为关于女性权衡变异的进化重要性的理论和知识做出贡献：1)研究结果将挑战关于人类性别劳动分工的进化论中普遍存在的概念，研究对象是跨文化表现出罕见生存和养育行为的女性；2)行为的生理相关因素将揭示女性生产策略和风险偏好的功能；3)妇女生产策略和风险偏好的经济和健康结果将梳理出这些行为的成本和收益，并决定妇女所作权衡的性质。更广泛的目标是促进人类性别分工的更全面的社会生态模型，突出妇女在其家庭和社会角色中权衡的可变性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Melissa Emery Thompson at the University of New Mexico, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the effects of differences in women's occupations on their household economies and physiological states, as well as the heath of themselves and their children. Most women in the United States and around the world engage in occupations that are more compatible with childcare than men's occupations and also that are less economically risky than men's occupations. However, some women do choose occupations that are neither compatible with childcare nor low risk, but very little is understood about what leads women to choose those types of occupations and what the outcomes are for women and their families. In order to better understand why some women choose these types of occupations and others choose more traditional ones, this project will conduct a study with women whose primary occupations represent this range. The goal of the project is to learn about potential positive and negative outcomes that result from different women's occupations in order to understand women's economic choices across different cultures. In doing so, factors that may buffer women and their children against more negative potential outcomes will be explored as well. The results of this project will be critical as women's roles in the household, local, and global economy continue to expand. It will also contribute to that expansion by employing and training women from underrepresented communities in social and lab-based sciences.The sexual division of labor is a hallmark of human societies that requires men and women to trade off allocation of individual time and energy between productive work and childcare. While evolutionary explanations for sex differences in these activities are rooted in the different reproductive roles of males and females, suggesting less flexibility for women than for men, empirical evidence suggests a great deal of variability in women's behavior. This project will highlight variability in women's productive work and risk preferences within a society where women show considerably more occupational variability and engage in significant risk-taking economic behavior. We will use a robust between- and within-individuals study design that employs mixed data collection methods in order to characterize behavioral and physiological flexibility and the costs and benefits for employing particular work and childcare strategies. The scope of this project will contribute to theory and knowledge about the evolutionary importance of variation in women's tradeoffs in three specific ways: 1) Results will challenge a pervasive notion in evolutionary theory about the human sexual division of labor with a case study of women who exhibit cross-culturally rare subsistence and parenting behavior; 2) Physiological correlates of behavior will shed light on the function of women's productive strategies and risk preferences; 3) Economic and health outcomes of women's productive strategies and risk preferences will tease apart costs and benefits of these behaviors and determine the nature of tradeoffs made by women. The broader goal is to contribute to a more comprehensive socioecological model of the human sexual division of labor that foregrounds the variability of women's tradeoffs in their familial and societal roles.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.