Do ’his’ education and class matter?
The changing effect of the husband on women’s labour-market transitions
in Italy and Britain
C
RISTINAS
OLERAAbstract
A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasizes individualization as the key process in late modernity. As maintained by Hakim, also women have increasingly become agents of their own biographies, less influenced by the social class and the family. In this study, I intend to contribute to this debate by analysing how, in Italy and Britain, women’s movements between employment and housework are linked to their husband's education and class, and how this link has changed across cohorts. Using discrete-time event-history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, my findings show that in both countries, if the woman’s educational and labour-market profile is controlled for, the husband’s occupation and education have lost importance. Yet, although based more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, divisions along ’classic’ lines are still evident and not context-free, and they assume different forms in the two countries with distinctive institutional and cultural settings. In ‘liberal’ Britain, women’s labour-market participation responds more to motherhood and class than to education, while in ‘familistic’ Italy education seems more important, which suggests the existence of returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.
Keywords: Couples/Women’s employment/Husband/ Class/Education/ Individualization
Number of words: 8550 (including abstract, keywords, text, notes, references)
Introduction
A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasises individualization as the key process in late modernity. It claims that ‘classic’ social stratification factors have lost importance so that actors choose more freely and countries increasingly converge (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Giddens 1991; Lesthaeghe 2010). As maintained by Crompton (2006), Hakim’s ‘preference theory’ on women’s employment patterns (Hakim 1998; 2000) can be seen as part of these late-modern cultural accounts. This paper conducts a ‘test’ of Hakim’s and individuation arguments by focusing on the linked lives of men and women within families, and especially on the changing effect of the husband on the wife’s labour supply. The paper’s approach to these issues has three distinctive features.
First, unlike most previous studies focused either on a short time period (Bernardi 1999; Bratti 2003; Pronzato 2007) or on a single country (Joshi and Hinde 1993; Jacobs 1999), this study uses a twofold comparison: across space, by analyzing two countries, Italy and Britain, with very different institutional and cultural settings; and across time, by comparing four different birth cohorts of women who have built their families and careers in different historical periods, thus facing different sets of opportunities and constraints. Secondly, the study draws on retrospective life-course data up to 2005 (namely, the ‘British Household Panel Survey’- BHPS and ‘Indagine longitudinale sulle famiglie italiane’- ILFI) and focuses on a relatively large span of women’s life courses (from one year before first marriage to 40 years, or end of first marriage, if occurring earlier). It accordingly analyses labour-market transitions by considering both the risk of exiting paid work to become a ‘housewife’ (devoted fulltime to domestic and care work), and the risk of re-entering paid work having interrupted it.
Third, this paper models the effect of partner’s resources by considering both education and class, and both for ‘her’ and ‘him’. This allows me to address the following questions: have Italian and British women’s labor-market movements become more independent from the husband’s resources, in line with
individuation accounts? Yet, are divides still observable although more based on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, and are they taking context-specific forms, being more based on education or on occupation, which is opposed to individuation claims?. Put otherwise, by including education and class simultaneously, in this paper I can see whether, in that given country and cohort, his/her occupational position absorbs the effect of his/her education or whether education retains a significant influence net of it, suggesting that investments in education have returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.
The debate: increasing individualization in women’s life courses?
It is indubitable that in all developed countries, compared to their ‘mothers’ and ‘grandmothers’, women in younger generations not only study and work more, postponing and reducing entry into marriage and motherhood, but they also more often combine work and family. However, these processes have occurred in complex ways, with variations across countries and social groups, and with persistent gaps in the work-family arrangements of men, so that commentators speak of a ‘stalled revolution’ (England 2010) or an ‘incomplete revolution’ (Esping-Andersen 2009).
A large number of arguments have been put forward within sociology, economics and demography to account for this increased but still diverse participation of women in the labour market. In response to Hakim’s ‘preference theory’ (1998; 2000), in recent decades the debate has rotated in particular around the weight of and interplay between preferences and constraints, agency and structure. As well known, Hakim challenges what she considers to be the dominant feminist view on women’s’ employment patterns: career breaks or part-time work, she argues, are not choices forced on women against their will by their family responsibilities and the insufficient welfare provision of child-care services. Rather, women’s disadvantaged and heterogeneous position in the labour market reflects the outcome of their differing family-work attitudes. As argued by Crompton (2006), preference theory can be seen as part of the stream in sociological theories that emphasizes individualization as the driving force behind change in late modernity. According to these theories, so called ‘of individuation and reflexive modernity’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
2002; Giddens 1991), individuals are still subject to inequalities and constraints of various kinds, but they have become agents of their own biographies, rather than followers of structurally determined pathways based on fixed social positions and models of the ‘good’ life. Individualization frees people from the influence not only of the social class but also of the family: partner relationships becomes, à la Giddens, ‘pure relationships’ based on a greater choice and a more equal relationship between men and women, and lasting only as long as both partners are happy with it, not because of tradition or a sense of commitment. Within this new ‘late-modern’ scenario, women are less constrained to enter marriages or to adhere to a traditional division of gender roles, so that also the effect of what the husband does on the wife’s employment has weakened. Moreover, convergence rather than divergence across countries is predicted: as also the proponents of the second demographic transition theory and modernisation theory posit, processes of secularization, weakening dependence on the family, and increasing emphasis on self-realization are generating an evident shift from gender-role traditionalism to egalitarianism, and they are spreading from Northern Europe to the rest of the developed world, leading to common patterns and outcomes (Lesthaeghe 2010; Inglehart and Norris 2003).
