7 Ways Young Women Combine or Decline Work, Marriage, and Kids

To anyone intent on telling young women that there is one ideal set of choices regarding work, marriage, and kids, there is something you should know: They aren’t listening. A study of a nationally representative sample of more than 5,000 women around the age of 30 documented seven key patterns of combining different kinds of work—or no work; marriage—or staying single; and kids—or no kids.

No one pattern dominated. The biggest group included just 20% of the women, and the smallest, 10%. That doesn’t mean that particular work and family situations didn’t matter. They did. Some were associated with less stress, greater earnings, and more freedom to make decisions.

Sociologists Adam M. Lippert of the University of Colorado at Denver and Sarah Damaske of Penn State University reported their findings in “Finding jobs, forming families, and stressing out? Work, family, and stress among young adult women in the United States,” published in the December 2019 issue of the journal Social Forces.

How the Study Was Conducted

Data were from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a nationally representative survey of adolescents. The participants were 5,070 women who were first interviewed in 1994 or 1995 in their homes when they were high school students. The authors focused on data from the fourth time the women were interviewed, in 2008, when they were between 27 and 34 years old.

For the women who were working for pay, their jobs were classified as professional or pink-collar. Another group of women were categorized as “slow starters.”

• Professional workers: “Managerial and executive positions; work in science, law, medicine, and the arts; and social work, counseling, and education.”
• Pink-collar work: “Work that brings few opportunities for advancement and to which women may be limited as family demands move them in and out of the labor force.” Examples include “service, sales, clerical, and housework; unskilled health care; and construction, production, and transportation.” (I doubt that any health care is “unskilled;” the authors probably mean that it does not require a degree.)
• "Slow starters": They are “marginally employed.” Most are single and have no children. The authors characterize them as having “difficulties transitioning into adult roles.” That seems to presuppose that marrying and having kids makes you an adult (which young adults don’t believe, and neither do older ones) and that if women don’t have those by around age 30, it is not ever by choice but because they are having “difficulties.”

The women were asked about their backgrounds, their work, marital status, and parental status, and a range of other experiences:

Overall Stress

The women who scored high on feeling stressed were especially likely to say that they were unable to control the important things in their lives, that difficulties were piling up so high they could not overcome them, that they were not confident they could handle their personal problems, and that things were not going their way.

• The stress that comes with poverty. The women were asked whether, in the past year, they had ever missed a payment for rent or mortgage or utilities. They were also asked whether they had worried that food would run out in their household before they had money to buy more.
• Family interference with work. Women indicated the degree to which they agreed that “family responsibilities have interfered with my ability to work.”
• Decision-making freedom. Women who were working for pay were asked, “How often do you have the freedom to make important decisions about what you do at work and how you do it?”

The authors wondered whether what the women saw around them during adolescence would matter. For the county where each woman lived, the authors documented the proportion of the adult women who were married, and the job opportunities available for women (defined as “the expected number of jobs for female workers relative to the potential supply of female workers, adjusted for sex segregation in the labor market”). The proportion of women who are married in the place where you live is a fascinating variable that I have not seen in other research. I think it would be relevant to single people’s feelings of satisfaction and interest in staying where they are. But it turned out not to be relevant to this study. On average, the women in all seven categories came from counties in which just over half of the women were married.

Work, Marriage, and Kids: 7 Ways They Go Together, or Don’t, in Young Women’s Lives

The authors used statistical modeling (“latent class analysis”) to come up with the seven groups and assign the women to them. Not all women fit perfectly into one of the categories, so the categories include some women that do not meet all the criteria.

Nearly a third of the young women (32%) were professionals, either with or without children. The biggest of the seven categories (20%) were the pink-collar women with no children. The smallest (10%) were the “slow starters.”

The professional women with no kids stood out in many ways. They had the highest earnings, very high levels of freedom to make decisions, and the least stress. They also had the highest levels of education, and their parents were the most highly educated, too. They were more likely to be single (47%) than married (35%) or cohabiting (18%).

The professional women with children had a similar profile, except that they were far more likely to be married (77%) and less likely to have parents with a college degree (33%, compared to the 52% for the professionals without children).

The mothers who did not have paid employment comprised the other category with a very high proportion who were married: 74%. Nearly the same proportion of those women were white—73%—a higher number than for any of the other six groups. Professional workers with kids were next most likely, at 70%, and pink-collar workers with children were least likely to be white (50%).

Professional Workers

1. Professional workers, no children (17%):

• They are more likely to be single than married or cohabiting.
• They have the highest personal earnings of all of the seven groups.
• They have the lowest overall levels of stress.
• They are the most highly educated.
• Their parents are the most highly educated.
• They are most likely to have come from families in which both parents worked for pay.
• They have jobs with very high levels of decision-making freedom; only professionals with kids had more.
• They lived in counties with the best job opportunities for women.

2. Professional workers with children (15%):

• More than three-quarters (77%) are married.
• They have the second-highest personal earnings.
• They have the second-lowest overall levels of stress.
• They are highly educated.
• They have jobs with the highest level of decision-making freedom.
• 7 out of 10 women in this group are white.

Pink-Collar Workers

3. Pink-collar, no children (20%):

• This is the biggest category; one-fifth of the young women are in it.
• They are twice as likely to be single as to be married or cohabiting.
• Their earnings are modest.
• They tend to have less stress than the other groups, except for the professional workers.
• Very few are receiving public assistance; only professional workers have similarly low rates.

4. Pink-collar with children (14%):

• They are more likely to be married than single or cohabiting.
• Their earnings are low.
• They are very unlikely to have a college degree.
• Their parents were highly unlikely to have college degrees.
• They are more likely than the women in the other groups to come from single-parent families.
• They have jobs with higher levels of decision-making freedom than everyone except the professional workers.
• They are least likely to be white (50%).

5. Pink-collar, part-time, with children (12%):

• They are much more likely to be married than single or cohabiting.
• Their earnings are very low.
• They are very unlikely to have a college degree.
• They lived in counties with relatively few job opportunities for women.

No Paid Employment or Marginal Employment

6. Mothers, no paid employment (11%):

• Nearly three-quarters (74%) are married.
• They have the largest families; 87% have more than one child.
• The women in this group are more likely to be white than the women in any other group; professional workers with children is a close second.
• They lived in counties with relatively few job opportunities for women.

7. Slow starters (10%):

• This is the smallest category, with just 10% of the young women.
• Most are currently unemployed or working just part-time.
• They are much more likely to be single than cohabiting or married.
• They typically have no children.
• They are less highly educated than their parents.
• They have the lowest earnings (except for the mothers with no paid employment).
• Their jobs have the lowest levels of decision-making freedom.
• They have the highest overall levels of stress.
• They come from the biggest families; only mothers without paid employment have nearly as many siblings.

Considerations Beyond the 7 Categories

The Stress of Poverty

Stress was not just linked to the seven categories. Poverty and family interference mattered a lot, too. Women who had missed a housing payment or who were worried about whether they could afford food were a lot more stressed than women who did not have those experiences. Women who said that their family responsibilities were especially likely to interfere with their work also reported a lot of stress.

In fact, once those factors were taken into account, only a few differences in stress among the seven groups remained. The professionals without children were significantly less stressed than the professionals with children or the slow starters.

Growing Up in a Place Where Women Have Better Job Opportunities

It mattered whether the women, as adolescents, lived in a place where women had greater job opportunities. Those women were likely to be single and have no kids when they were around the age of 30. The professional workers with no kids—the group with the highest earnings, the most education, the least stress, and very high levels of freedom in making decisions—came from the counties where women had the best job opportunities.