How Sexism in Institutions and Everyday Interactions Shapes Early Childbearing

Abstract

Early childbearing is associated with poor outcomes for parents and children, potentially exacerbating inequality within and across generations. Building on the structural sexism and health perspective, we argue that systemic gender inequality is a conceptually important—and understudied—factor in early childbearing. Using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 5,052 female respondents and 32,595 person-years) merged to state, county, and school characteristics, we investigate how exposure to structural sexism during adolescence shapes early childbearing. We measure structural sexism in institutional domains with state and county-level measures of economic, cultural, and reproductive health. We also generate a novel measure of structural sexism in interactional domains, capturing gendered expectations, power dynamics, and conservative religious beliefs among school peers. We find that institutional sexism is associated with a higher likelihood of early childbearing among young women racialized as Black, but not among those racialized as White. Interactional sexism is also a significant predictor of early childbearing, and is especially salient for adolescents as they turn to peers for social cues about gender roles. Our results underscore the importance of institutional and interactional forces for shaping families and raise questions about increasingly polarized gender climates post-Dobbs.