The Impact of Women’s Adolescence on Future Career Success

Isabella Lozano
Dr. O’Geen
POL 201
December 5, 2018
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Introduction
Preparing for the real world and the workforce begins with an individual’s development
at a young age. Learning starts in the home and continues into school. Adolescence, in particular,
becomes a crucial period for social and cognitive development that translates into during success
in adulthood. The period of adolescence is generally “the transition between childhood and
adulthood.”1 The brain is still developing at this point which places an emphasis on learning in
high school and developing new skills. In particular, I want to research what factors during
adolescence translate into how successful women are as adults? I chose to use the Height and
Wage of Men and Women in the US from Real Stats to evaluate this question. This dataset is
comprised of survey results from a sample of 12,686 men and women in the United States. I will
specifically be examining the survey results for the women only. I believe that how hard a girl is
willing to work and push themselves in high school and the example parents display illustrates
how successful they are in the workforce.
Hypotheses
The first hypothesis is women who have parents in a professional or managerial position
will have a higher adult hourly wage. Daughters begin looking up to their parents as role models
at a young age. Family life proceeds to be what kids perceive as the norm. Therefore, when a
child sees their parents working hard to provide for their families at a high-level job, this
becomes what a child sees as being the standard for successful adults. Parent’s setting this
example may push women to similarly strive for a professional/ managerial occupation and be
successful. Women with this goal of being prosperous in the working world may push
themselves harder and receive a higher wage than those who did not see their parents succeeding
in a professional or managerial occupation. I will examine the relationship of parent’s example
they set for their kids and success in the workforce by looking at the adult hourly wages of
women who have a mom or dad in a professional/ managerial position compared to women who
do not have a mom or dad with this job.
The second hypothesis is women who participated in athletics during high school will
have a higher adult hourly wage. Being an athlete in high school allows adolescents to develop
unique skills that aid in succeeding later in life. These skills include experience with teamwork
and leadership which translate into the workforce. Time management is also learned from
juggling school work and commitments for a sport. Additionally, athletics provide young girls
with the opportunity to set goals for themselves such as scoring in a game or getting faster.
Women who obtained these skills that come with participating in athletics will be able to apply
their knowledge to a job and have the opportunity to be more successful. To examine this
relationship, I will look at the effect that participation in athletics during high school has on adult
hourly wage compared to those who did not participate.
Finally, the third hypothesis is women who were involved in clubs during high school
will have a higher adult hourly wage. Similar to participating in athletics, participating in clubs
requires time management and teamwork. High school clubs give students the opportunity to
apply what they learn in the classroom into real-life situations. Clubs also allow advancement of
social skills that can be used to be successful in jobs. The girls that push themselves to be
involved in student organizations are likely hard workers and determined to achieve goals.
Therefore, participation in high school clubs will allow women to be more successful and obtain

1 Ginny Ryan, "Adolescence Is an Important Time of Change," University of Iowa Hospitals &
Clinics, November 09, 2018, https://uihc.org/health-topics/adolescence-important-time-change.
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a higher wage than the women who did not participate in clubs. I will be looking at the number
of club memberships in high school and how the participation in more clubs affects hourly wage.
Data2
Table 1: Data Summary of Wages for Women in the U.S.
Statistic Min Median Mean Max St. Dev.
Wage 0 9.577 12.681 380.769 13.47037
Mom’s Job 0 0 0.09624 1 0.2949679
Dad’s Job 0 0 0.1812 1 0.3852256
Clubs 0 1 0.8789 6 1.112893
Athletics 0 0 0.3624 1 0.4807569

