Family, Careers and Marriages: Reaction to Articles
The topics of family, careers and marriage are ones that all individuals of all walks of life deal with on a somewhat daily basis. Through these three articles, scholars provide an interesting information into specific areas within this broader topic of family, careers and marriage.
Foremost, Korenman and Neumark's paper entitled "Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive?" provides interesting insight on how marriage correlated with an increased salary among white males. Korenman and Neumark explore how the married workers tended "receive higher performance ratings than single men; as a result, they were likely to be promoted" (Korenman, and Neumark).Using human capital wage equations, the scholars explored data that led them to believe that married men had higher salaries. One of the more interesting conclusions that Korenman and Neumark make is in regards to never married men- that there is "faster wage growth for married men as compared to never married men, then from an intercept shift associated with any particular marital status (Korenman, and Neumark).This particular conclusion is interesting in that there they make the conclusion but there is nothing really of substance that offers why in fact that this is happening. Does marriage really help men be more productive? Personally, it seems that marriage brings an added responsibility to one's life and the desire to move forward and ultimately, make more money to provide for a household is something that subtly forces married men in that direction. It seems that there are a myriad of factors that are keeping single men back from moving faster up the salary chain and it seems mostly, that single men d no need it as much as married men do. With added responsibility in one's...
For instance, if a married man was moving professionally at a single man's rate and his personal life was growing, including say a house and kids, the personal life might move off track because there is limited monetary backing for this type of personal growth.
Further reading into the broader realm of family, marriage and careers is providing by an article by Claudia Goldin in "The Long Road to the Fast track: Career and Family." This article provides an interesting insight into how the career and family goals have changed for women college graduates over the last century or so. Goldin asserts that there are five cohorts of college graduate women which includes the women college graduates of 1900 to 1920 who had either "a family or career," the second cohort of women which graduated from 1920 to 1945 and had a "job then family," a third cohort of women the graduated from 1946 to the 1960s who had a "a family then job," a fourth group who graduated from 1960s to 1980s who goals included getting a career then raising a family and finally those that graduated from 1980 to 1990 who goals had been "career then family" (Goldin). Goldin contributes some of the change to the labor market including "the growth of a wide variety of white collar jobs"; but, when reviewing the material, the change seems stronger that just the labor market (Goldin). Personally, the changes in ideologies and perspective for college graduates comes from within society and the social norms that have transformed over the courses of the graduation time periods of these five cohorts of women. Is it possible that men were at war and women had to get a job in between…
