*【專題演講】Maternal Employment and Children’s Cognitive Ability in a Gender-Inegalitarian Society
- 日期 : 2026/05/26 14:00
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主講人 : James Raymo
- 地點 : 中央研究院人社中心第一會議室
- 演講者簡介 : James Raymo is Professor of Sociology and Henry Wendt III ’55 Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. At Princeton, he is the founding director of the Global Japan Lab, and the faculty director of the Strategic Partnership between Princeton and the University of Tokyo. Raymo received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Michigan and was on the faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 19 years before moving to Princeton. He is a social demographer whose research focuses on documenting and understanding the causes and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with low fertility and population aging in Japan. His published research includes analyses of marriage timing, divorce, recession and fertility, marriage and women’s health, single mothers’ well-being, living alone, family change and social inequality, employment and health at older ages, and regional differences in health at older ages. He currently serves as a co-Director of the international community of scholars called Research on East Asian Demography and Inequality, on the editorial boards of leading journals, and was as the vice-president of the Population Association of America in 2023.
- 演講摘要 : In this study, we revisit the relationship between maternal employment and children’s well-being in Japan, a wealthy society marked by strong normative beliefs about distinct gender roles within the family and pronounced gender inequality both at home and in the workplace. We pay particular attention to distinctive features of Japanese mothers’ employment, including the high prevalence of nonstandard employment, unstable or intermittent labor force attachment, and relatively limited educational variation in employment patterns. Our findings reveal an overall negative relationship between children’s cognitive performance and their cumulative exposure to mothers’ regular employment, a relationship that is largely limited to children of less-educated mothers. In contrast, mothers’ nonstandard employment has little influence on children’s cognitive performance, regardless of maternal education. Decomposition analysis indicates that educational differences in the relationship between maternal (regular) employment and children’s cognitive outcomes contribute to disparities in children’s cognitive achievement. Our study highlights the importance of gender context in understanding the effects of maternal employment on children’s well-being and underscores the need for policies that better support working mothers in gender-inegalitarian societies.
- 主辦單位 : 中央研究院人社中心調查研究專題中心
- 聯絡人 : 謝小姐 | csrevent@gate.sinica.edu.tw | (02)2787-1816
