The Changing Role of the Partner’s Labour Market Resources for Female Employment Careers in Germany

• In Event: 250 - Regular Session. Work-Family in International Context

Abstract

The paper investigates cohort trends in how the educational and occupational status of both spouses in a partnership shapes employment dynamics over women’s life courses. Theories and previous research suggest opposing mechanisms. The income effect, economic theory and gendered division of labour assume that partners with a higher status provide a disincentive for women’s employment, while social capital theory predicts a positive effect of a high status partner who can share labour market skills and motivation. In this paper we analyze the German Socio-Economic Panel and apply event history analyses of transitions out of the labour force and back into part-time and full-time employment for four cohorts of German women born between 1955 and 1979. We show that over cohorts a woman’s own education and occupational status has become a stronger predictor of her employment transitions, while the effect of her partner’s position has become weaker. In the earliest cohort, having a high status partner was related to women’s labour market exit but this effect neutralized over the cohorts and even reversed in the most recent cohort. The negative relationship between a partner’s high education level and a woman’s labour market return to full-time employment also became weaker over the cohorts. We illustrate the repercussions for different types of partnership constellation and conclude that these trends have led to an increased divergence in in female employment participation between high-status and low-status homogamous partnerships.

Authors

• Leen Vandecasteele, University of Tübingen

• Frederike Esche, Humboldt University-Berlin