In line with individuation-type expectations, there is a body of evidence indicating that, as women’s orientations towards and investments in education and work have increased, their choices concerning the life course have become more individualized, and that the ‘partner effect’ has weakened. For example, studying the British case Dex et al. (1998) show that, whereas for women born just after the war the occupational position of their husbands and the region in which they lived were the main determinants of their employment behaviour, by the 1970s women’s own characteristics, in primis their human capital, had become much more important. In Italy, too, using data from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bratti (2003) shows that husband’s income has the expected negative sign on the wife’s probability of being in the labour market, but its effect is much smaller than her own wage.
Yet, the evidence of a declining ‘husband effect’ is consistent also with human capital-new home economic theory and the logic of opportunity costs which, unlike Hakim, assumes intra-women
homogeneity of preferences and posits the central role of economic not cultural drivers. It is also consistent with those who argue that in post-industrial societies, where both labour markets and families are unstable, women’s attachment to the labour market has become not only more desired but also more necessary (Esping-Andersen 2009). Moreover, in contrast with both standard economic- and individuation-type hypotheses, this decline in the ‘husband effect’ appears to have different timing and forms across countries. According to various scholars, a cross-national convergence has not been achieved because institutional and cultural contexts not only constrain or enable choices, providing different opportunities for preference attainment (Gash 2008; Steiber, Berghammer and Haas 2016), but also shape women’s and men’s preferences (Treas and Widmer 2000; Pfau-Effinger 2005; Knudsen and Wærness 2001). In a study on couples’ careers, Blossfeld and Drobnic (2001) for example argue that observed cross-country differences in the effect of the husband’s resources on the wife’s labour-market outcomes largely mirror types of welfare and gender regime, being negative in familistic countries, positive in social democratic countries, and absent in liberal countries. Similarly, and referring to the British case, Crompton and Harris (1998), Rake et al. (2000) and McRae (2003) argue that low- and mid-skilled mothers are markedly more likely to reduce their employment than are mothers with higher skills, because in a ‘liberal’ context like Britain it is class that largely explains women’s ability to act upon preferences and overcome constraints – above all, a lack of public childcare support.
Different types of resources and mechanisms may drive the ‘husband effect’ and thus also its possible decline. According to economists, two opposite mechanisms are at work: due to the ‘price-of-time effect’ (the so called ‘opportunity-cost effect’), the higher a woman’s education, the more she is encouraged to work because she would forgo too high earnings if she stayed at home with a child; due to the ‘income effect’, the higher the husband’s position, the less a married woman is encouraged to work long hours or to strive for a high occupational status (Becker 1981; Borjas 2005). That is, according to economists, ‘her’ high education, taken as proxy of her earnings potentials, pushes towards a high female labor market attachment while ‘his’ high occupation or education, taken as proxy of family income, towards a low one.
According to sociologists, high levels of education and job entail not only monetary but also non-monetary returns, whose distribution and magnitude are context-embedded. These include interesting, meaningful or identity-enhancing work (Gerson 1985), and transmissions of selected norms and values, such as gender equality, autonomy and emancipation (Bryant 2003). For a man, too high education may mean adherence to more gender-egalitarian attitudes, which, contrary to what economic theory predicts, may stimulate his wife’s career (Cunningham, Beutel, Barber and Thornton 2005). Moreover, as social capital scholars note, a higher level of education implies not only greater productivity, but also better knowledge of the labour market, job-seeking capacity, motivation to work, access to extensive and ‘powerful’ networks: all resources that are transferrable to the partner, and that can increase his/her job attainment (Bernasco 1994; Bernardi 1999).
In the ILFI and the BHPS the absence of retrospective information on either wages and other relevant labour-market features, or on attitudes and preferences, prevents the direct testing of these various possible mechanisms (income, attitude or social capital effect). Yet, as argued by Kalmijn and Kraaykamp (2007), an approach that simultaneously considers education and class in a comparative perspective is fruitful. Indeed, although occupational class and education are empirically related, they have different theoretical meanings, so that when they are used simultaneously, class becomes more strongly an economic indicator of stratification, while education becomes a cultural indicator. Moreover, when different contexts over time and/or across space are taken into consideration, it is possible to compare how the micro-level effects of education and class vary across countries and to read this variation as macro-level effects, namely as effects of context.
The ‘husband effect’ in context: hypotheses on Italy and Britain
As many scholars have argued, the effect of education and class on the gender division of paid and unpaid work is institutionally and culturally embedded (Geist 2005; Steiber, Berghammer and Haas 2016). In particular, there is evidence that education polarizes behaviours to a greater extent where a general
cultural shift in favour of non-traditional gender roles has not (fully) occurred (Lück 2006). In such relatively traditional contexts, education not only works as an instrumental human capital investment allowing access to high material resources, that is, entry into primary segments of labour markets and availability of good earnings to buy care (which is particularly important if reconciliation policies are poor). Education also strongly differentiates attitudes, leading to higher approval of ‘modern roles’ and to greater bargaining power in having them accepted (Author 2013). Evidence indicates that Italy is one such traditional gender context where both attitudinal and behavioural change has been largely compositional, driven by the increasing share of women with those characteristics that have always fostered their labour supply, such as childlessness and high education (Schizzerotto, Bison and Zoppe 1995; Künzler 2002; Lomazzi 2017).
