Volume 59, Issue 3 p. 417-438
Research Article

Investigating Religion and Inequality through Women's Work-Family Pathways

Claire Chipman Gilliland

Corresponding Author

Claire Chipman Gilliland

Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Correspondence should be addressed to Claire Chipman Gilliland, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27517. E-mail: ccgill@unc.edu

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 26 July 2020
Citations: 1

Abstract

This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work-family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work-family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work-family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work-family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work-family experiences.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.