Life Course Patterns of Career-Prioritizing Decisions and Occupational Attainment in Dual-Earner Couples

Abstract

Couples' long-term pattern of favoring one spouse's career in major decisions is thought to affect occupational trajectories, but current research has looked only at short-term effects of single decisions. This article applies a new technique, the interpolated curves approach, to represent and compare life course patterns of major career-prioritizing decisions, using in-depth data from 51 couples. Five clusters of career hierarchy patterns are identified; the patterns predict income better than summary measures of career hierarchy, including average individual career gains to decisions and self-reported career priority. Findings are significant for wives, and are similar but weaker for husbands.

Categorizing Married Couple Expected Employment Prioritization in the Post-Recession United States

“…This categorization seems to be a shift in expected prioritization. These results are largely consistent with Pixley's (2008) findings regarding decision-making patterns as well as Moen and Huang's (2010) findings that dualearner couples may create a gendered career customization strategy that ultimately privileges husbands' jobs. The results in this paper could be due to the Great Recession as respondents report that they and their spouse are likely to be pragmatic in their responses to employment opportunities.…”

“…Couples tend to develop trust, long-term understandings of reciprocity, and a shared interpretation of their family's best interest throughout marriages. Further, Pixley (2008) documents complicated career hierarchy decisions that scaffolded upon one another throughout the marital life course, highlighting the need to understand previous career prioritization when assessing thoughts about future relocation opportunities.…”

Bounded or boundaryless? An empirical investigation of career boundaries and boundary crossing

“…Family relationships are another important factor influencing people's perceptions about the desirability and the feasibility of crossing specific career boundaries. This applies, for example, in the case of familial entrepreneurship which is often passed on from one generation to the next (Bruin and Lewis, 2004), but also in the case of dual-earner couples, where the career of the man is often prioritized (Pixley, 2008).…”

Re-Thinking the Two-Body Problem: The Segregation of Women into Geographically-Dispersed Occupations, 1980-2010

“…As Pixley (2008) notes, the emphasis on individual mobility decisions, rather than broader life-course implications, may be a result of a methodological convenience rather than analytical importance. Since Pixley's critique, a few studies have explored how workers' occupations predict relocation.…”