The Gendered Rise of Same-Sex Parenthood, and Other Interesting New Research
Do LGBTQ People Want to Get Married?; A Lot of Babies Eligible for SSI Aren't Getting It; Gender Gaps in the Creator Economy; Why Parents Homeschool; Maybe Moms Don’t Actually Want to WFH + more.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Well, this newsletter is extremely late and I am very sorry about that. It’s been a week. Ironically, this was supposed to be the week that everything slowed down. I filed a draft on Monday and, for the first time in a while, did not have to immediately pivot to working on another. I was looking forward to taking a little breather. And then, chaos was unleashed upon my family in the form of a sick child, some very frustrating interactions with the NHS, and a few nights of terrible sleep.
I can’t complain too much. It’s been a rough week, sure, but one I will cherish. My back is still aching after sleeping in my daughters’ bed two nights ago, but then, I sort of love it when we all sleep in a cozy jumble together. It disturbs me to my core to see my ordinarily chipper and hearty six-year-old looking wan and weak and with so little appetite, but then I also somewhat guiltily enjoy our lazy sick days at home together. Everything she says these days makes me laugh. While I was trying (and failing) to feed her a little soup for lunch on Tuesday, she announced out of nowhere that if she had to be sick but could choose her ailment, she’d go for a sprained ankle (?!?). Then, after noodling on it a little longer, she decided that she’d prefer to bite her tongue, “but only once—and definitely not burn it.” Later, after swallowing a dose of Calpol, she asked, “Which drain pipe does the medicine go down?" I dunno. She just cracks me up. But I digress! Lots of interesting stuff to cover this week.
A Lot of Babies Who Qualify for SSI Aren’t Getting It
The U.S. has a means-tested program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which provides cash benefits to low-income elderly folks and those with disabilities. Infants born below a certain weight threshold are automatically considered medically eligible for SSI (though again, it’s a means-tested program, so a low-birth weight baby might ultimately not qualify depending on their parents’ income). This study tried to figure out what share of SSI-eligible infants are actually receiving SSI. Within a population of babies born between 2012 and 2018, less than 40% of underweight babies received SSI, and those who did tended to live in more disadvantaged areas. Among underweight infants likely to be income-eligible for SSI, benefit receipt rises, but only to 65%. So the program isn’t reaching a lot of the babies its supposed to serve. And within this SSI-eligible population, take-up was actually lower in more economically disadvantaged areas. So if we’re talking about the broad population of underweight babies in America, those in more disadvantaged areas are more likely to get SSI. But within the SSI-eligible population, babies in more disadvantaged areas are less likely to get it.
Gender Gaps in the Creator Economy
The vast majority of research on gender inequality in the labor market focuses on the traditional labor market. But over the past couple decades there’s been a huge expansion of the so-called creator economy—that is, YouTubers and TikTokers and Podcasters, etc… Content creation is kind of an interesting “labor market” because there are low barriers to entry, and the working conditions are about as flexible as they come. Perhaps, one might wonder, it is a bastion of gender equality!
Alas, according to this mammoth working paper, it is not. The authors focus on YouTube creators in Italy between 2006 and 2023. Broadly, they find that the majority (58%) of over 18,000 channels identified are male-run. Men were pioneers in the content creation market, while female channels only began to pick up around 2011 or so. Women tend to start channels at about the same or even higher rates than men, but their channels are less enduring, so “active channels remain predominantly male.” I’m not sure I totally understand how they looked into this, but apparently the authors found that “despite putting in greater effort on average, female creators tend to receive lower levels of audience engagement and appreciation.”
The also find huge gender disparities when it comes to content. “Beauty” is overwhelmingly female (97.2%), and “Food” is marginally so (56%), while male creators predominate in “Technology” (86.8%) and “Knowledge” (74.1%).
