Open research questions in Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
118 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 6,158 Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Suggestions have been made to develop skills and vocational training programs to enhance the economic status of slum women by providing better job opportunities. There must also be equal pay for both genders and proper working conditions for them. The government and NGOs must ensure that women workers' working conditions are safe. Furthermore, gender discrimination and patriarchy in the slum community must be eradicated through appropriate campaigns. Economic and social support programs can be developed to provide more job opportunities for poor urban workers.
Gender Disparities in Employment Opportunities among Slum Residents in Dhaka City: A Sociological Study · 2026 · DOIFor this, further research is needed on participation banks and investment preferences of working women. In this regard, further research on religious belief characteristics, cultural structure interactions and future investments in working women can provide additional information about the content and direction of marketing strategies for working women.
In one of the limited studies conducted on this subject, Yılmaz and Turanlı (2022) examined which income bracket participation banks are related to, and according to the results obtained, it was revealed…
Abstract How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored.
Crowded Out: The Influence of Mental Load Priming on Intentions to Participate in Public Life · 2025 · DOIAs for female same-sex couple families, their position in the counterfactual income distribution seems to be strongly limited by the gender wage gap these women experience, which is not outweighed by the sexual orientation wage advantage they have and the higher probability of two-earner couples among these families.
A successful career as an economist in the Federal Reserve System typically requires contributions to both research and policy analysis, and so gender gaps in research output are important to understand. Another potential explanation for the gender gaps in research output among System economists is that women have more intense domestic responsibilities and therefore may work fewer hours; indeed, the evidence from most STEM fields is that publications by single, childless females are not significantly different from publications by single childless men. Although we do not have information on the family status of the economists in the System, we do find larger gender gaps in research output among economists in the age range in which individuals have a higher probability of having young kids.
The analysis focuses on five factors representing gender-role attitudes that have not been systematically explored in the literature: preferred responsibility for income, preferred responsibility for household chores and child care, life priorities (career, family, others), preference for job flexibility, and prioritizing less demanding and stressful jobs over higher wages.
Labor-force participation rates declined during the Great Recession and never fully recovered, then steeply declined again during the COVID-19 pandemic (Guilford and Cambon 2020); the degree to which individuals will reenter the labor force remains to be seen.
Analyses of effects of employment on fertility in contemporary developing or post-demographic transition populations are limited by the widespread use of modern contraceptives: while uptake of these methods may be a mechanism by which reduced fertility is enacted, their use may obscure effects of employment on fertility.
Despite substantial literature suggesting that the more family responsibilities one has, the more likely that family matters are to “spill over” into one’s work, little is known about how employed mothers’ “maternal decision-making” is related to spillover or how mothers’ own personal gender ideologies may influence this link.
Women may also have a preference for jobs that are compatible with their domestic responsibilities, such as part-time and flexible jobs, both of which are scarce in low- and middle-income countries (ILO, 2009).
PROTOCOL: Vocational and business training to increase women's participation in higher skilled occupations in low‐ and middle‐income countries: protocol for a systematic review · 2016 · DOIIt is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family.
‘The wife's administration of the earnings’? Working-class women and savings in the mid-nineteenth century · 2011 · DOIThis study includes retrenchments in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as an understudied mechanism to investigate possible explanations for wage inequality in the labor market.
Retrenchments in Unemployment Insurance Benefits and Wage Inequality: Longitudinal Evidence from the Netherlands, 1985-2000 · 2011 · DOIRecognizing that little is known about how men's and women's engagement in the off-the-books economy differs, this article reports the results of 313 face-to-face interviews with Moscow residents on their off-the-books work practices.
Research limitations/implications The suggested relationship between women's education and employment needs to be further investigated using rigorous econometric techniques in order to distinguish between productivity‐enhancing effects of education and other determinants of increased female employment (FEMPL).
Firstly, what change is observable in the patterns of men and women's time spent in domestic labour over the past twenty years, when taking into account structural factors such as employment patterns and social class? Secondly, among which groups of the population of couples can change be identified? One of the problems of this area of research has been that relatively few studies have systematically analysed change over time using directly comparable large-scale data.
