Working Mothers Around the World: Moderating effects of social position of mothers' paid work in middle- and high-income countries

Abstract

In both developing and industrialized countries today, mothers constitute a substantial share of the labour force. Mother's engagement in paid labour has also been encouraged across levels of economic development through a political agenda for equal rights, opportunities, and investments in early childhood care. At the same time, mothers have not make up for their increased efforts in paid labour by relinquishing responsibilities in the private sphere. Care tasks are still a quintessential facet of working mothers' daily routines as well as their identities. Indeed, a long tradition of feminists have made it abundantly clear that unpaid care work performed by both employed and non-employed mothers, remains the undervalued foundation of labour markets across the world. This dissertation studies the consequences of motherhood on different facets of women's paid labour in the public sphere, which here is referred to as labour market outcomes. This does not imply that paid labour is the only valuable form of work, or that mothers are the only people who provide unpaid care. Mothers' paid work in the labour market, however, does define the scope of this dissertation.