The ‘Secondary’ Spouse: Exploring Differences in Relative Earning Contribution in Asian and White Households 2021-2024

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 15. Immigrant labor market and earnings

Abstract

Extant literature across disciplines has cogently demonstrated that women’s paid labor force participation is a complex process. The intention, preference and the decision to act on them is a function of both macro level labor market opportunity and micro level socioeconomic characteristics and less measurable gender ideology. One of the critical variables universally is the woman’s marital status. Paid labor force participation by married women has implications on a raft of dimensions such as empowerment level, gender- role specialization and gender earning differential. These implications become significant given the percentage of married couple households, as of 2024, wherein both men and women are working, is, at 49.6% considerable. Furthermore, proportion of married couple families in which only the husband is employed declined from 35% in 1975 to 19.1% in 2020. Further factor that is relevant is immigration status. Extant scholarship on race-ethnic differentials in employment and earnings contributions by married women tends to be limited to Blacks, Hispanics, or Whites. This study employing the 1% pooled samples of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 American Community Survey (ACS) data investigates variations in wives’ earning contributions as measured by wives total annual earnings as a proportion of total annual husbands’ earnings among six foreign born Asian groups, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese disaggregated by ethnicity status relative to native born non-Hispanic Whites.

Author

• Veena S. Kulkarni, Arkansas State University-Main Campus