Educational heterogamy and the division of paid labour in the family: a comparison of present-day Belgium and Sweden

Building on the growing importance of partner effects in stratification research, this study adopts a couple perspective on the division of paid labour in the family. It considers the role of educational heterogamy, and takes account of the family life cycle by means of the presence of (young) children. The importance of these two factors for women’s relative labour market participation is compared between Belgium and Sweden – two European countries that share socio-economic features but differ regarding labour market and social policies. Multinomial logistic Diagonal Reference Models are used to analyse the pooled cross-sectional data of the EU-SILC 2004-2008. Our results show that women’s relative labour market participation is less education-driven in Sweden than in Belgium, and it is more related to the couple effect of educational heterogamy and the life cycle effect of the presence of (young) children, confirming more egalitarianism and family friendliness in Scandinavia than in continental Europe

The forest and the trees : Industrialization, demographic change, and the ongoing gender revolution in Sweden and the United States, 1870-2010

Background: The separate spheres, in which men dominate the public sphere of politics, arts, media, and wage work and women dominate the private sphere of unpaid production and caring, is a powerful configuration in much social theory (including Parsons, Becker, and Goode), which posited that with industrialization, family structures and activities would converge towards the nuclear family with strict gender roles.Objective: This paper examines the major trends unraveling the gender division of family support and care that reached its peak in the mid-20th century, often called the ‘worker-carer’ or the ‘separate spheres’ model, by comparing the experiences of Sweden and the United States.Methods: We use data that includes time series of macro-level demographic and economic indicators, together with cross-sectional data from censuses and time use surveys.Results: The unraveling of the separate spheres began with the increase in the labor force participation of married women and continues with the increase in men’s involvement with their homes and children, but its foundations were laid in the 19th century, with industrialization. We show that despite short-term stalls, slowdowns, and even reverses, as well as huge differences in policy contexts, the overall picture of increasing gender sharing in family support and care is strongly taking shape in both countries.Contribution: By doing a comparative, in-depth analysis, it becomes clear that the extreme role specialization within the couple that divided caring from ‘work,’ though theoretically important, applied only for a limited period in Northern Europe and the United States, however important it might be in other regions

Age homogamy and modernization : Evidence from turn-of-the-twentieth century Sweden

<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Marriage is a fundamental institution with implications for economic and social development. The age difference between spouses reflects social relations across time and space. It has decreased with modernization, presumably because marriage for sentimental, rather than instrumental, reasons has become widespread. This study investigates age differences between spouses and how they changed at the time of the industrial revolution in Sweden. We analyze spatial differences in age homogamy by linking them to indicators of industrialization and modernization at the individual and community level. We use full- count census data of about 600,000 couples in 1880-1900. The results show socioeconomic and spatial differences between different measures of age homogamy, but do not support a link between cultural change and change in age homogamy. Instead they are more consistent with explanations focusing on how industrialization and urbanization relaxed the old Malthusian marriage pattern, weakening the link between property and wealth, and, by extension, that to marriage and smaller age differences between spouses.</span></p></div></div></div

To be or not to be? Risk attitudes and gender differences in union membership

Attracting membership while stifling freeriding and heterogeneous preferences among potential members is critical for trade union success. Women are generally seen as less inclined to join trade unions, particularly at the onset of the labor movement. We highlight a previously neglected explanation for this: the importance of risk and gender differences in assessment hereof. We study matched employer-employee data from two industries around the year 1900 where union membership was associated with different levels of risk: the Swedish cigar and printing industries. We find that the gender gap in membership was larger in the high-risk environment (cigar) and smaller in the low-risk environment (printing). Women were not hard to organize but avoided risks and uncertain returns

Gender, Productivity and the Nature of Work and Pay: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Industry

Women have, on average, been less well-paid than men throughout history. Prior to 1900, most economic historians see the gender wage gap as a reflection of men's greater strength and correspondingly higher productivity. This paper investigates the gender wage gap in cigar making around 1900. Strength was rarely an issue, but the gender wage gap was large. Two findings suggest that employers were not sexist. First, differences in earnings by gender for workers paid piece rates can be fully explained by differences in experience and other productivity-related characteristics. Second, conditioning on those characteristics, women were just as likely to be promoted to the better paying piece rate section. Neither finding is compatible with a simple model of sex-based discrimination. Instead, the gender wage gap can be decomposed into two components. First, women were typically less experienced, in an industry in which experience mattered. Second there were some jobs that required strength, for which men were better suited. Because strength was so valuable in the other jobs at this time, men commanded a wage premium in the general labour market, raising their reservation wage. Hiring a man required the firm to pay a 'man's wage'. This implies that firms that were slow to feminise their time rate workforce ended up with a higher cost structure than those that made the transition more quickly. We show that firms with a higher proportion of women in their workforce in 1863 were indeed more likely to survive 35 years later.gender, productivity, discrimination, piece-rates, time-rates, labour markets, firm survival

Women’s Education, Empowerment, and Contraceptive Use in sub-Saharan Africa: Findings from Recent Demographic and Health Surveys

Fertility remains higher and contraceptive levels are substantially lower in Sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere in the developing world. In this paper we use information on individuals and couples provided in recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS, fifth wave) undertaken in Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, and Zambia. We use bivariate and multivariate techniques to examine the determinants of contraceptive use among married women (aged 15-49), focusing on the impacts of women’s education and empowerment. Our results show that education was an important determinant of contraceptive use, but mattered less in choice of method effectiveness. The impact of education was similar in all the countries studied with the exception of Kenya, where it was non-existent. Empowerment was less important in determining contraceptive use. Efforts to increase contraceptive use in general and the use of modern methods more specifically need to focus on providing basic education for all women and on changing gender roles.