Variation in Women's Economic Tradeoffs and Risk Preferences

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。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职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在新墨西哥大学梅丽莎·埃默里·汤普森博士的赞助下，这一博士后奖学金奖项支持一位早期职业科学家，研究女性职业差异对她们家庭经济和生理状态的影响，以及她们和她们孩子的健康。美国和世界各地的大多数女性从事的职业比男性更适合育儿，而且经济风险也比男性低。然而，一些妇女确实选择了既不适合育儿也不符合低风险的职业，但人们对是什么导致妇女选择这些类型的职业以及对妇女及其家庭的后果了解甚少。为了更好地理解为什么一些女性选择这些类型的职业，而另一些女性选择更传统的职业，该项目将对主要职业代表这一范围的女性进行一项研究。该项目的目标是了解不同妇女职业可能产生的积极和消极结果，以便了解妇女在不同文化中的经济选择。在这样做的同时，还将探索可能缓冲妇女及其子女免受更多负面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。它还将通过雇用和培训来自代表性不足社区的妇女从事社会和以实验室为基础的科学来促进这种扩张。性别分工是人类社会的一个标志，要求男性和女性在生产性工作和育儿之间权衡个人时间和精力的分配。虽然对这些活动中的性别差异的进化解释植根于男性和女性不同的生殖角色，这表明女性的灵活性低于男性，但经验证据表明，女性的行为存在很大的变异性。该项目将突出妇女在社会中生产性工作和风险偏好的可变性，在这个社会中，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。我们将使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育儿策略的成本和收益。这个项目的范围将通过三个具体的方式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)结果将挑战进化论中关于人类性别分工的普遍概念，并以表现出跨文化罕见生存和育儿行为的女性为例进行研究；2)行为的生理相关性将阐明女性生产策略和风险偏好的功能；3)女性生产策略和风险偏好的经济和健康结果将梳理这些行为的成本和收益，并决定女性做出的权衡的性质。更广泛的目标是为一个更全面的人类性别分工的社会生态学模型做出贡献，该模型突出了女性在家庭和社会角色中权衡的多样性。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.