'Trailing wife' or 'trailing mother'? The effect of parental status on therelationship between family migration and the labor-market participation of married women

Numerous studies demonstrate that married women sacrifice their own careers in order to support their husbands' careers by following them as tied migr ants, largely independent of their own occupational status. Thus, it appear s as if family migration is shaped by the dominant gender roles and gender identities which configure the lives of women and men in married couple fam ilies. The motivation for this paper stems from a concern that family migra tion research has failed to consider that the effects of family migration o n the labor-market participation of married women may be contingent on pare ntal status. This research is designed to uncover the individual acid joint effects of migration and parental status on married women's labor-market p articipation. The approach taken in this research is to begin with a very s pecific type of married couple family-married couple families without child ren-and to trace how the birth of the first child and migration events inde pendently and jointly determine women's labor-market participation over a 5 -year time span. The data for the analysis are drawn from the 1987 through 1992 Family File of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Random effects prob it models of labor-force participation and employment indicate a small, sho rt-lived, impact of migration on the employment of married women without ch ildren-but for married women with children the negative effects of family m igration on both labor force participation and employment are large and end ure for many years.