“Is Male Unemployment Good for Women’s Employment? A couple-level cross-national study with 31 countries”

There are many studies into the added worker effect, whereby unemployment of one partner increases labour supply of the other. Less is known, however, whether the increased labour supply of the reacting female partner is limited to the unemployment phase or lasts beyond it, thereby reshaping the couple’s work-family arrangements more durably. This article investigates change in couples’ division of paid work during and after a male partner’s unemployment spell in 31 European countries with the longitudinal EU Statistics on Income and Living between 2003-2019. We employ a difference-in-differences design with propensity score matching to examine whether women’s share of couples’ total paid working hours increase during and after the unemployment spell of the male partner, compared to a control group of observably similar couples without male unemployment. We subsequently run multilevel analyses with random slopes and cross-level interactions in the matched sample to measure the moderating effect of countries’ contexts. We find evidence of a statistically significant increase in women’s share of couples paid working hours in the two years after their male partner regained employment, particularly among inactive and part-time working female partners. This partner’s effect significantly varies by a country’s poverty risk, couple’s taxation model, and gender employment gap.

Luana Marx is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.