By contrast, in Britain a longer history of industrialization and of urban married women’s employment and a much earlier and more intense shift to a ‘women-friendly’ service economy made women’s employment more ‘normal’ already in the post-war decades (Knudsen and Wærness 2001). Compared to Italy, Britain has also experienced a much earlier and more intense family and gender change. In Britain, rates of cohabitation, divorce, and procreation outside marriage have risen significantly, and both the time devoted by men to domestic and care work and the approval of new gender roles have generally increased across cohorts (Künzler 2002; Lück 2006). Yet, also in Britain this approval is limited by a strong emphasis on the centrality of mothers for the best of the child and by a distrust of out-of-home care. Indeed, as shown by Treas and Widmer (2000), Britain exhibits high consensus on the compatibility of paid work with marriage, but very low consensus on its compatibility with the presence of pre-school children. These cultural orientations are in line with the level and type of social policies promoted. With its move from a Beveridgean to a liberal welfare state, in the 1980s and 1990s Britain had one of the lowest provisions of subsidized childcare services, one of the shortest and least generous maternity and parental leave systems, and one of the highest levels of deregulation and de-institutionalisation of the labour market, and in turn wage inequality. Since New Labour’s advent to power in the late 1990s, liberal ideologies have weakened. Yet, because reforms have focused on stimulating demand rather than supply, on assisting the cost of
childcare on the basis of parents’ income and employment status, and on the refusal to reduce normal working hours schedules, they have not greatly reduced divisions between better-off highly-educated mothers and poor ones. In Britain the cost of children is still mainly ‘a private matter’, and the main policy of reconciliation is part-time employment as a low-wage unregulated secondary labour market (Lewis 2003; Wincott 2006).
Although stemming from a familistic rather than a liberal ideology, also in Italy the cost of children has remained ‘a private affair’. In the early 2000s subsidized childcare services covered at national level only 6 per cent of children under three; typical opening hours of the universal pre-primary school were incompatible with fulltime work; a universal financial child allowance still did not exist; and parental leaves extended also to fathers were still paid at 30 per cent of current wages. In Italy the main instrument of reconciliation was and still is the family, with its gender structure and its intergenerational and kinship solidarity, so called ‘granny welfare’ which is so widespread as to cut across different social strata (Bettio and Plantenga 2004; Naldini and Saraceno 2011).1
In light of these different institutional and cultural contexts, I can formulate two hypotheses: H1- More rapid disappearance of the ‘husband effect’ in Britain compared to Italy
In Britain, where married women’s employment started to be widespread and approved much earlier than in Italy, I expect to find a weak or null ‘effect’ of husband’s education and class on married women’s movements between employment and housework already in the oldest cohort. In Italy the ‘husband effect’ disappears later. Indeed, where female participation is less common and traditional gender and family norms, reinforced by a women-unfriendly employment structure, are strong, as in Italy in the post-war decades, also those few selective women entering paid work are influenced by the context. Either because these working women have somehow ‘internalised’
1
Although there is evidence that forms of early childcare vary according to the mother’s and father’s social position (Brilli, Kulic and Triventi 2017), in the postwar decades until the early 2000s (when my data stop) in Italy overall formal childcare reached a maximum of 3% in the South and 12% in the Centre-North and informal private care such as babysitting around 4%, so that the main source of extra-parental care was quite universally grandparents.
traditional norms or because, even if they are ‘modern’, they negotiate with traditional husbands and networks, they do gender by exiting the labour market and not re-entering it when forming a family, unless their work is necessary because they are married to low-educated low-class men. H2- Her class is more important than her education in Britain compared to Italy
In both countries, as the ‘husband effect’ declines, I expect women's own characteristics to become the main determinant of their labour supply, but that they do so in distinctive ways in the two countries. In Italy, I expect education to retain a significant influence net of occupational position because in Italy also in younger cohorts education still strongly differentiates approvals of ‘modern roles’ and the ‘extended family’ still largely compensates for the lack of reconciliation policies. So highly educated women in not high-grade jobs can have access to free-of-charge sources of childcare and thus pursue employment continuity, letting their weaker home-centred preferences emerge and be attained. In Britain, where a highly deregulated labour market has allowed for a wide spread of earnings, along with a residualist welfare state also in the field of reconciliation and a modest ‘extended family’ compensation, it is class that matters most. Education itself does not guarantee employment continuity. Rather, British women who are à la Hakim not ‘home-centred’ need to have spent a long time in the labour market and to have achieved relatively good positions if they are to enjoy some maternity protection and/or sufficient incomes to purchase care.
Data and method
Empirical analyses were based on BHPS and ILFI. The latter is relatively old, but at present it is the only survey in Italy that, in a very similar way to BHPS, combines a retrospective with a prospective panel design and uses standardized interviews on the life-courses of respondents and their adult family members, including partners. More precisely, I used the entire history of the ILFI as collected in the first wave in 1997
and updated until 2005 (the fifth and last wave conducted). For the sake of comparability, also for the BHPS I employed retrospective and prospective information until 2005 (the 15th wave).
In order to study labour-market transitions, I used discrete-time hazard rate models by fitting simple logit regressions to the data. Thus, for the transition out of the labour market, the dependent variable was the log-odds of the monthly conditional probability of leaving employment within a particular month, given that the person had worked until that time and had never stopped to become a full-time housewife (although she may have had episodes of unemployment or other inactivity conditions such as training schemes)2. For the transition back, the dependent variable was the monthly conditional probability of re-entering paid work, given that the woman had exited paid work earlier to become ‘housewife’ and was still not working until that time. Women can move in and out of the labour market more than once over the observed life course. Yet, although quite common in Great Britain already in older cohorts, such movement is rare in Italy. Models for repeated events were thus not applied. Although transitions through part-time work are relevant as another form of women’s adjustments around family formation, deriving from and giving rise to specific gender assumptions and practices (Gash 2008; Verbakel 2010), they were excluded because of data restrictions.3
Being interested in the ‘husband effect’, only the phase of the life course when women were in couples
was analysed, from one year before the start of the marriage to age 40 or to the end of the marriage if it
occurred before age 40. More precisely, I focused only on first marriages and only on those women in couples at the time of the interview (for whom I had the entire occupational history of respondents and their partner). Cohabitations not ending in marriages and second marriages were not considered. Indeed, in contexts where cohabitation and divorce is still quite rare – as in many parts of Italy still today or among 2
A woman was defined as employed when she had a job, when she was on maternity leave or on another form of paid leave, and, for Italy, when she was on ‘Cassa integrazione guadagni ordinaria’ (a redundancy benefit). A woman was defined as a housewife when she declared that she was inactive in order to take care of the family.
