WOMENS EMPLOYMENT AND THE GAIN TO MARRIAGE - THE SPECIALIZATION AND TRADING MODEL

This chapter critically examines the hypothesis that women's rising em ployment levels have increased their economic independence and hence h ave greatly reduced the desirability of marriage. Little firm empirica l support for this hypothesis is found. The apparent congruence in tim e-series data of women's rising employment with declining marriage rat es and increasing marital instability is partly a result of using the historically atypical early postwar behavior of the baby boom era as t he benchmark for comparisons and partly due to confounding trends in d elayed marriage with those of nonmarriage. Support for the hypothesis in multivariate analyses is found only in cross-sectional aggregate-le vel studies, which are pear tests of an individual-level behavioral hy pothesis and which also present difficulty in establishing the appropr iate causal direction. Individual-level analyses of marriage formation using longitudinal data and hazard modeling uniformly fail to support the hypothesis, while analyses of marital dissolution yield mixed res ults. Theoretically, the hypothesis also has severe limitations. The f requent tendency to equate income equality between spouses with women' s economic independence and a lowered gain to marriage fails to distin guish between situations where high gains to marriage may be the resul t of income equality from situations where the result is a very low ga in to marriage. Focusing on income ratios alone also tends to distract attention from the underlying causes of these ratios and their struct ural determinants. Finally, the independence hypothesis is based on a model of marriage that views the gain to marriage as a result of gende r-role specialization and exchange. Historical evidence on the family indicates that this is a high risk and inflexible family strategy for independent nuclear families and one that is in strong contrast to con temporary family patterns.