From Housewives to Employees, the Mental Benefits of Employment across Women with Different Gender Role Attitudes and Parenthood Status

Zhuofei Lu, Shuo Yan (), Jeff Jones, Yucheng He and Qigen She
Additional contact information
Zhuofei Lu: Department of Social Statistics, University of Manchester, HBS Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Shuo Yan: Warwick Manufacturing Group, The University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Jeff Jones: Warwick Manufacturing Group, The University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Yucheng He: Independent Researcher, Chongqing 400000, China
Qigen She: Faculty of Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (UIC), Zhuhai 519000, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-13

Abstract: Previous studies suggest that paid employment can improve workers’ mental health status by offering a series of manifest and latent benefits (i.e., income, self-achievement and social engagement), which motivates policymakers’ ongoing promotion of labour force participation as an approach to protect women’s mental health status. This study extends the literature by investigating the mental health consequences of housewives’ transition into paid employment across different gender role attitude groups. In addition, the study also tests the potential moderating role of the presence of children in relationships. This study yields two major findings by using nationally representative data (N = 1222) from the United Kingdom Longitudinal Household Study (2010–2014) and OLS regressions. First, from the first wave to the next, housewives who transitioned into paid employment reported better mental health status than those who remained housewives. Second, the presence of children can moderate such associations, but only among housewives with more traditional gender role attitudes. Specifically, among the traditional group, the mental benefits of transition into paid employment are more pronounced among those without children. Therefore, policymakers should develop more innovative approaches to promote housewives’ mental health by considering a more gender-role-attitudes-sensitive design of future labour market policies.

Keywords: employment; gender role attitudes; housewives; mental health; parenthood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/5/4364/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/5/4364/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:5:p:4364-:d:1083873

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().