In order to look exclusively at women in this model, I subsetted the dataset to exclude
information for males. I additionally subsetted the data so the variable, adult hourly wages,
includes wages up to $400 an hour. This will give a closer look to the effect of the independent
variables on wages by eliminating outliers. After I subsetted the data, the total sample size used
in this regression in 3,273 women. To measure adult success in women’s perspective jobs, I
looked at hourly wages as an adult. A high hourly wage is an indicator of prosperity in the
workforce compared to lower hourly wages. Therefore, the dependent variable in the regression
is adult hourly wage (wage96). For the independent variables of the regression, I used the
dummy variables for mothers and the dummy variable for fathers in a professional or managerial
occupation (mompro2 & poppro2), the dummy variable for participation in athletics during high
school (athletics), and the variable for the number of clubs participated in during high school
(clubnum).
The dependent variable, adult hourly wage, has a range from $0 to $380.77. A low wage
compared to a high wage is operationalized as a value less than the average hourly wage from
this variable. The mean hourly wage is 12.68079. Therefore, the average hourly wage for women
as adults is $12.68 per hour. The highest adult hourly wage I will examine from the data set is
$380.77. The lowest is $0 which likely indicates that the woman does not have a job. The
standard deviation for this variable is 13.47037. This means that a data point will be about
13.47% away from the mean ($12.68), on average.
The independent variable, mother in a professional or managerial occupation, has a range
from 0 to 1. For this dummy variable, 1 indicates the woman’s mom holds a professional/
managerial occupation and 0 signifies that their mom does not hold this occupation. The mean is
0.09624. This indicates that from all the women included in this model, 9.6% have a mom who
has a professional or managerial job. This low number shows that it is not very common for
women to have moms that hold this type of job or any job. More specifically, from this model,
there are 315 women who have a mom that holds a professional/ managerial job and 2,958 that
do not. The standard deviation for this variable is 0.29497. This variable is used to test the first
hypothesis of a parent’s professional/ managerial job having a positive relationship with
women’s adult hourly wage.
The independent variable, father in a professional or managerial occupation, is also a
dummy variable. The range is 0 to 1. 1 indicates the woman’s dad holds a professional/
managerial occupation and 0 signifies that their dad did not hold this occupation. The mean of
this variable is 0.1812 which shows that 18.12% of the women have a dad who has a

2 Figure 1 shows the data summary for each variable that is being used in this regression.
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professional or managerial position. This mean is higher than the mean for women’s moms with
the occupation, but it is still pretty low. In total, 593 women have a dad who has a professional/
managerial position while 2,680 do not. The standard deviation is 0.38523. This variable is also
being used to test the first hypothesis of a parent’s professional/ managerial job having a positive
relationship with women’s adult hourly wage.
Participation in a sports team during high school is another independent variable. This
dummy variable ranges from 0 to 1. In this athletics variable, a 1 is given if a woman who
participated in athletics during high school while a 0 indicates no participation. The variable’s
mean is 0.3624. Therefore, of all the women in this model, 36.24% of them said they participated
in athletics. Specifically, there are 1161 who participated in athletics in high school and 2043
who did not participate. The standard deviation is 0.48076. This variable is being used to test the
second hypothesis of athletic participation having a positive relationship with women’s adult
hourly wage.
The last independent variable is the number of clubs that women participated in during
high school. This variable ranges from 0 to 6. 6 is the highest number of clubs that women from
this dataset participated in while 0, no clubs, is the lowest amount. This variable’s mean is
0.8789 showing that on average, women participated in about 1 club during high school. More
precisely, 1,582 women did not participate in any clubs while 1,622 women participated in at
least 1 club (up to 6 clubs). Only 3 women participated in 6 clubs showing that this number of
clubs is not common among this sample of women. The standard deviation is 1.11289. This
variable is used to test the third hypothesis that participation in clubs has a positive relationship
with women’s adult hourly wage.
Analysis3
Table 2: Multivariate OLS Analysis of Wages for Women in the U.S.
Adult Hourly Wage
Mom’s Job 3.426***
(1.131)
Dad’s Job 3.748***
(0.885)
Athletic Participation 2.248***
(0.713)
Number of Clubs 0.805**
(0.315)
Constant 10.196***
(0.462)
N 3204
R-squared 0.022
Adj. R-squared 0.021
Residual Std. Error 18.426 (df = 3199)
F Statistic 17.956*** (df = 4; 3199)

3 The results of this model’s regression can be seen in Figure 2.

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***p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .1