3
The BHPS, in fact, does not allow their proper study across decades since the retrospective part on occupational change registers change of jobs only in the case of change of employer. Moreover, because of the scarcity until recently of part-time jobs in Italy, these transitions are too rare in the Italian dataset to be studied, especially in the oldest cohort.
older cohorts in Britain – cohabiting or remarrying women and men have too specific characteristics and are subject to too specific mechanisms to be merged with first-time married couples.
The focus only on working women around marriage obviously entailed a selection: excluded from the analyses were those that had never married or had never started to work until marriage. Also excluded were those that had started to work but had withdrawn from the labour market before the opening of my observational window, i.e. before marriage. Yet in my cohorts marriage was the norm, so that only around 10 per cent resulted never married by age 35.4 Moreover, interruptions not for family responsibilities were very rare, and those connected to marriage rather than to motherhood were largely captured by fixing the beginning of the risk set at one year before marriage. A selection was also embodied in the study of the transition back from housework to employment, and potentially a more serious one as it is for any second or higher-order transition over the life course. Indeed, at risk of coming back into the labour market are not only those married women that have started to work but also those that, once they have started, have interrupted, having specific characteristics compared to the universe. In order to control for sample selection and unobserved heterogeneity, in line with the procedure used in previous own works (for details see Author 2009: 101), I ran Heckman’s bivariate probit models with selection5. Moreover, given the person-month file structure, where observations were not independent, in order to obtain more efficient estimates I used the option ‘cluster (Pid) ’. Since Rho often resulted not significant, or when significant probit
estimates with correction of the crucial covariates did not substantially differ, only logit estimates without correction are reported here.
4
The problem arose only with the last cohort. Because the last interview date was 2005, women born after 1970 could not be observed over age 31-35, an age at which an increasing share of women (and men) have still not entered first stable unions.
5
In the study of the transition back, sample selection was controlled by using as selection variables ‘her part-time status’ and ‘her labour market experience’ (cumulative time spent in employment since first job), variables that affect the chances of exiting employment but not of re-entering it once exited. Since in Italy a large proportion of the women in my cohorts had never worked, control for sample selection was run also for the transition out, using ‘mother’s work experience as selection variable’, a variable that affects the chances of entering employment in the first place but not of exiting it later, once started..
As said, the crucial covariates of interest were ‘his’ and ‘her’ education and class, introduced simultaneously to capture net effects6. For the transition out, the class variable, based on the respondent’s current occupation, thus introduced as time-varying, was coded with a collapsed five-category version of the EGP classification in order to reduce the number of parameters to estimate and to avoid single categories into which few women and men fall. The five categories chosen were: service class; routine non-manual employees; petty bourgeoisie, farmers and smallholders; skilled non-manual workers, and unskilled manual workers. Level of education, both for ‘him’ and for ‘her’, was also introduced as a time-varying covariate and measured in three groups: up to lower secondary education, upper-secondary education, and tertiary education. For the transition back, since it involved a lower share of women, especially in Italy and especially if graduated, education was coded in two groups (up-to lower secondary versus upper-secondary and tertiary), whereas class was coded in three groups (merging skilled with unskilled manual workers; routine non-manual workers with the petty bourgeoisie7) and introduced as time-constant by referring to the last occupation held before withdrawing from the labour market.
The models also controlled for various covariates: ‘her’ duration in origin state (in employment since first month of first job for the transition out, and in housework since first month of interruption for the transition back); ‘her’ previous labour market experience for the transition back (total cumulated number of months in paid work since first job up to interruption); ‘her’ part-time status; ‘his’ activity status; age of 6
A high degree of homogamy between him and her and a high correlation between own class and own education might cause multicollinearity problems when introducing them together in the same regression model. Yet, own calculations with BHPS and ILFI show that in Italy 66% of couples have the same level of education (with a Goodman-Kruskal’s gamma of 0.78) and 34% have the same class (gamma 0.39), while in Britain the share is 58% and 31% respectively (and gamma 0.45 and 0.40). Data also show that degree of homogamy has not greatly changed across cohorts. Regarding class and education’s association, for ‘she’ gamma is equal 0.69 in Italy and 0.64 in Britain; for ‘he’ it is 0.59 in Italy and 0.49 in Britain.
7 For the transition out, routine low grade non-manual workers were merged with high grade routine non-manual workers since in Britain a
minuscule number of men belong to the category (see Table I) and in the case of the last cohort, its regression coefficient for ‘his class’ could not be estimated because none of those few made the transition (thus Y does not vary). In the transition back, the petty bourgeoisie was merged with routine non-manual workers, and skilled manual workers were merged with unskilled ones because when estimating ‘her class’, in Britain in the fourth cohort, for the former case, and in Italy in the third cohort for the latter, none made the transition back.
youngest child; number of children; region of residence8. Other relevant labour market features such as wages, type of contract, public/private sector would be useful as further controls, especially in order better to capture effects of education over and above strictly human capital/economic returns. Yet, as said, the absence of retrospective information on them in either one or both datasets prevented me from doing so . Table I shows the distribution of all the independent variables used in the regressions, by country and birth cohort.
[Table I around here]
Cohorts and types of work history: descriptive evidence
How many women with low or high education and class, or married to a high or low profile man experience continuous, curtailed or discontinuous careers once they have entered paid work? Through an ex-ante definition of relevant types of work histories, based on previous literature using analysis of variance or sequence analysis (Jacobs 1999; Corna et al 2016), Figure I and Figure II distinguish types of work histories based on the number of family-care breaks experienced from the time that women leave education until the age of 359 and show their distribution according first to ‘her’ and then to ‘his’ education and class. In
8
For the transition back, part-time status, i.e. whether the last job before withdrawing from the labour market was as a part-time employee or not, was not included because of too low numbers in Italy, especially in older cohorts. In regard to region, following previous studies (e.g: Schober and Scott 2012; Bernardi 1999), three groups were distinguished in order to control for variations in employment opportunities, childcare availability and gender-role attitudes: Scotland, Wales and England for Britain; North, Centre and South for Italy.
