Work-family conflict: The effects of religious context on married women's participation in the labor force

Abstract

Past work shows religion's effect on women's career decisions, particularly when these decisions involve work-family conflict. This study argues that the religious context of a geographic area also influences women's solutions to work-family conflict through more or less pervasive normative expectations within the community regarding women's roles and responsibilities to the family. We use the American Community Survey linked with community-level religious proportions to test the relationship between religious contexts and women's participation in the labor force in the contiguous United States-2054 census geographic areas. Using spatial analysis, we find that community religious concentration is related to the proportion of women who choose not to work. Communities with a higher proportion of the population belonging to conservative religious traditions also have a greater proportion of married women choosing not to work outside the home. © 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.