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Marriage, Women’s Work Trajectories & Family Income in Three Countries
Tue, August 11, 2:30 to 4:10pm PDT (2:30 to 4:10pm PDT), Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Floor: 4th Floor, Union Square 14Abstract
Married women in Western nations have embraced the breadwinner role with varying levels of enthusiasm. Do these differences in career trajectories within marriage have an impact on household income inequality? We investigate the relationship between women's labor market decisions and income inequality in marital households in the United States, Germany and Britain. We use panel data models to investigate the development of couples’ work careers and women’s earnings in the first five years following union formation, and we simulate income inequality under alternative assumptions about household labor supply, marital stability and welfare state support for working families. Our analysis of career trajectories points to important ways in which cross-national differences in institutional settings structure women’s work careers: in the United States, women experience steep penalties for labor market withdrawal, especially in the early career, and substantial penalties for part-time work. Women respond to these incentives by maintaining high levels of full-time participation after marriage and childbirth. In Britain, recent minimum-wage legislation alleviates some but not all of the wage penalties associated with part-time work. Despite these disadvantages, part-time employment rates among married women are substantially higher in Britain than in the United States. In Germany, women’s wages are protected by three distinctive features of the German labor market: a credential-based occupational structure, centralized wage-setting that precludes the development of sharp wage differentials for part-time work, and extensive employment protections for women who withdraw temporarily following childbirth. Results from simulations of family income inequality suggest that women’s labor force participation is an important component of country-level income inequality.