9
In the descriptive figures, age 35 rather than 40 as in the regressions has been chosen because it is the maximum age up to which one can observe all four cohorts, and it is high enough to capture the large majority of entries into marriage, the age of which has increased across cohorts but remains on average lower than 32 in both countries (see OECD online family database). To be precise, because the date of the last interview was 2005, in the fourth cohort women born after 1970 could not be observed until age 35. Hence they were excluded in the descriptive figures but reincluded in the regression analyses where the different length and phases of observable life course were controlled for (through duration in origin state, previous labour market history, age and number of children).
order to make the figures more straightforward, class and education have been differentiated into only two categories, and measured at the beginning of the observational window, that is, one year before marriage.
[Figure I around here]
Italy has been described as having an ‘opt in/opt out’ participation pattern, rather than a universal model of discontinuous participation as in Britain, or of continuous or curtailed participation as in Scandinavia and Germany (Reyneri 2011). As said, it has also been portrayed as a country where changes across cohorts have been limited and mainly compositional. This is evident also in Figure I: in Italy, younger cohorts differ mainly in the declining share of women who have ‘never worked’, especially among the low educated; and gaps between high- and low-status women in the share of continuous careers once starting to work remain quite constant across cohorts (around 30 percentage points difference for education and 20 for class).
In Britain, by contrast, both changes across cohorts and intra-women gaps appear much more marked: for women with high education/class, labor-market attachment increases mainly through a growth of ‘continuous’ careers (from the oldest to youngest cohort its share increases by 32 percentage points); for low-profile women mainly through a decline in the ‘1 break, no return’, but also through a growth in the ‘2+ breaks’ type of career (from the oldest to youngest cohort its share increases by 27 percentage points). In accordance with the findings of other studies (Joshi and Hinde 1993; Joshi, Macran and Dex 1996), this suggests that in the past the norm was to interrupt work when forming a family and to return when all the children were grown up. Women in younger cohorts have increased their labour-market attachment by reducing their interruptions, by postponing exits from around marriage to around first childbirth, by re-entering more often between births and more quickly after child-bearing. At the same time, as the ‘stay-at-home’ norm declines but institutional support remains marginal, women become more heterogeneous but also more polarised.
[Figure II around here]
The story emerging when considering types of work history by ‘his’ profile is very similar. In Italy, women married to husbands with different educational or class profiles mainly differ in terms of their permanent exclusion from the labour market: wives of low-educated or manual workers have more frequently ‘never worked’ up to age 35. Yet, unlike what was observed for ‘her’ profile, the gap between women married to a high or low-status man in the share of this type of work history has widened over time (in the oldest cohort, a 10 point difference for ‘his’ education and 4 for ‘his’ class; in the youngest cohort, 12 for education and 18 for class). This signals also for Italy a decline in the ‘stay-at-home’ norm and an increase in heterogeneity and polarisation, but with the Italian declination of this norm, applied to entering paid work at all, more than interrupting it when forming a family, and reinforced by very bad employment prospects, especially in the South. Once Italian women start working, ‘continuous’ is by far the most typical pattern, quite independently of what the husband does and with little difference across cohorts. Indeed, the change appears only from the first to the second cohort, when the share of wives of high-status men exhibiting continuous careers rises from 60 to 75 per cent, and the gap with the wives of low-status men rises, from the oldest to the youngest cohort, from 3 to 12 percentage points difference for ‘his’ education, from 9 to 15 for ‘his’ class.
In Britain nearly all women from the oldest cohort exited the labour market during family formation, regardless of their husbands’ level of education and class. From the late 1950s onwards, differences among women emerged later in the life course: in the first and second cohort only about 20 per cent of wives of both low- and high-status men had continuous careers, whereas in the youngest cohorts about 45 per cent did so if married to high-status men versus around 30 per cent if married to low-positioned husbands.
Although straightforward, these descriptive figures suffer from the usual ‘bivariate limitation’. Given the high degree of educational and occupational homogamy in mating selection (Blossfeld and Timm 2003),
differences between wives of high- and low-status men may conceal differences in women’s own profiles, or vice versa. On moving from a bivariate to a multivariate environment, it is possible to determine, ceteris
paribus, whether the effect of ‘his’ class and education remains after controlling for ‘her’ class and
education, and whether education retains significance controlling for class. This issue is analysed in the next section.
Married women’s transitions in and out of the labour market: the ‘effect’ of husband’s education and class
Table II shows the results of discrete-time event history models on married women’s transitions from employment to housework by cohort and by country. Highlighted in bold are the ‘effects’ for the second, third and fourth cohorts, which differ significantly from the ‘effects’ for the first cohort. Table III shows the results for the transition from housework to employment.
As expected (H1), in Italy, if ‘her’ educational and labour market profile is controlled for, the partner’s resources seem to matter in the oldest cohort: wives of middle-high educated men tend to exit the labour market more and re-enter less than wives with low-educated husbands. In later cohorts the inhibiting ‘effect’ of ‘his’ education disappears and ‘her’ level of education starts to matter10. As also expected (H2), In Italy the ‘effect’ of a woman’s own education remains after controlling for occupational class11, and class distinctions become less relevant across cohorts: in the first and second cohort, those less likely to interrupt
10
To be precise, ‘her’ level of education has a significant impact only in the transition out. Yet this is due to small sample sizes and strong selection processes: since, as evident in Figures I and II, a relatively low share of married women interrupt their labour market participation, at risk of making the transition back is a quite small group mainly consisting of low- educated and southern women. High-educated women tend not to interrupt regardless of their job positions. Hence those few that do so, knowing , in a context like Italy with low employment opportunities, that they risk permanent exclusion, are probably pushed out by relatively traditional attitudes towards gender and parenthood roles similar to those typical of low-educated women.
