Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 23, 1995 TAG: 9505230082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
If you rate a happy family life as more important than a successful career, your reward, ironically, may be a plumper paycheck.
This finding, in a national study by the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, may be some comfort to millions of overextended Americans confronting the difficult task of balancing commitments to work and family.
Wharton researchers found higher earnings among workers who early in life had told researchers they rated a good marriage and finding the right spouse as very important.
The 4,268 respondents were surveyed as high school seniors in 1972. In a follow-up study 14 years later, those who had rated a strong family life as a major goal reported higher hourly earnings than their peers: 4 percent higher for women and 7 percent higher for men.
Their earnings were even higher than those of peers who as students had rated such career-oriented goals as success at work, having a lot of money, and finding a steady job as very important.
The Wharton researchers' confidence in their findings was heightened by the discovery that the pattern of greater earnings for workers committed to family also held true for women. Women generally are assumed to experience greater work-family conflicts because they often undertake a larger share of family responsibilities.
For some time, economists have known that married men earn markedly better pay, from 10 percent to 50 percent more, than their single counterparts.
Those studies, however, have not fully explained why married workers are better paid. Conventional managerial wisdom and some sociological studies suggest there are trade-offs involved in emphasizing family over work.
But the Wharton study proposes that the job market provides yet another example of the truism preachers so often repeat at wedding ceremonies: that the rewards of matrimony depend on each partner's level of commitment.
``Paying attention to family early on is going to pay off,'' said Peter Cappelli, lead researcher in the study and co-director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.
Cappelli and his co-authors, Jill Constantine of Williams College and Clint Chadwick of Wharton, theorize that support from a strong family helps offset the strain of workplace problems.
Moreover, they contend, if extra effort put into work early in life comes at the cost of neglecting family, the burden of an unraveling marriage later probably more than makes up for any boost to a career.
``How much does it cost you to have trouble with your wife, a divorce, trouble with your kids? That's disruptive in a huge way to your life,'' Cappelli said.
Sanders Korenman, the author of several other studies on the impact of marriage on wages, cautioned that the Wharton study should not be read as proof that there is an economic reward for cutting back on late nights at the office to have dinner at home.
``It's not clear that [the attention to family] is coming out of work effort. It may be that these people spend less time bar hopping, going to movies and things like that,'' said Korenman, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Memo: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.