For whose sake do couples relocate? Gender, career opportunities and couples’ internal migration in Sweden

Maria Brandén () and Sara Ström ()
Additional contact information
Maria Brandén: Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Postal: SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Sara Ström: Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Postal: SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

No 2011:3, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: The aim with this study is to examine how career possibilities in the man’s and the woman’s occupations – in the country as a whole, as well as in the region where the couple resides – affect heterosexual couples’ regional mobility. The context is Sweden –a country with a strong dual earner norm combined with a very sex segregated labor market. In the analyses we perform logistic regressions on Swedish register data, 1998–2007. We study how four dimensions of career possibilities affect couples’ geographical mobility and are interested in if their effect varies by gender. The dimensions are geographical wage differences, current career, occupational level and wage compression in occupations. In summary, our findings indicate that male and female career opportunities affect the couple in different ways when one moves beyond focusing on the level of their occupations. In particular the effect from wage compression in occupations seems to be dependent on gender, with a clear effect for men and no effect for women. Even when including measures of career opportunities within professions, there exist some non-egalitarian patterns in whose career couples adjust to. It hence seems as if couples adapt somewhat more to the man's career possibilities than the woman’s, even when we adjust for the underlying gender differences in career possi-bilities.

Keywords: Regional mobility; internal migration; sex segregation; career; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2011-02-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming as Brandén, Maria and Sara Ström, 'Couples' Education and Regional Mobility – the Importance of Occupation, Income and Gender' in Population, Space and Place, 2012.

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