11
As shown in Author (2013), in Italy the effect of education remains after controlling not only for ‘his’ class and ‘her’ working hours and labour market experience, but also for ‘his’ and ‘her’ occupational score, and for ‘her’ type of contract and sector (public or private sector).
are women from the service class, followed by routine non-manual workers, while those more likely to do so are, at the same level, women from the petty bourgeoisie and with skilled and unskilled manual jobs. In younger cohorts the strength of the coefficients weaken, and only two groups emerge: the service class versus the rest.
[Table II and Table III around here]
Unlike in Italy, in ‘liberal’ Britain class seems more important than education (H2). Indeed, when both class and education are introduced into the model, not only ‘her’ education but also ‘his’ education matter less, if at all. Moreover, in each cohort at least three groups of classes emerge: lower risks of labour-market drop-out concern women in the petty bourgeoisie12, followed by women from the service class, whereas higher risks concern manual workers both skilled and unskilled, and routine non-manual workers (whose risk is similar to that of the service class in the oldest cohort, and to that of manual workers in other cohorts). In Britain class also matters in differentiating the likelihood of re-entering the labour market after leaving it: women from the service class are more likely to re-enter not only in the first but also in the second and third cohort. Moreover, unlike in Italy, in the oldest cohort not only ‘his’ but also ‘her’ education matters, losing significance in subsequent cohorts. This further signals that, as the ‘stay-at-home’ norm declines, the divide between women has moved from whether and when paid work is re-entered to whether and when it is exited in the first place. Finally, age and number of children have a strong impact, much stronger than in Italy13, suggesting that in a liberal regime like the British one, where the employment of married women and mothers has become more accepted but support for care and reconciliation is still very scarce and family compensation weak, women’s labour-market participation responds more to
12
In the last cohort women of the petty bourgeoisie become more likely to interrupt. However, given the very low numbers of women in this category (see Table I), these estimates should be treated with caution.
13
Significant differences between Italy and Britain were tested by running a single model with interactions between country dummies and relevant covariates.
motherhood and class than to education. Yet, in Britain it is ‘her’ resources and not ‘his’ that matter, and they do so already in the oldest cohort: ceteris paribus, in Britain in all cohorts ‘her’ transition out of the labour market is not affected by ‘his’ education and class, while ‘her’ transition back is affected only by ‘his’ education in the oldest cohort, but the ‘effect’ is weaker compared to Italy, which suggests that in the immediate post-war decades the ‘stay-at-home attitude’ was already declining in Britain.
Conclusions: linked lives in context
According to ‘preference theory’ and the so-called ‘theories of individuation and reflexive modernity’, in late modernity lives have become more individualised and more freely-chosen. Consequently, also women’s labour-market participation has become more independent from that of their husbands and their own position in the social stratification. As normative and structural constraints relax and values such as freedom, independence and self-responsibility spread, a convergence across countries is achieved. A lively debate on the dominance of preferences over constraints, of agency over structure, has been generated by these late-modern cultural accounts. Yet, research has rarely ‘tested’ them by focusing on the linked lives of men and women within families, and especially on the changing effect of the husband on the wife’s labour supply. Using discrete-time event-history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, in this study I have analysed how, in Italy and Britain, women from four subsequent birth cohorts move in and out of the labour market in ‘response’ to their husband's education and class.
Two insights emerge. In line with individuation-type arguments, but also with classic human-capital arguments, in both countries the ‘husband effect’ has weakened over time and intra-women differentiation has become based much more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile. The manner in which this has occurred, however, is different in the two countries. Bivariate descriptive figures show that women in Italy who are married to husbands with different educational or class profiles differ primarily in their permanent exclusion from the labour market. Once women start to work, continuous employment is by far the most typical pattern, and, as event history regressions show, from the second cohort onwards it is so quite independently of what the
husband does. In Britain, where married women’s employment expanded through intense tertiarisation and became more culturally accepted already in the post-war decades, the ‘husband effect’ is already absent in the oldest cohort. In Britain, nearly all women in the oldest cohort exited the labour market during family formation, regardless of the class and the level of education of their husbands, while wives of highly-educated men were less prone to re-enter having exited, but the gap with respect to the wives of low-educated husbands was smaller compared to Italy. In the past, when the norm of incompatibility between marriage and motherhood with paid work was still cogent, divisions among women emerged later in the life course, in the decision whether and when to re-enter the labour market once the children had grown up. In subsequent cohorts, British women have started to reduce interruptions and to increase re-entries, and to do so independently from the education and class of their husbands.
The second insight emerging from the analyses conducted by this paper is that, contrary to individuation-type accounts, both in Italy and Britain women’s employment paths still differ by ‘classic’ stratification factors, such as education and class, but again in distinctive ways in the two contexts. In Italy, which is well known in Europe for having one of the widest gaps between poorly- and highly-educated women in both behaviours and attitudes but also one of the lowest ‘child effects’, participation responds much more to education than to motherhood. Moreover, in Italy education differentiates first entry into paid work much more than subsequent permanence, and it does so also beyond class, suggesting that something more than human capital/economic returns is at work. In Britain, the impact of motherhood is stronger than in Italy, and class seems more important than education. Evidently, in a liberal regime like the British one, with high wage dispersion, scant childcare public support without ‘granny compensation’ as in Mediterranean familistic regimes, of crucial importance is the ability to enter high-grade jobs – as highly-educated women more often do – and thus be able to afford private childcare.
