Cristian Rodriguez

Cristian Rodriguez 571 words

The first article was Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006, where the data that was collected was from the General Social Survey, in order to see the type of impact that has been made on marriage when it comes to race and gender. This study was split into four different groups, white husbands, black husbands, white wives, and black wives. At the beginning of the study, around the 70s, it was reported that married women are more likely to be unhappy with their marriage as well as having emotional problems than men who are married and women who are single. After women began to enter the workforce more, it seems that more issues have arisen, such as the added pressure of having to go home after work and having to do housework. Although there has been an increase in husbands sharing some of the responsibility, it has yet to be significant enough to reduce the strain on the woman, since the wives still perform a disproportionate amount of housework compared to the husband. This type of responsibility that women have taken also did not fare well for men, since at the beginning of the study, men were more happy with their marriages. After the increase of women in the workforce, there was a decline in male happiness with their marriages, which could be because, since the 1970s, there has been declining wages, underemployment as well as wives contributing more to the households, husbands seem to be losing their grip on being the dominant group. Another factor that has been considered is race, where blacks have a totally different view on their marriage as opposed to whites, where black wives are the least happy. Black marriages are reported to have much less marital happiness as opposed to whites, and this could be for the lack of economic opportunities that blacks have. Black women have the biggest effect on marriage happiness though, considering they have had higher employment, even more than white wives, as well as being the ones to look for a suitable partner, thus lowering the marriage rate altogether.

                The second article was Do Highly Paid, Highly Skilled Women Experience the Largest Motherhood Penalty? This article explores the effect that childbearing may have on women, and which factors may affect the penalty most; skill, wage, race? The data that was collected from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, from 1979 to 2010. The data showed that white women have been seen to have the biggest disadvantage when having a child, especially since white women are also the most highly skilled and highest paid. The possible reasoning behind this observation may be that white women lose work time because they either leave or only work part-time to take care of the child. As a result, these women lose out on any kind of possible experience as well as possible lowering of wages. The case is different when it comes to black women, where they see less penalties based on skill or wage. This may be because of the fact that white women get higher paying jobs with higher skill requirements than black women, which in turn may lead to white women essentially having more to lose than black women. Even after this penalty that white women face, they are still usually better off than black women because they will have the cushion of possibly either being married to a man who earns a lot as well, or they still earn more in general regardless of the penalty they take.