Who escort children: mum or dad? Exploring gender differences in escorting mobility among parisian dual-earner couples

Abstract

International audienceThe present article looks to pinpoint explanatory factors for the sharing of escorting of children in dual-earner families. It proposes a detailed analysis of inequalities and interactions in dual-earner families when it comes to escorting children by taking into account the characteristics of trips to and from school for children, the characteristics of the parents’ occupations, and the characteristics of the household. Compared with earlier research, the model considers more detailed data about the escorts’ jobs, such as specific working hours, which provide a better understanding of the constraints on parents and insight into the choices made when both parents are in a position to escort their children. The findings depart somewhat from those of earlier work on the question because more specific data are considered. They show a marked gender inequality in escorting because mothers in dual-earner families do more than two-thirds of the escorting. But the factors explaining the sharing of escorting act almost symmetrically for both parents, with the effect of work starting and finishing times being preponderant. These models confirm that the inequality kicks in ahead of this: mothers in dual-earner households are more often than fathers in jobs with short working hours and which are more compatible with escorting

A socioeconomic analysis of commuting professionals

“…A well-known reaction to this more complicated problem is that one partner accepts a new (possibly part-time) job in the vicinity with both a probably worse qualification-match and a lower income, whereas the partner with a higher willingness to commute keeps working full-time in a longer distance. Both empirical findings on this willingness to commute and traditional role models suggest that usually, women tend to reduce their commuting distance in this kind of situation (Hjorthol and Vågane 2014;McQuaid and Chen 2012;Auspurg and Schönholzer 2013;Sultana 2005;Motte-Baumvol et al 2017). The respondents of the professional's sub-sample fit better to these previous findings since for highly educated fathers positive and for highly educated mothers negative or at least comparably smaller coefficients were estimated.…”

“…Finally, coefficients for the number of children were estimated and found to influence the commuting distance for certain sub-samples. Based on the state of research, contrary effects on the gender groups were presumed, with men commuting longer and women shorter distances with every additional child (McQuaid and Chen 2012;Motte-Baumvol et al 2017;Hjorthol and Vågane 2014). To assess the differences between the entirety of workers and the professional's subsample, assumption A 3.3 states less significant impacts of children on the commuting distances.…”

“…As the presence of children in the household reinforces the effect, the difference is explained by the often more complex everyday life of women, which tends to involve longer trip chains, e.g. due to the escorting of children (Scheiner and Holz-Rau 2017;Motte-Baumvol et al 2017;Oakil et al 2016).…”

Dual Career Couples and Their Inclinations Regarding Work and Family: The Brazilian Scenario

“…The use of a secondary database as a source of evidence related to the theme of work is not common, but neither is it new in the context of international research (ALLEN and FINKELSTEIN, 2014;MOTTE-BAUMVOL, BONIN and BELTON-CHEVALLIER, 2015;MYSÍKOVÁ, 2014;MINNOTTE, MINNOTTE and THOMPSON, 2016). However, in the national literature, there is no research using data of this type to investigate the theme of dual careers.…”

Turn taking behavior in dual earner households with children: a focus on escorting routines

“…Ceteris paribus, children tend to be more escorted by their mothers than fathers (e.g. Fyhri and Hjorthol 2009;Barker 2011;Ekert-Jaffé 2011;Scheiner andHolz-Rau 2012, 2017;Hjorthol and Vagane 2014;Bernardo et al 2015;Motte-Baumvol et al 2017). This gender difference is not only clearly noticeable in the tendency to escort children and the time spent with children, but also in experienced stress and subjective well-being (e.g., Offer 2014;Feng and Boyle 2014).…”