Therefore, in both Italy and Britain, women’s agency seems to have widened across generations, but persisting differences between the two countries suggest that this has occurred in a still complex interplay with the social structure. The extent to which such differences are more institutional, as maintained by
welfare regime scholars (Esping-Andersen 2009), or cultural, as argued by historical demographers (Reher 1998; Dalla Zuanna and Micheli 2004) is difficult to determine. Different kinds of data and techniques, involving a higher number of countries and/or time-varying measures of macro features would be necessary. Moreover, as well-conceptualised by gender scholars (Pfau-Effinger 2005; Saraceno 2016), the cultural and institutional dimensions are closely intertwined, so that their relative contribution is difficult to grasp. Moreover, data restrictions, such as the absence of information on attitudes, intentions and negotiations within couples, on the one hand, and on income, wages or other relevant labour market returns, on the other, prevent proper ‘testing’ of the role of preferences and the mechanisms possibly responsible for the ‘husband effect’ (income, attitude or social capital effect). They also prevent proper treatment of the endogeneity issue in the education-work–care relationship. However, on simultaneously modelling education and class, and of ‘he’ and ‘she’, some evidence emerges of the existence in Italy, but not in Britain, of an effect of ‘her’ education net of own occupational position and ‘her’ husband’s position, suggesting, contrary to Hakim’s and individuation theories, that different countries may provide different opportunities for preference attainment.
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Figure I: Incidence of different types of work history up to age 35 of married women in Britain and Italy, by ‘her’ education and class
Italy Britain
By ‘her’ class
Notes: Low-educated = up to lower-secondary; High-educated=upper-secondary or tertiary
Low-class=manual workers; High-class=non manual workers
Source: BHPS, 2005; ILFI, 2005.
Figure II: Incidence of different types of work history up to age 35 of married women in Britain and Italy, by ‘his’ education and class
Italy Britain
By ‘his’ education
By ‘his’ class
Notes: Low-educated = up to lower-secondary; High-educated=upper-secondary or tertiary
Low-class=manual workers; High-class=non manual workers
Table I: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables
Italy Britain
1935-44 1945-54 1955-64 1965-74 1935-44 1945-54 1955-64 1965-74
Her Education (at marriage)
-up to lower-secondary 77.8 63.1 46.2 45.1 75.0 65.4 57.9 53.2
- upper-secondary 16.4 25.0 41.0 43.6 4.1 7.6 9.1 15.2
- tertiary 5.8 11.9 12.8 11.3 20.9 27.0 33.0 31.6
Her Activity status (at marriage)
- employed 94.7 93.7 93.4 88.7 98.1 93.0 93.5 90.6
- unemployed 0.3 2.9 2.9 5.5 0.0 0.0 0.8 4.1
- inactive 5.0 3.4 3.7 5.8 1.9 7.0 5.7 5.3
Her Class
(among employed at marriage)
- service 15.0 22.5 27.6 23.0 15.7 20.2 25.6 23.2
-routine non-manual workers, high 8.1 11.9 12.8 12.4 39.1 42.6 31.3 25.8
- routine non-manual workers, low 15.0 15.4 16.1 23.7 15.3 11.4 14.6 16.8
- petty bourgeoisie 18.4 11.5 12.4 10.7 0.8 0.6 2.0 1.3
- manual workers, qualified 4.5 6.3 2.9 3.4 6.9 10.7 7.5 11.0
- manual workers, unqualified 39.0 32.4 28.2 26.8 22.2 14.5 19.0 21.9
Her Part-time status
(among employed at marriage)
- self-employed 18.4 12.1 15.3 14.4 1.2 0.6 2.6 2.5
- fulltime employee 76.3 83.5 75.1 72.9 97.6 97.8 92.5 85.2
- parttime employee 5.3 4.4 9.6 12.7 1.2 1.6 4.9 12.3
His Education (at marriage)
- up to lower-secondary 72.8 63.1 47.2 49.7 61.9 52.2 48.0 56.1
- upper-secondary 19.3 26.8 39.8 41.5 6.4 11.3 13.9 16.4
- tertiary 7.9 10.1 13.0 8.8 31.7 36.5 38.1 27.5
His Activity status (at marriage)
- employed 97.6 98.4 98.2 96.3 97.4 97.7 94.9 91.8
- unemployed 1.1 1.1 1.5 3.1 0.4 0.3 3.8 5.9
- inactive 1.3 0.5 0.3 0.6 2.2 2.0 1.3 2.3
His Class
- service 16.4 19.7 25.4 26.2 17.2 23.3 24.8 22.5
- routine non-manual workers, high 7.1 7.8 9.4 6.4 10.9 13.4 8.7 10.2
- routine non-manual workers, low 7.1 6.1 6.2 7.9 1.9 2.6 2.8 1.4
- petty bourgeoisie 18.6 14.4 16.7 19.3 3.5 4.5 8.4 10.8
- manual workers, qualified 29.4 36.0 28.7 27.3 38.3 35.8 34.4 32.0
- manual workers, unqualified 21.4 16.0 13.6 12.9 28.2 20.4 20.9 23.1
Her Experience in employment in months (at marriage)
67.7 55.2 49.4 42.8 60.9 57.2 56.3 43.5
Region (at marriage)
- North/England 56.5 55.2 49.6 48.8 73.9 78.4 77.2 77.2
