Last week, I was invited to present my dissertation research during the LIS Summer Workshop. My lecture was titled “Family Policies, Women’s Earnings, and Between-Household Inequalities: Using LIS for comparative analyses“. It consisted of three parts.

The first part of my lecture dealt with my argument to combine institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. I differentiate between two types of family policies, and how these affect women’s employment. These two types of family policies are reconciliation policies and financial support policies to families. Reconciliation policies were found to stimulates the employment of specifically mothers, thereby decreasing the employment gap between mothers and women without children. Financial support policies to fmailies with children, on the other hand, were found to increase this motherhood-employment gap.

Secondly, I have answered the question to what extent – and in what direction – women’s increased earnings have affected earnings inequality between households. Put simply: women’s earnings attenuate the earnings inequality between households. Moreover, reconciliation policies were found to stimulate women’s employment in such a way, that her attenuating contribution to household inequality was stronger, while financial support policies suppress this attenuating effect. This means that a family policy-context facilitating women’s employment contributes both to smaller inequalities within households, as well as between households.

The third part of my lecture was technical in nature, and specifically addressed comparative analyses using the LIS database. I presented a ‘netting down’ tool that may assist in comparing net and gross earnings data in the LIS database. Evaluations of the performance of this netting down tool suggest that netting down improves the quality of comparative analyses, but residual bias (between net and gross datasets) remained.

Presenting at the LIS Summer Workshop was an amazing experience, with attendants asking smart and constructive questions. I learned a lot from the experiernce, myself. The slides of my presentation are available upon request (r.nieuwenhuis@utwente.nl).

The jury was pleased with a clear presentation of both the research question, and some selected findings. The poster presented some findings of a paper I’m currently working on, integrating institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. From the question-section of the poster:

Women?s employment rates have increased dramatically. Why?

• Institutional arrangements reduced role incompatibility between motherhood and employment.
• Demographic change towards lower fertility, lower marital rates, and higher education, made women?s employment more likely.

We answer three questions:

1. How did levels of role incompatibility vary over time in industrialized countries?
2. What explains levels of role incompatibility?
3. Did lower incompatibility of roles contribute to women’s employment?

Since this is very much work in progress, I will not (yet) disseminate any findings, but it is very nice to give a heads up on what I’m currently working on. Below a picture of the poster, but please note that the resolution is intentionally kept low, since this is work in progress.

So, below some thougths on what I learned about sociology:

[My] thesis completes my research master Social and Cultural Sciences, which I started upon my obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in sociology. In many ways, this thesis forms an accumulation of the lessons I learned. Three of those important lessons regard a trinity of a perspective on science, of how to theorize, and of method.

During my education, I developed a perspective on science, influenced by both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Within the rules set by a specific paradigm, I attempt to elaborate upon the core idea(s) of such paradigm by asking new questions that build on existing ones, by using theories to formulate prelimirary answers to these questions, and finally by testing these new answers against empirical evidence with as much rigor as possible.

Regarding the formulation of explanations derived from theory, I was inspired by the principle of methodological individualism. Based on this principle, I learned the importance of analyzing social phenomena that are observable at the macro level by formulating explanations at the level of the individual.

Finally, regarding the method of research, I was taught both survey methodology and a variety of statistical tools that together can provide the rigor required to test the preliminary answers that were derived from theory.

Regarding my Master’s thesis, it studies polarization in North American’s abortion attitudes. I was able to locate a very nice lacuna in the literature, and built upon existing literature to solve this lacuna. But, without further ado, I will let the preface speak for itself:

Attitudes on the permissibility of induced abortion vary widely in the United States of America. How people think about abortion has often been the topic of scholarly studies, which highlighted aspects ranging from the level of the streets with protests either ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’, to the level of legislation and Supreme Court rulings, to the public opinion on abortion. The question whether public opinion on abortion has become more polarized received substantial attention of social scientists, as well. This study adds to this body of literature on polarization in the North Americans’ public opinion on induced abortion. It contributes a new explanatory framework on polarization of public opinion which allows much of the existing literature to be brought together, a suggestion for a statistical approach for analyzing hypotheses derived from this model, and new hypotheses derived from this model.

Chapter 1 describes a background on the abortion issue in the United States, and three generations in the development of research on abortion attitudes are identified. To contribute to the third generation, three research questions are formulated that share the goal of developing and testing an explanatory model for attitude polarization. In chapter 2, it is explored how a theory of polarization should be formulated. A theoretical framework for such explanations is developed, based on the identification of three mechanisms constituting polarization. In chapter 3, the theoretical model is substantiated with theories on attitudes on abortion, and hypotheses on the polarization of North Americans’ attitudes towards abortion are derived. Chapter 4 contains a detailed description of the data that are used to test these hypotheses. Also, a procedure is suggested to analyze polarization. This procedure is used throughout chapter 5, in which the hypotheses formulated in the third chapter are tested. The concluding chapter 6 then relates the outcomes of these analyses back to the three research questions from the first chapter. Also, limitations of the used approach, directions for future research, and the implications of the findings for the used theories are discussed.

Several people and organizations have contributed to this project, with financial or other means. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization responsible for collecting the data of the General Social Survey used in this study, made sensitive data available for use in this study. This made it possible to take into account the state in which people live. The funds required for obtaining these additional data were made available by Ariana Need, and are part of her NWO VIDI subsidy.1 Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute sent a very detailed, historic overview on state-level legislation on abortion in the United States.

I conclude this preface by expressing my sincere and kind gratitude towards my supervisors Ariana Need and Manfred te Grotenhuis. They contributed profoundly to this project by providing ideas, advice, and methodological guidance. To me, however, of much greater importance was how they have helped me to strike a fair balance between ambition and personal life events.