They mention a few possible explanations for these disparities: a gender gap in tech skill could explain why women were slower to get into content creation and less likely to make tech content. It’s possible that women might get into content creation for the flexibility but ultimately give up when they struggle with the entrepreneurial aspect of it. There may be a dearth of successful role models in the creator industry, or perhaps women are more sensitive to the negative feedback you are bound to get in the digital realm. Ultimately, the authors conclude in somewhat humorous fashion that “while the content creator market offers significant opportunities for all actors, our findings indicate that gender disparities persist.”
Do LGBTQ Young People Want to Get Married?
Gay marriage is legal now, but do LGBTQ people actually want to get married? Within the smallish sample of 257 “sexual minority young adults” included in this study, the majority (60.4%) said they want to marry someday, but less than a third “consider marriage a major life goal,” and only 35.5% say they’d be disappointed if they never married. The study couldn’t directly compare these results to the heterosexual population, but next some other research on the subject, these findings seem to suggest that “marital aspirations seem generally lower among sexual minorities than heterosexual young adults,” as Aaron Hoy, an associate professor of sociology at Minnesota State University and one of the authors of this study, put it to me in an email.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the LGBTQ young adults surveyed were a little wishy washy on what sort of commitments marrige ought to involve. A slight majority were ambivalent (neither agree nor disagreeing) about whether or not marriage ought to be “a lifelong commitment” and almost half were ambivalent about whether marriage ought to be monogamous. Basically none of them (3.1%) strongly agreed that marriage “is an important social institution” and most (64.9%) agreed that marriage treats women unfairly. Broadly, the authors found that “those who hold more critical attitudes toward marriage are less likely to report wanting to marry compared to those who hold less critical attitudes,” though the association wasn’t super strong. They also found that those who don’t think a marriage ought to be monogamous are less likely to want to get married. Who knows if that’s causal relationship, but it’s kind of a funny connection: evidently, having a less restrictive view of marriage doesn’t necessarily make marriage more attractive.
The sociodemographic patterns were interesting, too. Being religious was positively associated with marital aspirations, which tracks with the population more broadly. Gays and lesbians are more likely than those who self-described their sexual orientation (usually as “queer”) to “desire marriage, to see marriage as a major life goal, and to say that they would be disappointed if they never get married.” But unlike among young adults more generally, there wasn’t an association between level of education and desire to marry. Likewise, while other research has found that, in general, young adults with married parents are more likely to want to marry themselves, this study found no association between parents’ marital status or divorce history and martial aspirations among LGBTQ youth.
Why Parents Homeschool
Pew published a brief breakdown of why parents in America homeschool. According to data from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 3.4% of American K-12 students were homeschooled during the 2022-23 school year, a bit higher than prior to the pandemic (2.8% in 2018-19). The top reason, cited by 83% of homeschooling parents, was “concern about the school environment,” which includes things like “safety, drugs or negative peer pressure.” Next, parents said they preferred to provide “moral instruction” (75%), although just about half said they preferred to provide “religious instruction,” which is an interesting distinction. Equal shares (72%) reported wanting to “emphasize family life together” and expressing “dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.” Half of homeschooling parents reported interest in a “nontraditional” approach to education. Very small shares reported the child having special needs or a physical or mental health problem as a reason.
Maybe Moms Don’t Actually Want to Work from Home
There is, by now, quite a bit of data on remote work out there. But a lot of it is conflicting, and much of it focuses on the pandemic years. This study harmonized a bunch of U.S. surveys to get a better understanding of who is working from home post-pandemic. Broadly, they conclude that “about one quarter of all paid workdays were WFH days in 2023 to 2025 among U.S. workers aged 20-64.”
One of their more interesting findings is that although women have been pretty consistently working remotely more often than men since mid-2022, the gap isn’t terribly big, which the authors take as an indication that “the forces that drive men and women to WFH (or not) seem to be mostly common to both groups.” That flies in the face of a certain narrative about working from home being more of a thing among women because they take on more childcare responsibilities. They do find that people who live with young children (aged 8 or under) WFH more than those who don’t. But that doesn’t seem to be influencing the gender gap in remote work much: while they find that women with young kids consistently WFH a bit more often than men with kids, there is a similar gender gap among childless workers.