- Centre/Wales 18.7 20.0 21.2 15.2 21.6 12.6 13.1 11.7
- South/Scotland 24.8 24.8 29.2 36.0 4.5 9.0 9.7 11.1
Child Status (at age 30):
- no children 17.1 12.3 17.3 22.3 14.1 11.7 20.3 20.9
- pregnant or youngest child 0-3 54.8 42.2 41.5 47.0 45.3 46.9 47.2 38.8
- youngest child aged 3+ 28.1 45.5 41.2 30.7 40.6 41.4 32.5 40.3
Number of children (at age 30) 1.39 1.39 1.24 1.15 1.83 1.68 1.54 1.52
NUMBER OF WOMEN 379 556 593 328 268 341 373 171
Table II: Estimated rates of married women’s first transition from employment to housework in Italy and Britain, by ‘his’ and ‘her’ education and class (Discrete time hazard rate models)
Italy Britain
1935-44 1945-54 1955-64 1965-74 1935-44 1945-54
Her Education: up to lower-secondary
- upper-secondary -0.41† -0.73** -0.64*** -0.59** -0.25 -0.01
- tertiary -0.06 -2.63*** -1.49*** -1.38** -0.15 0.08
Her Class: service
-routine non-manual workers 1.68*** 0.62* 1.30*** 1.17*** 0.27 0.61***
-petty bourgeoisie 1.76*** 0.75* 1.18*** 0.71† -2.13** -1.34†
- manual workers, qualified 2.27*** 0.87* 1.17*** 0.82 0.64** 0.64**
- manual workers, unqualified 2.16*** 1.04** 1.45*** 1.12** 0.55* 0.75***
His Education: up to lower-secondary
- upper-secondary 0.62** 0.23 0.11 -0.21 0.23 0.11
- tertiary 0.88* 0.19 -0.03 0.41 0.20† 0.07
His Class: service
-routine non-manual workers 0.49 -0.05 -0.81*** 0.11 0.01 0.40**
-petty bourgeoisie -0.21 0.2 -0.55** 0.3 -0.07 0.02
- manual workers, qualified 0.48† 0.36 -0.38† -0.01 -0.1 0.06
- manual workers, unqualified -0.08 -0.01 -0.39 -0.12 0.06 0.19
Her Duration in employment -0.003** -0.005*** -0.003* -0.006*** -0.004*** -0.001
Her Part-time status: self. or fulltime empl.
- part-time employee -0.63 0.35 -0.31 0.33† -0.67** 0.35†
His Activity Status: employed
- not employed -0.14 1.34*** -1.13† 0.25 0.99† 1.26***
Region: North/England
- Centre/Wales -0.15 -0.01 0.08 0.17 -0.21† -0.02
- South/Scotland -0.75** 0.003 0.45** 0.70*** 1.03*** -0.15
Child Status: no children
- pregnant or youngest child aged 0-3 0.28 0.66*** 0.24 0.50* 3.21*** 3.75***
- youngest child aged 3+ -1.32*** -0.25 -0.49* -0.24 1.87** 2.65***
Number of children -0.58*** -0.62*** -0.21† -0.29* -1.69*** -2.09*** Constant -6.43*** -5.58*** -5.83*** -5.65*** -4.96*** -6.35*** LOG-LIKELIHOOD -841.7 -1249.2 -1224.68 -643.18 -829.05 -1019.69 NUMBER OF MONTHS-PERSONS 39596 69311 69398 24236 14790 23471 NUMBER OF WOMEN 368 556 589 307 265 339 NUMBER OF TRANSITIONS 142 197 185 107 200 215
Notes: estimates using option « cluster »; ***p-value <0.01 **p-value<0.05 *p-value <0.10 † p< .20 ; In bold = coefficients of second,
third and fourth cohort that differ from the first cohort at least at .20 level.
Table III: Estimated rates of married women’s first transition from housework to employment in Italy and Britain, by ‘his” and ‘her” education and class (Discrete time hazard rate models)
Italy Britain
1935-44 1945-54 1955-64 1965-74 1935-44 1945-54
Her Education: up to lower-secondary
- upper-secondary or tertiary -0.09 -0.27 -0.12 -0.14 0.43* -0.01
Her Last Class: service
-routine non-manual workers +petty b. -1.07† -0.78* -0.06 0.6 -0.44† -0.39*
- manual workers -1.13† -0.6 -0.27 0.1 -0.8** -0.55**
His Education: up to lower-secondary
- upper-secondary or tertiary -1.54*** 0.17 0.33 0.71* -0.51** 0.03
His Class: service
-routine non-manual workers + petty b. -0.21 0.34 0.45 -0.02 -0.21 0.18
- manual workers -0.39 0.1 0.29 0.32 0.05 0.51***
Her Duration in housework -0.007* -0.01*** -0.007** -0.005 0 0.003†
Previous Labour Market Experience -0.004† -0.003 -0.003 -0.001 -0.001 0.001
His Activity Status: employed
- not employed -0.21 0.99 1.54** 1.22 0.16 -0.21
Region: North/England
- Centre/Wales 0.68* -0.11 0.19 -1.16** -0.55** -0.31†
- South/Scotland -0.02 -2.01*** -0.98*** -1.52*** -0.26 0.08
Child Status: no children
- pregnant or youngest child aged 0-3 -0.18 -0.7 -1.52*** 0.24 -1.39*** -1.24***
- youngest child aged 3+ 0.03 0.18 -0.52 0.66† -0.58* -0.62*
Number of children 0.15 0.3** 0.21† -0.37† 0.18* 0.07 Constant -4.10*** -4.48*** -5.01*** -4.84*** -3.51*** -4.09*** LOG-LIKELIHOOD -289.97 -480.38 -446.7 -263.22 -989.05 -1255.82 NUMBER OF MONTHS-PERSONS 22416 29088 27633 8812 21871 23148 NUMBER OF WOMEN 168 232 235 134 231 295 NUMBER OF TRANSITIONS 41 72 65 45 174 228
Notes: estimates using option « cluster »; ***p-value <0.01 **p-value<0.05 *p-value <0.10 † p< .20 ; In bold = coefficients of second, third
and fourth cohort that differ from the first cohort at least at .20 level.
