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Title: Women's Job Transitions: A Dynamic Analysis of Job Mobility and Job Leaving
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Felmlee, Diane Helen |
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Women's Job Transitions: A Dynamic Analysis of Job Mobility and Job Leaving Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1980. DAI-A 41/10, p. 4500, Apr 1981 Cohort(s): Young Women Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Fertility; Job Patterns; Locus of Control (see Rotter Scale); Mobility; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes; Socioeconomic Status (SES); Transition Rates, Activity to Work; Transition, Job to Job; Women; Work Histories The number of women in the labor force has increased dramatically in recent years. At the same time, numerous studies have been done on women's employment issues. However, research has generally been of a cross-sectional nature and has failed to focus on the dynamics of women's employment activities. This study is a longitudinal, in-depth analysis of two major processes involved in women's employment--job mobility and leaving employment. The Young Women sample of the National Longitudinal Survey (1968-1973) is used to develop an appropriate data set for this study. The panel and retrospective information is transformed into a set of employment transition histories for each person in the white women sub-sample. A multivariate, continuous-time, stochastic model is used to analyze individual level employment transition rates. In the first step of the analysis, basic factors in the process of women's job mobility are identified. Women's rates of job to job changes are negatively associated to job rewards and positively associated to individual resources. In addition, several family-related constraints have substantial negative effects on rates of job shifts. Being married, for instance, slows down rates of women's job changes. The process of changing jobs is not simply a function of employers' and employees' desires. Job changes are also a function of the structural access that individuals have to jobs. Additional analyses demonstrate the interaction of the mobility process with two access factors in a job change, the locus of control (voluntary/involuntary) and the type of employer transition (same employer/different employer). The process of voluntarily changing jobs differs substantially from that of changing jobs involuntarily. Furthermore, models for rates of voluntarily changing jobs with the same employer differ from models for rates of voluntarily changing jobs with different employers. Job shifts to a new employer rely on general, screening information such as wages, SES, IQ, and educational goal. Job shifts with the same employer (indicative of firm internal labor markets) depend heavily on age and length of time on a job, a result which implies that moves in firm internal labor markets are largely a function of seniority, firm-specific resources, and vacancies in a firm. Rather than being continuously employed, many women move out of employment for periods of time. Therefore, in the third part of the study transitions out of employment are modeled in a dynamic framework. Models for rates of leaving employment because of pregnancy are contrasted with models for rates of leaving employment due to reasons other than pregnancy. These models differ in ways that imply that fertility behavior influences employment decisions. However, the wage variable has a negative effect both on rates of leaving a job due to pregnancy and on rates not due to pregnancy. This suggests that high wages are a disincentive to leave a job for any reason, i.e., the wages of a job influence pregnancy decisions for employed women. In sum, results provide evidence that labor force activity influences fertility behavior as well as that fertility behavior influences labor force behavior. The final question addressed concerns the consequences of employment discontinuity for women's occupational attainment. Results show that women are more likely to make job changes that result in decreases, rather than increases, in SES or wages when their job changes are interrupted by nonemployment than when the changes are made without a break. Further research demonstrates that the negative consequences of discontinuity are not due simply to differences in the characteristics of the women or jobs involved in discontinuous job changes. Instead, costs are embedded in the process of job changing. |
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Bibliography Citation
Felmlee, Diane Helen. Women's Job Transitions: A Dynamic Analysis of Job Mobility and Job Leaving. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1980. DAI-A 41/10, p. 4500, Apr 1981. |