When it comes to how much people want to work from home, the gender gap is a bit more substantial: women reliably want to work from home more than men. But this gap doesn’t appear to be driven by children, either. Men who live with young children have a higher desired WFH rate than men without young kids, even after controlling for age, education, and occupation and industry effects. But amazingly, women with young kids want to WFH less than women who don’t, even after accounting for the above mentioned controls. I found that very confusing! Ultimately, the authors conclude that “gender and family structure matter on the margin,” but don’t really explain much of the variation in desired or actual working from home rates. Education is a much better predictor of both. (Note: This section has been edited to clarify the authors’ findings and to remove a statement indicating that overall, people with young kids have a higher desired rate of remote work. I couldn’t escape the suspicion that there was something off about my interpretation of the study so I reached out to one of the authors. They did not measure how having young kids impacts the desired rates of work from home overall. They compare the desired WFH rate of men with young kids to men without young kids. And they compare the desired WFH rate of women with young kids to women without young kids. Sorry about that. I was thrown off by how a Table in the paper was labeled. I regret the error!)
The Psychology of Male Fertility
What sort of qualities make for a father. This study tried to tease out the relationship between various psychological traits (leadership skills, social maturity, emotional stability) and fertility among Swedish men. It turns out the relationship is somewhat complex. Men with better leadership skills, and higher social maturity and emotional stability are more likely to have one or two kids. But then men with lower leadership, social maturity, and emotional stability are more likely to have three or four kids.
It seems like a decent amount of the association between worse psychological traits and the higher birth parities is explained by multi-partner fertility. Basically, men with worse leadership skills and less social maturity and emotional stability are more likely to have kids with more than one woman. Age also seems to be a factor, as men who score low on those traits tend to become fathers earlier than other men, which gives them more time to have more kids with more women. Would it be crass to make a joke about Elon Musk here?
The Gendered Rise of Same Sex Parenthood
Same sex unions have been legally recognized in Sweden since 1995. This study takes a look at how same-sex parenthood has trended in Sweden in the years since. Long story short, parenthood has become a lot more common among same-sex married couples over the time period, increasing seven-fold between 1995 and 2021—but the increase was driven almost entirely by women. The prevalence of parenthood within lesbian marriages rose from 9% in 1995 to 57% in 2021, which is only slightly lower than the rate for heterosexual marriages. Male same-sex parenthood, on the other hand, is still pretty rare, which the authors expected, given the practical and legal hurdles to adoption and surrogacy. “Almost no Swedish men in same-sex marriages lived with children in 1995, and the proportion had only risen to about 10% in 2021,” the authors write.
Over time, lesbian moms increasingly resembled moms in heterosexual marriages when it came to things like educational attainment, income, and age. That sort of convergence was not observed among gay fathers, which is “comparatively rarer, but characterized by higher socioeconomic status.” That also makes sense: surrogacy and adoption are expensive. (Note: Previously this section stated that gay marriage was legalized in Sweden in 1995. An astute reader pointed out that, in fact, 1995 is when Sweden legally recognized same sex unions. But same-sex marriage was not legalized there until 2009. I regret the error!)
A couple of thoughts as to possibly why women with small children don’t WFH… 1) It’s possible mothers desire a life/place outside of home so there are clearer boundaries. 2) women who have children usually (I presume but I’m sure you have data to back this up) take a step back in their career and may not have the flexibility earned (which is 2025 needs to be earned not given in most jobs) to be able to wfh
The data around wanting to wfh is interesting! I have an 11 month old and appreciate being able to wfh as needed but now that I am starting to have kids, wfh is never really an ideal. On Fridays daycare is closed and so I wfh with baby. Those are exhausting days. If she is sick, I wfh. Also, my husband has less flexibility in his job to wfh so (at this moment in time) it is typically me who last-minute works from home and cares for baby at home. I’m not sure how people manage that daily or more frequently than once a week/as needed. It’s a LOT. So in those circumstances I don’t really WANT to wfh. I would rather just be at home with baby and not work or go to the office to work.