Variation in Women's Economic Tradeoffs and Risk Preferences

Starkweather Kathrine E, Leipzig

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Melissa Emery Thompson at the University of New Mexico, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the effects of differences in women's occupations on their household economies and physiological states, as well as the heath of themselves and their children. Most women in the United States and around the world engage in occupations that are more compatible with childcare than men's occupations and also that are less economically risky than men's occupations. However, some women do choose occupations that are neither compatible with childcare nor low risk, but very little is understood about what leads women to choose those types of occupations and what the outcomes are for women and their families. In order to better understand why some women choose these types of occupations and others choose more traditional ones, this project will conduct a study with women whose primary occupations represent this range. The goal of the project is to learn about potential positive and negative outcomes that result from different women's occupations in order to understand women's economic choices across different cultures. In doing so, factors that may buffer women and their children against more negative potential outcomes will be explored as well. The results of this project will be critical as women's roles in the household, local, and global economy continue to expand. It will also contribute to that expansion by employing and training women from underrepresented communities in social and lab-based sciences. The sexual division of labor is a hallmark of human societies that requires men and women to trade off allocation of individual time and energy between productive work and childcare. While evolutionary explanations for sex differences in these activities are rooted in the different reproductive roles of males and females, suggesting less flexibility for women than for men, empirical evidence suggests a great deal of variability in women's behavior. This project will highlight variability in women's productive work and risk preferences within a society where women show considerably more occupational variability and engage in significant risk-taking economic behavior. We will use a robust between- and within-individuals study design that employs mixed data collection methods in order to characterize behavioral and physiological flexibility and the costs and benefits for employing particular work and childcare strategies. The scope of this project will contribute to theory and knowledge about the evolutionary importance of variation in women's tradeoffs in three specific ways: 1) Results will challenge a pervasive notion in evolutionary theory about the human sexual division of labor with a case study of women who exhibit cross-culturally rare subsistence and parenting behavior; 2) Physiological correlates of behavior will shed light on the function of women's productive strategies and risk preferences; 3) Economic and health outcomes of women's productive strategies and risk preferences will tease apart costs and benefits of these behaviors and determine the nature of tradeoffs made by women. The broader goal is to contribute to a more comprehensive socioecological model of the human sexual division of labor that foregrounds the variability of women's tradeoffs in their familial and societal roles. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.