Maike van damme

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jfi-10.1177_0192513X211022397 for Couples' Relative Resources, Male Power, and Relationship Conflict from a Comparative Perspective by Maike van Damme, Clara Cortina and Maria José González in Journal of Family Issues

As we saw in Chapter 1, research on family behavioral change has been dominated by two theoretical frameworks, namely Gary Becker’s neoclassical economic approach and the 2nd Demographic Transition thesis. For very different reasons, both envisage that gender convergence in terms of employment and life-long careers will promote greater couple instability, weaker commitments to partnerships, and a drop in fertility. The evidence has appeared to support these arguments quite well, but only up to a certain point. A number of countries have, over the past decades, experienced a radical u-turn in terms of marital stability and fertility. And most interestingly, these are the very same countries that boast the greatest degree of gender convergence in terms of earnings and employment. This turn-about suggests that we need to re-theorize longer run trends

Using two waves of the Generations and Gender Survey for eight European countries, we test under what conditions couples experience high levels of disagreement over time or separate. The results partly support the idea of relative resources, suggesting that a decrease in the status of men in couples (job loss) is significantly associated with high levels of conflict. The transition to high conflict is more frequent when there is a discrepancy between policy and behavior. Social policies designed to meet the needs of working parents in dual-earner couples together with the diffusion of gender egalitarian values can lead to a reduction in unhealthy levels of couple conflict.

... countries Maike van Damme and Matthijs Kalmijn Tilburg University, Department of Sociology, ... sociological perspective. Parsons (1949) argued that role specialization within marriage has a function: It would avoid marital conflict (because of occupational competition ...

Two recent articles (Grunow et al. in J Marriage Fam 80(1):42–60, 2018; Knight and Brinton in Am J Sociol 122(5):1485–1532) suggest that gender ideology is multidimensional. Such a finding is of utmost importance because, if robust, it can be used in future comparative (multilevel) research. However, these two articles present different results on which gender ideology profiles are dominant in Europe. Using the European Value Study, we replicate and extend these Latent Class analyses and address the question of generalizability and content- and criterion-related validity. We come to a five-cluster solution that not only synthesizes theoretically and empirically the results of the two articles, but also contributes to the literature by clarifying the place of these five gender ideology types in a multidimensional space. We suggest that in Europe five ‘worlds of norms’ exist that are mutually influenced by the general institutional context of welfare states.

The specialization theory from Gary Becker is often used to explain the effect of women's work on the risk of divorce. The main argument is that women with little work experience have higher economic costs to exit marriage. Using the Fertility and Family Surveys, we test for 16 countries to what extent women's employment increases the risk of separation. We also more directly examine the role of economic exit costs in separation by investigating the effect of separated women's work history during the union on women's post-separation employment. The results imply that Becker was right to some extent, especially in contexts with little female employment support. However, in settings where women's employment opportunities are more ample, sociological or psychological theories have probably more explanatory power to explain the causes and consequences of union dissolution.

ABSTRACT Partnership instability may affect women’s fertility in two ways. It may either cause women to postpone conceiving a child or it may accelerate conception. Although the first explanation sounds more plausible today, some decades ago higher childbearing rates may have been observed among less stable couples. An explanation for this can be that in those days instable couples strived to reduce uncertainty in their relationship by giving birth to children. Nowadays, a divorce cost argument seems more applicable, i.e. it is plausible that knowing the higher costs of a separation or divorce, more divorce-prone women are less likely to give birth to a child. Results of the conception hazard models for first and second births using the risk of separation as an indicator for partnership instability indicate that the divorce cost argument based on Becker’s New Home Economics theory is more plausible than the Uncertainty Reduction Theory of Parenthood of Friedman et al.

Recently, there has been an increase in cross-national comparative studies on either relative resources or housework within couples, but so far none of these comparative studies has related these issues to partnership quality concerning housework. Following Gershuny (2005), I combine Blood and Wolfe’s theory (1960) on comparative resources of the spouses and their relationship bargaining power with insights from Hirschmann (1970) on responses to unfair situations. Spouses can respond in three different ways when the outcome of the bargaining process on housework is unfair: They may be loyal, they may try to argue and change the situation (‘voice’), or they may exit the union (or at least thinking about exiting the union). I expect that the more resources women have compared to their spouse, the more likely women would like to change an unequal situation (voice or exit). Using the Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS) [2004-2010], I compare ‘young’ couples with an unequal division of ...

