What makes dual career couples work? A longitudinal comparative mixed methods analysis

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Longitudinal research has mainly focussed on women's problems in maintaining a career. However, mothers in a relationship are the ones who struggle because fathers often rely on their unpaid work efforts to maintain a career (Blossfeld and Drobnic, 2001, Gershuny, 2000). This suggests that couple-level shifts in the division of labour upon entering parenthood are at the heart of the problem of gender inequalities in life course career investment. Women who enter parenthood are also the majority of the UK female population (Office for National Statistics, 2012). Hence, this project's main goal is to understand how couples' careers are interrelated across their lives. The second goal is to analyse which factors are associated with dual career failure and dual career success.The theoretical re-framing requires new methodological advances. The dual curve approach, which I developed during my PhD, to fill this gap and which I will further develop in the course of the project in combination with the following two recent data advances, enables these questions to be answered. (1) Whereas it used not to be possible to look at couples' long-term career trajectories because panel data only covered short time-spans, the US, UK, and German panel studies and Swedish register data now cover up to 45 years of couples' lives. This enables a comparison of the same life course stage at different historical eras with different levels of family policy support and analysis of how couple-level behaviour relates to family support across different life course stages. The panel datasets have been harmonized in the surprisingly underused Cross National Equivalent File which greatly reduces the start-up time for comparative research. (2) This exciting quantitative opportunity is paired with a new qualitative life course component: Researchers are only now being given direct access to arrange interviews with panel participants. This unique data combination - a mixed methods approach investigating macro- and micro-level factors using both longitudinal panel and register data as well as qualitative data - enables an unprecedentedly rich narrative of couples' careers across their lives.This application is timely because a better understanding of couples' careers may inform current policy makers' efforts to efficiently support couples' careers (as exemplified by the 2014 US White House Summit on Working Families and the introduction of 26 weeks of paternity leave if the mother returns to work in the UK). The research is also important because (1) on the macro-level, dual career success can help balance governments' social security books, which are strained by an ageing population which has to be supported by an ever smaller number of workers. (2) A better use of human capital can help companies find the employees they need. (3) On the micro-level, dual career success can decrease women's and couples' risks of falling into poverty in case of divorce or the unemployment of the male breadwinner. (4) It can contribute to a fairer society by reducing inequalities within the couple with regards to human capital investments across the life course (OECD, 2013). And (5) it can increase the quality of couples' lives in terms of individual well-being (as my PhD findings suggest). Overall, it may contribute to a more competitive UK economic performance and a fairer society. The project will allow me to bridge disciplines as well as qualitative and quantitative, register and panel data. It will build the capacity for future comparative work thereby adding value to the UK's current large investments in longitudinal and big administrative data.A project start in 2016 is crucial as it will allow me to work alongside two complementary non-overlapping ESRC/ERC projects. The project adds a long-term couple-level work strategy perspective to the Centre for Time Use Research's analysis of the day and can inform a panel data harmonization project