Panacea or Pitfall? Women's Part-time Employment and Marital Stability in West Germany, UK and US
Part-time employment, overwhelmingly taken up by women, is advocated as a means of achieving work-life balance. British, German and US panel data are used to test competing hypotheses regarding the effect of married women’s employment on divorce risk across countries representing different earner-carer and part-time work regimes. Results provide no support for the independence hypothesis; where effects are significant, wives’ part-time or full-time employment predicts more stable marriages as compared with wives out of the labor force. The optimal mix, however, varies across the countries. West German couples where the wife (but not mothers) works part-time are significantly more stable, whereas UK couples where the wife works full-time are most stable. Divorce risk in both countries begins to rise, however, as wives’ relative earnings increase, suggesting persistent tensions between economic necessity and traditional gender roles. Only in the US did a mother’s (not wives’) part-time employment significantly decrease divorce risk. So only in the country with no policy support for work-life balance did the reduced-hours strategy predict more stable marriages for parents. The differences across contexts indicate minimal reinforcement of a male breadwinner model allows modern families to balance economic and familial pressures more successfully.
Cooke, L., Gash, V.