Partnership instability may affect women’s fertility in two ways. It may either cause women to postpone conceiving a child or it may accelerate conception. Although the first explanation sounds more plausible today, some decades ago higher childbearing rates may have been observed among less stable couples. An explanation for this can be that in those days instable couples strived to reduce uncertainty in their relationship by giving birth to children. Nowadays, a divorce cost argument seems more applicable, i.e. it is plausible that knowing the higher costs of a separation or divorce, more divorce-prone women are less likely to give birth to a child. Results of the conception hazard models for first and second births using the risk of separation as an indicator for partnership instability indicate that the divorce cost argument based on Becker’s New Home Economics theory is more plausible than the Uncertainty Reduction Theory of Parenthood of Friedman et al.

Studies on the economic consequences of divorce for women have paid little attention to changes in employment. In this article, we investigate changes in employment for separating women and the impact of individual and institutional factors on these changes using data on 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001). Our dynamic analyses of the odds of employment entry and exit, and changes in working hours demonstrate that European women only modestly increase employment after separation, although in some countries this change is larger than in others. Important individual-level determinants of employment changes are education and labour market experience (positive effects), health (positive effect), and the presence of young children (negative effect). Institutional factors have opposing influences: more generous public childcare provisions encourage the employment of separated women, whereas more generous allowances for single parents discourage employment....

Although it is well known that the majority of women experience an income decline after separation, there is much heterogeneity in these income changes. The social class of the union women come from before the separation may be related to variations in the economic consequences of union dissolution. Using the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008), I find that there is an ‘underclass’ of separated women who are less likely to receive child support and more likely to be on welfare. Although women from the lower classes experience the smallest income drop, they remain at the bottom of the income distribution. On the other hand, I find that the short-term income drop due to separation is largest for women coming from a white-collar worker union. However, fixed effects models show that while service class women recover pretty soon from their large income falls, women who had a spouse from the routine non-manual working class do not succeed to return to their pre-separation income le...

In this article, I explore to what extent heterogeneity in income changes due to separation is related to the social class of the ex-partner. Using the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2006), I find that there is an ‘underclass’ of separated women who are less likely to receive alimony and more likely to be dependent upon welfare benefits than women with an ex-partner from higher social classes. Although women from the lowest social classes experience only a small income drop after separation, they remain at the bottom of the income distribution. However, women who were having a partner of the white-collar class experience a much larger income fall. Of these women, the ones who had an ex-partner from the service class recover rather soon, while the ones who were living with someone of the routine non-manual do not return to their pre-separation income levels. A possible explanation of these findings may be the extent of women’s economic independence during the union.

The specialization theory from Gary Becker is often used to explain the effect of women's work on the risk of divorce. The main argument is that women with little work experience have higher economic costs to exit marriage. Using the Fertility and Family Surveys, we test for 16 countries to what extent women's employment increases the risk of separation. We also more directly examine the role of economic exit costs in separation by investigating the effect of separated women's work history during the union on women's post-separation employment. The results imply that Becker was right to some extent, especially in contexts with little female employment support. However, in settings where women's employment opportunities are more ample, sociological or psychological theories have probably more explanatory power to explain the causes and consequences of union dissolution.

The specialization theory from Gary Becker is often used to explain the effect of women's work on the risk of divorce. The main argument is that women with little work experience have higher economic costs to exit marriage. Using the Fertility and Family Surveys, we test for 16 countries to what extent women's employment increases the risk of separation. We also more directly examine the role of economic exit costs in separation by investigating the effect of separated women's work history during the union on women's post-separation employment. The results imply that Becker was right to some extent, especially in contexts with little female employment support. However, in settings where women's employment opportunities are more ample, sociological or psychological theories have probably more explanatory power to explain the causes and consequences of union dissolution.