This chapter deals with the father's role and gender attitudes as possible links between the mother's employment status and child outcomes. The focus here is on academic outcomes, because previous research has suggested that father involvement may enhance children's cognitive competence (Gottfried, Gottfried, & Bathurst, 1988, 1995), and previous chapters in this volume have shown both that fathers were more active in household tasks and child care when mothers were employed (Chapter 4) and that children of employed mothers obtained higher scores on achievement tests (Chapter 7). There are four routes by which effects of maternal employment on children might be carried by the father's role that are described in Chapter 1. The first three of these routes are depicted in Figure 8.1.

The first route (see Figure 8.1 A) is that interaction with a father has special advantages for children, particularly with respect to competence in math. An alternative to this hypothesis was suggested in Chapter 1: fathers' involvement with children may prove cognitively advantageous, not so much because it is different in style from mothers', but because it augments the amount of attention the child receives.

The second route (see Figure 8. 1B) is that, to the extent that maternal employment functions to move parental roles in a less traditional direction, daughters will benefit with respect to their achievement patterns and sense of competence. This route has two forms: (1) this will occur because they observe a more equalitarian relationship between their parents; and (2) this will occur because the merging of parental roles that accompanies maternal employment diminishes parents' gender-role stereotypes.