Abstract
The dynamics of women’s employment remains a major theme in economic sociology or, as in Maternal Employment and Child Health, labour economics. However, whereas in the UK research has predominantly focused on the impact of childbearing on subsequent employment trajectories, looking at the consequences of maternal employment on child development has had more currency in the United States. In her book, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, a feminist economist from Rutgers University, puts this debate in a global perspective by providing a well-documented empirical study of the relationship between the employment of mothers and three aspects of malnutrition – small size at birth, reduced growth (stunting) and low weight for height (wasting) – among children aged under five in a selection of less studied Asian countries (Bengladesh, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste).
The book is organized into six chapters. The introduction reminds the reader of a few key facts about the countries in the sample, useful to those less familiar with Asia. Although selected in order to minimize heterogeneity, these countries nevertheless differ significantly, in terms of size and the extent of poverty, even if, in all cases, this remains a challenge alongside access to education and health services.
Chapter 2 discusses the issues surrounding women’s employment around the world, including themes familiar to readers of Work, Employment and Society, such as segregation and gaps in earnings, as well as paid and unpaid work. Aspects more relevant to the countries studied are discussed, such as imbalances in self-employment, the attractiveness of dairy farming as a source of income for women or how working-time gaps also apply to girls who perform housework in addition to school, whereas boys tend not to. The global dimension of women’s employment is not forgotten; the reader is provided with useful reminders of the ambivalent role of low-paid work in the garment industry in these countries, as was the case in Europe previously. This chapter could provide a good first introduction for students unfamiliar with the topic.
Chapter 3 introduces the conceptual framework behind the study and describes the factors potentially impacting on children’s health. Two hypotheses are weighed against each other: firstly, that maternal employment raises household income and therefore the quality of the food afforded by families as well as improving access to health services; and secondly, that maternal employment may have a negative impact on children, especially if young, by restricting the time available for breastfeeding and the preparation of nutritious meals. As such, health is operationalized as a production function that is related to, among other factors, mothers’ education, which increases their productivity: less time spent by more educated women is equivalent to more time by less educated women.
Chapter 4 reviews the existing evidence about the effect of maternal employment on child development, which covers industrialized countries. Regrettably, nuances are sometimes lost, and recent work such as Brooks-Gunn et al. (2010) on the impact of mothers’ employment on the development of young children is not mentioned. The second part of the chapter takes us back to the main theme, that is factors affecting mothers and children in Asia, including gender preferences for children.
Chapter 5 details the data and the methods followed. The empirical works relies on a series of probit models measuring the probability of children displaying each of the malnutrition symptoms controlling for a wide range of factors. The sample is constructed with data from the Demographic Health Survey between 2005 and 2009. This chapter will be mostly useful to readers wishing to augment their understanding of cross-country quantitative analysis, but might prove too technical to non-specialist audiences.
Findings are presented in Chapter 6, a general result being that the initial negative impact of women’s employment on children’s nutrition can partially be accounted for by socio-economic differences between mothers, sometimes entirely, as in the case of stunting. The author provides a few leads with regard to the remaining unexplained negative impacts on small size at birth in countries such as Timor and Pakistan – positive in India and Cambodia – which could have to do with the jobs characteristics of mothers. Similarly, the remaining probability of a child of a working mother to be underweight could indicate short-term effect due to epidemics, or war, as in Timor-Leste and Nepal. Consequences for policy making are discussed in the last chapter.
To summarize, this book could appeal to researchers interested in gendered economic behaviour by broadening their perspective away from an often Western-centric debate. For methodologists it provides a well-documented illustration of quantitative cross-national research carried out in countries where limited data is available. Finally, however, one would have wished at times to find more bridges between the two aspects of the book – i.e. the detailed empirical study on the one hand and the comprehensive analytical framework as developed in Chapter 4 on the other.