Over the last four decades, rising employment rates among women in Europe have made the traditional “male breadwinner” model of households increasingly uncommon. Yet as Guillaume Paugam demonstrates, this general shift has been accompanied by a series of other changes within and between households that have significant policy implications.
Growth in the number of women in employment has driven an overall rise in employment rates in Europe over the last four decades. In a relatively short space of time, the role of women in labour markets has shifted drastically from a predominant focus on unpaid household work to employment participation that is moving ever closer to men’s. For heterosexual couples, the male breadwinner model has thus gradually given way to the “dual-earning couple”.
Figure 1: Evolution of couple employment participation over time on average in Europe
Note: EU-LFS data for all countries of the EU (including the UK but not Croatia) as early as 1983. See accompanying paper for more details.
These evolutions have tended to shift inequality in access to employment from within the couple, to across couples. Imagine a society with just four couples (eight individuals) and an employment rate of 50% (four people in employment, four workless). In a pure male breadwinner society, all these couples would have at least one person – the male partner – in employment. There would be no workless couples, but this even access to employment across couples is at the expense of the female partners, with none of them in work.
Academic literature tends to show that European societies have increasingly, as women’s employment has risen, been moving towards a radically different model: a polarised distribution of jobs across couples. In our example, this would be characterised by two dual-earning and two dual-workless couples. For the same number of jobs, the way these jobs are distributed shapes inequality in employment participation, and in the consequences of employment participation in terms of earned income, in radically different ways.
Polarisation across couples
A key mechanism behind this rise in polarisation is that women entering employment have been disproportionately likely to do it with a male partner also in employment. At the same time, deindustrialisation has disproportionately hit sole-male-breadwinners, leading to dual-earning couples on the one hand, and dual-worklessness on the other.
Past research clearly documents this polarisation for the 1980s and 1990s. But do we have reasons to doubt that it is as relevant for subsequent decades? Plotting the evolution of polarisation indicators (which capture the distribution of jobs across couples as introduced in the “four couples” example) suggests that we do, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Polarisation indicator for the distribution of employment across couples (1983-2019 evolution on average across Europe)
Note: EU-LFS data for all countries of the EU (including the UK but not Croatia) as early as 1983. More negative values indicate a distribution of employment that gets more even across couples and inegalitarian within couples (male-breadwinning societies). Higher positive values indicate a distribution of employment that gets less even across couples and more egalitarian within them. See accompanying paper for more details.
Yes, employment and non-employment cluster in couples more than 40 years ago. But this rise in polarisation happened entirely in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, it has slowed down and even started to reverse, in a phenomenon strikingly common to most countries.
Over the past two decades, three key and mutually reinforcing changes have emerged. These are the sectoral transformation of economies, the increasing educational comparative advantage of women, and the substitution of non-standard employment for worklessness among low-skilled couples. The shock of the 2008 financial crisis helped accelerate these changes and the rise of the female-single-earning couple and non-standard-earning couple have embodied these evolutions.
Female single earning was a completely marginal phenomenon four decades ago. But for the first time, it has now overtaken dual-worklessness as a proportion of all couples on average in Europe. Its rise has accelerated in the last two decades, and the 50-percentage-point gap between the proportion of male and female-single-earning couples in 1983 has reduced to a 14-percentage-point gap.
Education and precarity
In most European couples, both partners share the same level of education, but this proportion has remained stable over time (around 64%). Among couples in Europe during the 1990s where partners did not share the same level of education, the male partner was most often the most educated. Today, this situation has been reversed: on average, European women are more educated than their partner. These couples in which the female is more educated than the male have driven the recent rise in female single earning.
In the 1980s and 1990s, women who entered employment were typically highly educated and partnered with highly educated and employable men, with both partners disproportionately likely to work in the service sector. Early rising female employment disproportionately took place in couples where the male partner was also employed.
But this is no longer necessarily the case. The shifting educational profiles of working women, in absolute value and relative to their male partner, explains why rising female employment now also fuels female-single-earning, and why polarisation has slowed as a result.
Further, the distribution of industrial jobs in the 1980s was heavily skewed towards male-single-earners in heterosexual couples – hence why deindustrialisation led to workless couples. The labour market position of low-skilled men and men employed in industry has continued to depreciate since.
While males in industrial employment were typically partnered with a workless female in the 1980s, they are now more likely to be partnered with a female working in the service sector. The 2008 crisis led to large scale losses of industrial jobs, but unlike the 1980s, this did not lead to non-employment clustering in couples, as female service employment acted as a buffer. If anything, the 2008 crisis accelerated the rise in female-single-earning.
Finally, another long-run trend accelerated by the 2008 crisis and tightly linked to the rise of the service sector is the rise in non-standard employment, such as part-time, temporary and self-employment. This has fuelled the general rise in employment rates over the past four decades, particularly for women.
Strikingly, precariousness in employment participation for couples is shifting away from dual-worklessness, towards couples whose only source of labour income is from non-standard work. Non-standard employment, which used to primarily be a complement to a standard job in couples, increasingly clusters in couples as their sole source of work earnings. Such non-standard-earning arrangements disproportionately affect lower-skilled couples, much like dual-worklessness.
Policy implications
These changes have three main implications for policy. The first relates to policies aimed at increasing employment rates, which remains a key objective in Europe. Much of the shift towards active labour market policies in Europe aims to get groups of workers traditionally outside the labour force into work – typically economically inactive women.
This “stock” still exists, but is becoming much smaller, while low-skilled men are increasingly workless. Economically inactive women often went straight from economic inactivity to work – many did not lack the capacity to work but were constrained out of it by social norms and welfare systems.
Workless, low-skilled men may present a different profile, stuck in long-term involuntary worklessness. Most workless male partners in female-single-earning couples seek or want work, but the proportion of female-single-earning couples keeps increasing. More ambitious policies of reskilling may be needed.
The second implication relates to female-single-earning couples. There is much evidence from the literature that women’s share of household unpaid work has not decreased proportionally to their rising share of paid market work in heterosexual couples.
We need large-scale education policies aimed at engaging males in unpaid household work. In the shorter-term, policies relieving women of their double-burden, such as extensive public childcare provision, are more urgent than ever as they increasingly assume an important, if not the main, breadwinning role. Public health prevention strategies monitoring the mental health of double-burdened working women are also key.
The third implication relates to policies aimed at preventing poverty and alleviating income inequality. Precarious, low-skilled couples are increasingly not workless, and as such, may go under the radar of welfare states. Getting workless couples into work only goes so far if that work is precarious.
Policies improving employment quality and making sure that work pays are even more important if insecure or low-paid work is not a complement to a more secure job anymore, but the only source of labour income in the household. Otherwise, in-work poverty looms.
Poverty and inequality are household level outcomes, while official measures often concentrate on individual-level employment. Studying household-level employment participation is an indispensable bridge towards better policies. It is also necessary to capture the quality of jobs, rather than just the number of jobs in a household. The relevant cleavage increasingly is not working households versus workless households, but households in good quality employment versus households in precarious work.
For more information, see the author’s accompanying paper in the Socio-Economic Review
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Andrei Nekrassov / Shutterstock.com
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