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On the Fringe: Family-Friendly Benefits and the Rural–Urban Gap Among Working Women

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Abstract

This study drew on longitudinal, nationally representative data to estimate rural–urban inequality in women’s access to family-friendly benefits. Multivariate fixed effects regression models showed that compared to urban women, rural women’s odds of reporting access were 11 % lower for flexible work scheduling, 24 % lower for job-protected maternity leave, 13 % lower for paid sick time, 21 % lower for vacation time, and 20 % lower for health insurance. The rural–urban gap in sick time was explained by differences in unionization, as rural women were less likely to be unionized than urban women. Our findings suggest that rural women’s work–family experiences may be more constrained than urban women’s work–family experiences.

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Notes

  1. For simplicity, we use the term “urban” throughout to signify the non-rural population. Note that our use of urban also includes suburban residents. Although the dataset that we analyze, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) provides information on urban, rural, and suburban area of residence, this information can only be gathered from a variable that has a large percentage of missing cases. We used a different variable on rural/urban that groups suburban with urban, but it has far fewer missing cases. We provide details on these definitions in the method section of this paper.

  2. We included access to health insurance in our analyses because it reduces absenteeism (Lofland and Frick 2006) and may provide workers with greater flexibility in balancing work and family.

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Correspondence to Rebecca Glauber.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 7.

Table 7 Odds ratios from fixed effects logistic regressions with and without imputed missing values

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Glauber, R., Young, J.R. On the Fringe: Family-Friendly Benefits and the Rural–Urban Gap Among Working Women. J Fam Econ Iss 36, 97–113 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9418-z

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