Working Conditions and Marital Dissolution

• In Event: 381 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Union Dissolution

Abstract

The vast demographic changes in families and workplace in the U.S. accompany with increasing demands of work and family involvement. Understanding the relationship between work and family can reveal how the new economy competes and negotiates with family, and what people pay to sustain the system. Applying JD-R model to NLSY79 with discrete-time hazard model, this study discusses how specific dimensions of working conditions influence the risk of divorce. The results show a full time job lower men’s divorce risk they encounter. In contrast, longer working hours influence women’s marital stability. Women who work at rotated shift suffer from higher risk of divorce than those at fixed shift. Personal income has no significant influence on men’s divorce risk, while women’s personal income is positively related to the risk of divorce. In addition, fringe benefits cannot effectively predict the risk of divorce for men, whereas paid sick days reduce women’s divorce risk, and health insurance facilitates women’s willing to get divorced. In summary, the influence of working conditions on divorce depends on the image of conventional gender division of labor in household. Although women’s employment keep going up, and gender equality spread widely, conventional breadwinner-homemaker family seems not be challenged for couples of NLSY79 cohort, as well as women’s disadvantages in the labor market, which forces women to stay in marriage.

Author

• Shih-Yi Chao