Nov

14

Dual careers and stress

November 14, 2007 | 2 Comments | Joshua Gans

Via Greg Mankiw, an interesting paper by Harvard PhD student, Noam Kirson, that identifies a correlation between female labour force participation and poor health outcomes, especially, for death from heart disease, for both men and women. There are caveats but the result is strong enough to give us pause for thought.

What does it mean? No evidence is presented on the impact of men staying home on stress-related health (there just isn’t enough data points there) but at the moment it is probably safe to guess that if men stayed home that would improve health outcomes too. In this case, I interpret this result to mean that family health outcomes are improved by having one adult in the household handle the household duties.

But here is the thing: in my observation and experience, handling the household duties — especially with regard to children — is hardly stress free. It is simply unpaid employment. So why should this form of unpaid employment, provided to the household, result in better health outcomes than if it was provided by another means? If it were simply the case that working women were taking on both a career and the household duties then surely that would impact on their health more. My point here is that this is a puzzle but may most likely mean that outside-home work is bad for adult family health and no one should leave the house. That said, we are a long way from policy implications here but hopefully this work will spur more research to tease out what is really going on.


Comments

2 Responses to “Dual careers and stress”

  1. Pat on November 14th, 2007 10:11 pm

    If I understand this correctly, research indicates that taking the stay-at-home-mother out of the nuclear family leads to poorer health for the family.

    In my limited experience (I am, after all, young in the literal sense rather than the award sense of the word) having a person based at home looking after the house has innumerable benefits for the family. The working parent has someone to come home to every day, providing stability even when their job is about to disappear. The children have someone to care for them when they are off school sick. The extra time spent on household cleaning would generally also lead to better hygiene for the family.

    While these things do not necessarily directly prevent heart disease, they do influence stress levels.

    Being a housewife is incredibly stressful. You’re right Joshua, it’s just unpaid employment.

    However, you will rarely find a more engaged “employee” than a loving mother.

    Perhaps there are anti-stress benefits in spending more time with your children. Raising children is far from easy work, whether one or both parents have paid employment. In either case, the stress mounts up.

    I suggest that being at home with one’s family, or having one’s spouse as a home-based carer, offsets some of the destructive stress in people’s lives.

  2. Andrew Leigh on November 15th, 2007 8:26 am

    Makes sense to me. It’s quite consistent with Chris Ruhm’s work, showing that recessions increase life expectancy.