The Gender Cliff in the Relative Contribution to the Household Income: Insights from Modelling Marriage Markets in 27 Eu
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The Gender Cliff in the Relative Contribution to the Household Income: Insights from Modelling Marriage Markets in 27 European Countries André Grow1 · Jan Van Bavel2 Received: 19 November 2018 / Accepted: 3 December 2019 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In Western countries, the distribution of relative incomes within marriages tends to be skewed in a remarkable way. Husbands usually do not only earn more than their female partners, but there is also a striking discontinuity in their relative contribu‑ tions to the household income at the 50/50 point: many wives contribute just a bit less than or as much as their husbands, but few contribute more. This ‘cliff’ has been interpreted as evidence that men and women avoid situations where a wife would earn more than her husband, since this would go against traditional gender norms. In this paper, we use a simulation approach to model marriage markets and demon‑ strate that a cliff in the relative income distribution can also emerge without such avoidance. We feed our simulations with income data from 27 European countries. Results show that a cliff can emerge from inequalities in men’s and women’s average incomes, even if they do not attach special meaning to a situation in which a wife earns more than her husband. Keywords Marriage markets · Income · Gender norms · Gender inequality · Simulation modelling
1 Introduction Women’s labour market opportunities have improved dramatically since the mid of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1960s, women have entered higher educa‑ tion in ever greater numbers and nowadays they often outperform men in terms of enrolment and success in tertiary education (Blossfeld and Buchholz 2009; DiPrete * André Grow [email protected] 1
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad‑Zuse‑Straße 1, 18057 Rostock, Germany
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Centre for Sociological Research, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
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and Buchmann 2013; Van Bavel et al. 2018). This was paralleled by an increase in female labour force participation and an influx of women into previously maledominated occupations of high status (Baxter et al. 2005; Cha 2013; Goldin 2014; Ruggles 2015). Because of these changes, some scholars have expected marriages to become increasingly gender egalitarian, meaning that spouses would become more and more similar in their labour force participation and contributions to the eco‑ nomic well-being of their families (e.g., Jalovaara 2012; Nock 2001; Oppenheimer 1988; Torr 2011). There is evidence that the economic roles that men and women play within their families have indeed become more similar over time (Blossfeld and Buchholz 2009; Goldscheider et al. 2015; Sweeney and Cancian 2004; Torr 2011). However, marked gender differences still exist in many areas of life (Bailey and DiPrete 2016; England 2010; Esping-Andersen 2009; Goldin 2014; Ridgeway 2011), also when it comes to the financial contributions
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