Knowledge that Transforms

Decades of research shows that holding and maintaining multiple social roles leads to better mental health and well-being overall, but role-accumulation theory has not proposed or considered whether effects vary at different stages in the life course. Rather, the current theory assumes that social roles’ positive influence on mental health should be similar at all ages. In addition, extant work suggests that accumulating roles that are more voluntary than obligatory is the best strategy for mental health, regardless of age. In contrast, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that in later life, adults tend to reduce their number of social roles, especially voluntary ones, as a strategy to maximize mental health. Using 21 waves/years of longitudinal data on Australian adults, we examine the effect of role-accumulation across the entire adult life course. Fixed-effects models show that the types of roles matter, with obligatory role-accumulation associated with better mental health at most ages, but not in late adulthood. In contrast, voluntary role-accumulation is beneficial at all ages, and especially for the mental health of older adults. The findings mostly support role-accumulation theory’s predictions and highlight the importance of voluntary roles for lifelong well-being. Our results suggest that creating more voluntary role opportunities that are accessible to all ages can benefit older individuals, communities, and population health more broadly.

Previous research on occupational devaluation typically evaluates the potential wage declines associated with a significant inflow of women into an occupation; results have been mixed. Few studies, however, examine the cultural mechanism central to the thesis, where an occupation’s symbolic value in multiple dimensions changes in response to the dynamics of its cultural association with women. This article proposes a new semantic approach to trace the devaluation process in U.S. culture, where occupation titles appear in scholarly and public discourses with varied semantic proximity to gender- and prestige-signaling phrases over time. Decade-specific occupation embedding (1900 to 2019) from 127 billion words of American English across genres and a novel fixed-effects estimator show a latent cultural bias against women’s work, such that an occupation’s general prestige and perceived potency (but not its moral standing) declines when it becomes increasingly stereotyped as female. The largest penalties are found in lower- and middle-wage occupations; most high-wage occupations, despite experiencing large increases in female share in recent years, are persistently stereotyped as male professions without a prestige loss. In total, the cultural mechanism of devaluation accounts for 22.4 to 25.9 percent of the observed negative link between occupations’ female typing and hourly wages.