A girl who attends a school with classmates whose mothers work is more likely to be in the workforce when she has a child herself than a girl who grows up in local circles where most mothers stay at home, Cornell researchers have found.
“Role models pull girls in different directions in adolescence, a period when preferences are formed, when they decide what to do in their life,” said Eleonora Patacchini, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “When they decide whether to return to work after having a child, they remember the mothers and fathers of their peers.”
Women trail men in the workforce largely because of the “child penalty” – women leaving work upon having a child and not returning. Social norms and culture influence a girls’ later decisions about participation in the work force; when she looked into precisely how, Patacchini, with doctoral student Giulia Olivero and Henrik Kleven, professor of economics at Princeton University, found that greater exposure to working moms at a very local level – the school – decreases the child penalty for girls. Meanwhile, exposure to working fathers increases the child penalty, a “striking” asymmetric effect, Patacchini said.
Girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers work are more likely to develop a gender-role ideal that reconciles career and motherhood, they conjecture, compared with girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers stay at home.
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Glad you could something from my comment. Regarding your edit, I think I understand where you are coming from. If one looks at pop-feminism and big companies nowadays having “girl bosses” while simultaneously continuing to exploit people not caring about civil rights, sure it seems like fighting sexism is only a secondary aim after dismantling capitalism. You may want to have a look into intersectional movements then that teach us how intertwined various forms of oppression, environmental exploitation and capitalism are. You cannot dismantle without the other. Capitalism works by oppressing and exploiting people as well as natural resources. We shouldn’t argue about what comes first, because all of these struggles are connected. Movements of white, privileged people fighting for more civil rights tend throw others under the bus to gain more power in capitalist society. So do white socialist men fighting against capitalism while forgetting about oppressed people. We should try to work together, take others’ struggles seriously and fight for a world free of oppression and masters.