The r-squared value is 0.02196 which means the model explains 2.17% of the variability.
This is a low number showing that this model explains very little of the variability of this data.
This does not give much validation to the goodness of fit. Despite this dataset being subsetted to
exclude outliers, still, some remain which impacts the variability. This can be seen for each
independent variable in the scatterplot graphs in the Appendix. However, as the results show,
there are statistically significant variables which conclusions can still be drawn from. Regarding
the residual standard error, there are 18.83 on 3,199 degrees of freedom. This assesses the
strength of fit for this model by telling us that the observed variables are on average 18.83 values
away from the regression line. This is a relatively low number that portrays the model’s
goodness of fit. Overall, there was no detected significant multicollinearity between the variables
as the dependent variables are not highly correlated. In this model, there is a total of 69
observations which were deleted due to missingness.
The intercept for this regression model is 10.196. This is the value of the adult hourly
wage when the independent variables are equal to 0. Therefore, when a woman did not
participate in clubs or athletics in high school and neither one of their parents hold a professional
or managerial job, the woman’s adult hourly wage is estimated to be $10.19. Examining the
coefficients for the independent variables will show their effect on adult hourly wages.
First, the coefficient for the dummy variable, women who have a mom in a
professional/managerial position, is 3.426. This coefficient is statistically significant at the level
of α< 0.01 with a t-score of 3.030 and a p-value of 0.00246. Statistical significance is evident
because the t-score is greater than 2 and the p-value is less than 0.01. From this coefficient, it can
be concluded that women who have a mom who holds a professional/ managerial job have an
hourly adult wage that is $3.43 higher than women who do not have a mom with this job. This
coefficient supports my hypothesis that women who have parents, specifically a mom, with a
professional/ managerial position have a higher adult hourly wage.
The dummy variable, women who have a dad in a professional/ managerial position, has
a coefficient of 3.748. This variable is highly statistically significant at the level of α< 0.001. The
t-score is 4.237 and the p-value is 0.00002. This coefficient tells us that women who have a dad
with a professional/managerial job have an adult hourly that is $3.75 higher than those who do
not have a dad with this job. This also supports my hypothesis that women who have parents, in
this case a dad, with a professional/ managerial position have a higher adult hourly wage. A dad
having this type of job affects women’s wage slightly more than a mom having this job. Both of
the results of the dummy variables for moms and dads who have a professional managerial
position both have a positive relationship with the adult hourly wage.
Next, the coefficient for the high school athletics participation dummy variable is 2.2476.
This coefficient is statistically significant at the level of α< 0.01 with a t-score of 3.151 and a p-
value of 0.00164. The t-score is greater than 2 and the p-value is less than 0.01. It can be
concluded that women who participated in athletics during high school have an adult hourly
wage that is $2.25 more than women who did not participate in athletics. This variable has a
positive relationship with the adult hourly wage. Therefore, it provides support for my
hypothesis that women who participated in athletics during high school have a higher adult
hourly wage than the women that did not participate.
Lastly, the variable for the number of clubs that women participated in high school has a
coefficient of 0.8053. This coefficient is statistically significant, barely, at the level of α< 0.05.
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The t-score is 2.559 which is greater than 2 and the p-value is 0.01056 which is less than 0.05.
This coefficient shows us that an increase in participation by 1 club results in an increase in adult
hourly wage by $0.81. This variable has a positive relationship with the dependent variable and
supports my hypothesis that women who participated in clubs have a higher adult hourly wage
than those who did not participate.

Conclusion
This regression shows that factors of adolescence, specifically participation in athletics
and clubs during high school as well as parents having a professional or managerial position,
affect women’s adult hourly wage. With this regression explaining only 2.19% of the variation,
97.80% of the variability of adult hourly wages is not explained which restricts the results from
being generalized. This shows us that there are a lot of other factors that affect wage and that are
not accounted for in this model. Adding more variables that affect wage would improve the
predicted values. It is also important to take into account that outliers that the independent
variables have. This regression has a small effect size, but the coefficients are statistically
significant, so the results can still be interpreted. From the results, it is apparent that parents
having a professional/managerial job increases women’s adult hourly wage the most compared to
participation in athletics and clubs. Women whose dad has a professional/ managerial job
experience the highest benefit with an hourly wage that is $3.75 higher than women whose dad
does not have this job. Meanwhile, women whose mom has this job have a $3.43 higher wage.
Also, my results showed that women who participated in athletics have an hourly wage that is
$2.25 higher than those who did not participate. Lastly, participation in clubs has the lowest
impact on wages. However, this regression shows that it still positively impacts wage by
increasing hourly wage by $0.81 for each additional club a woman participated in. Overall, my
hypotheses were supported by this regression with participation in athletics and clubs resulting in
women having a higher wage as well as women with parents in a professional/ managerial
position having a higher wage. The results implicate that parents setting a good example impacts
women’s success the most. It is also implicated that skills learned from extracurricular activities
during high school translate into success later in life, but with a small effect size.
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Appendix

Graph 1: Scatterplot of the dummy variable for moms with a professional/ managerial
position.

Graph 2: Scatterplot of the dummy variable for dads with a professional/ managerial
position.
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Graph 3: Scatterplot of the dummy variable for athletic participation during high school.

Graph 4: Scatterplot of the variable for number of clubs participated in.

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Bibliography
Bailey, Michael A. Real Stats: Using Econometrics for Political Science and Public Policy. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Ryan, Ginny. "Adolescence Is an Important Time of Change." University of Iowa Hospitals &
Clinics. November 09, 2018. https://uihc.org/health-topics/adolescence-important-time-
change.