Explaining Gender Inequalities That Follow Couple Migration

• Author: Natascha Nisic,Silvia Maja Melzer
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12323
• Date: 01 August 2016

N N University of Hamburg

S M M Bielefeld University∗

Explaining Gender Inequalities That Follow Couple

Migration

By exploiting the unique social and economic

differences between East and West Germany,

the authors investigated how macro-level

opportunities interact with couple-level deci-

sion making to explain gender differences in

the determinants and economic outcomes of

household migration. By incorporating regional

socioeconomic conditions into household bar-

gaining theory, 4 hypotheses for each region

were derived. The hypotheses were tested using

cross-classied multilevel regressions and the

German Socio-Economic Panel (1992–2012)

combined with regional economic indicators.

First, gender-specic determinants of couples’

West–West (i.e., within West Germany) and

East-to-West migration were analyzed; sec-

ond, subsequent economic consequences were

investigated by comparing couples with singles.

The results conrm that gender differences in

macro-conditions can impose decision logics

that seemingly contradict the initial power

relation within couples. Despite more tradi-

tional gender arrangements in West Germany,

well-educated partnered women earn signi-

cant absolute and relative income gains from

School of Business, Economics and Social Sciences,

Universitaet Hamburg,Welckerstraße 8, D-20354 Hamburg,

Germany (natascha.nisic@wiso.uni-hamburg.de).

∗Department of Sociology, Bielefeld University,

Universitätsstraße 25, D-33165 Bielefeld, Germany.

Key Words: couples, employment, family economics, gender

roles, migration, quantitative methodology.

migration; their egalitarian East German coun-

terparts suffer signicant losses compared with

single women and East German men.

In the past two decades, the migration of couples

has received considerable attention in the eld

of mobility research. Researchers have been

particularly puzzled by the persisting gender

inequalities in the outcomes of job-related

migration among couples. Despite signicant

increases in women’s education, earnings, labor

force participation, and work attachment (Costa

& Kahn, 2000), the long-distance migration

of families continues to be undertaken for

the advancement of men’s careers. Female

partners suffer considerable losses in terms of

economic achievement and career prospects

(see, e.g., Boyle, Cooke, Halfacree, & Smith,

2001; Cooke, 2008b; Jacobsen & Levin, 1997;

Shauman, 2010, and the references therein).

The signicant attention these gender disparities

have received must be understood in the context

of labor market research, which reveals that gen-

der differences in mobility outcomes are mostly

found only among couples. Single women,

like single men, are reported to prot from

job-related spatial mobility by taking advantage

of better job offers and employment opportuni-

ties in distant regions (Geist & McManus, 2012;

Jacobsen & Levin, 1997; Maxwell, 1988; van

Ham, Mulder, & Hooimeijer, 2001; Zaiceva,

2010). Particularly for highly qualied single

workers, spatial mobility has been shown to

foster career progress regardless of gender.

Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (August 2016): 1063–1082 1063

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12323

1064 Journal of Marriage and Family

These patterns of inequality have also very

much challenged theoretical explanations. Pre-

vious attempts to explain gender disparities have

primarily focused on internal determinants and

decision making within couples largely by refer-

ring to either microeconomic models of utility

maximization and bargaining between partners

or sociological theories of gender role ideology.

Therefore, the theoretical and empirical efforts

have focused on the ongoing and unresolved

debate about which explanation to favor (for a

review, see Cooke, 2008b). General criticism

of these approaches has recently emerged, indi-

cating the dearth of structural explanations that

take into account how gender inequalities in

the external labor market inuence the mobility

opportunities of men and women (Shauman

& Noonan, 2007). In particular, studies that

have analyzed the impact of occupational

sex segregation on gender-specic migration

opportunities and returns have surfaced in the

mobility literature but remain inconclusive

about the factual empirical relevance of such

structures (Perales & Vidal, 2013; Shauman,

2010; Shauman & Noonan, 2007).

We aim to contribute to the existingliterature

by adopting a third position. From this perspec-

tive, structural and individual-level approaches

do not present alternative explanations but

instead need to be combined. We therefore

focus on how macro-level opportunity structures

interact with individual incentives and couples’

decision-making processes to create gendered

patterns of migration outcomes. In particular,

we argue that testing the theories noted above

may remain incomplete and misleading if this

interaction is not taken into account. We address

and extend the existing research in three ways.

First, with respect to the structural dimen-

sion, we explicitly take into account regional

labor market structures, namely, gender-specic

wage and employment opportunities in the des-

tination and origin regions. Although regional

determinants are implicit in most structural

and individual-level approaches, they are rarely

incorporated directly into empirical analysis.

Second, in regard to theories of decision-

making within couples, we draw on recent

debates about the relevance of bargaining the-

ories that have increasingly been proposed as a

theoretically more straightforward and empiri-

cally more adequate extension to the prevailing

household-utility-maximizing models (Lund-

berg & Pollak, 2003; Ott, 1992).

Third, we apply this integrated approach to

the job-related migration decisions and out-

comes of couples in East and West Germany.

The comparison between the East and West

German regions provides a theoretically and

methodologically unique opportunity because,

despite the fact that the political and institu-

tional framework has been the same for both

regions since the reunication of Germany in

1990, signicant cultural and economic differ-

ences persist. Actually, we are not aware of any

other country in which individuals can freely

migrate with no major linguistic or cultural bar-

riers that has such major internal differences in

gender roles and gender-related economics. This

situation allows us to derive and test new con-

trasting hypotheses about decision processes and

the migration behavior of couples. Moreover,

the case of Germany presents a special empiri-

cal puzzle. Although detrimental mobility con-

sequences for women have been conrmed for

the German case in previous studies, in recent

empirical work highly qualied West German

women in partnerships have been found to bene-

t signicantly from household relocation; their

East German counterparts remained unable to

prot from such moves (Nisic, 2010; Zaiceva,

2010). This nding is quite surprising and con-

tradicts both economic and sociological theories

because gender arrangements appear to be much

more egalitarian in East Germany. At the same

time, these inconsistent ndings seem to t into

a broader context of more heterogeneous nd-

ings about migration consequences for men and

women that have been reported in the interna-

tional literature recently (Clark & Withers, 2002;

Lersch, 2013).

In the remainder of this article we rst dis-

cuss existing theoretical and empirical evidence

on job-related household migration. We then

apply our theoretical model to household migra-

tion in the German context by investigating

the gender-specic individual and regional

determinants of household migration and their

subsequent effects on the absolute and rela-

tive incomes of the partners. For the empirical

analysis, we use parallel data for partners in

cohabiting couples from the Socio-Economic

Panel Study (SOEP) from 1992 to 2011, which

we combine with regional-level labor mar-

ket data. In line with our approach, we apply

cross-classied multilevel regression models

that take into account both regional context

effects and the panel structure of the data.