A limitation of this study (Sanday 1973) was the single measure of female contribution, combining separate scores for female contribution to several different sources of food (agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, hunting, gather? ing).
The girl we have in mind was the daughter of a smallholder or agricultural laborer, artisan, industrial worker, or casual odd-job man in a society where 50 to 90 per cent of holdings (according to region) were insufficient to maintain a family…
At the same time, it is necessary to ask whether the very large increases in the pay of the upper salaried and professional workers are warranted on economic incentive grounds; and whether increases on such a scale add to difficulties of restraining 21.
If the livelihoods of these women are to be improved and international development goals and educational commitments are to be reached and fulfilled, it is suggested that these skills that the women already possess should be investigated more systematically in order to better understand the transfer of knowledge between different contexts.
'You have to find a location where you will sell, where you think you will sell most' – Exploring the numeracy skills of female microcredit clients in Nicaragua · 1970 · DOIIndia is poised to supply nearly a quarter of the global incremental workforce in the coming decades, yet subnational employment statistics remain lacking.
Geographic Inequalities in Employment Indicators Among Men and Women in India: An Analysis of 720 Districts, 2019–2021 · 2026 · DOIABSTRACT Gender inequality remains a major barrier to inclusive development, yet the gender implications of deeper integration into global value chains (GVCs) are not fully understood across regions.
The Linkage Between Global Value Chain Participation and Gender Inequality: Evidence From East Asia, South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East · 2026 · DOIDespite growing global interest in gender equity and digital inclusion, limited research has examined how gig work, digital access, and women’s income contributions interact to influence household gender dynamics within culturally conservative contexts.
Gender Role Reversal in Gig Economy Households: A Sociological Insight from Southeast Asia with Evidence from Pakistan · 2025 · DOIAbstract We document gender differences in children’s time investments in education, unpaid labour, and leisure in an understudied population of children living in urban informal settlements in Indonesia and Fiji.
While it is evident that the gender parity in schooling has improved considerably in India in the last few decades, research on pro-male bias in accessing privately managed schools is sparse.
Most-cited papers in Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
- Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? · American Journal of Sociology · 2007 · 1,839 citations
- Revisiting Event-Study Designs: Robust and Efficient Estimation · The Review of Economic Studies · 2024 · 1,328 citations
- The Wage Penalty for Motherhood · American Sociological Review · 2001 · 878 citations
- Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19 · Review of Economics of the Household · 2020 · 583 citations
- Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia · American Economic Review · 2020 · 470 citations
- Gender inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic: Income, expenditure, savings, and job loss · World Development · 2020 · 350 citations
- In Sickness and in Health: Risk Sharing within Households in Rural Ethiopia · Journal of Political Economy · 2000 · 345 citations
- Measuring the Division of Household Labor · Journal of Family Issues · 1991 · 335 citations
- Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2021 · 268 citations
- The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes · European Societies · 2020 · 251 citations
Most recent work
- Rethinking Gender and Other Seemingly Nonmanipulable Characteristics for Causal Analysis · KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie · 2026
- From PhD to employment: gender gaps in early career outcomes among doctorates in Italy · European Journal of Higher Education · 2026
- Information and Social Norms: Experimental Evidence on the Labor Market Aspirations of Saudi Women · Economic Development and Cultural Change · 2026
- Long-term Effects of Recession on Parenthood Gender Inequality in Labor Market Outcomes · Journal of Labor Research · 2026
- Rural-Urban Dynamics of Women's Employment: Evidences from Gujarat State · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Tax Policy in a Space of Uncertainty: Through a Gendered Lens · Pittsburgh Tax Review · 2026
- The Impact of Piketty’s Capital-Income Ratio on Income Polarization - Moderating Effect of the Gender Education Gap - · The Journal of China Area Studies · 2026
- Economic resources and parity among US women: A conjoint experiment on preferred family scenarios · Demographic Research · 2026
- Female labour force participation in South Africa · Human Science Research Council SA · 2026
- When education is not enough: the persistence of the male breadwinner model in Turkey · Community, Work & Family · 2026
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