Unequal Unions? Marriage, Earnings Trajectories, and Intrahousehold Inequality in Same-Sex and Different-Sex Couples

• In Event: LGBTQ+ Families

Abstract

Despite a large body of research on earnings differentials by marital status, relatively little compares married and cohabiting individuals—a gap that has grown more consequential as cohabitation has become an increasingly common and stable living arrangement in many industrialized societies. Moreover, existing studies have focused almost exclusively on different-sex couples, where men’s comparative advantage in paid work coincides with normative breadwinner expectations, making it difficult to disentangle economic mechanisms from gender norms or selection from marriage effects themselves. Same-sex couples provide crucial analytical leverage, allowing us to clarify these mechanisms while holding gender constant within the couple. Using novel linked Canadian administrative tax records (1982-2022) and Census data (2016, 2021), this study examines three interrelated questions: (1) How do individual earnings and earnings inequality within couples differ between married and cohabiting partners, and how does the couple’s gender composition shape these patterns? (2) How do these earnings outcomes change as couples transition from cohabitation to marriage, and do trajectories differ by for individuals in same-sex and different-sex couples? Finally, (3) to what extent does parenthood moderate these associations? To address these questions, I estimate random-effects models to capture population-level earnings differences between married and cohabiting individuals, and fixed-effects event study models to isolate within-person changes as couples transition to marriage, together disentangling selection into marriage from its effects on household specialization. By differentiating individual gender from gendered relational dynamics, this study unpacks key mechanisms driving marriage-related earnings inequality within and between couples. Empirically, this study is among the first to provide longitudinal evidence on marriage effects for same-sex couples, advancing our understanding of sexual-minority work-family dynamics in the post-marriage-equality era.

Author

• Chih-lan (Winnie) Yang, University of Alberta