Explaining Gender Inequalities That Follow Couple Migration

In the past two decades, the migration of couples has received considerable attention in the field of mobility research. Researchers have been particularly puzzled by the persisting gender inequalities in the outcomes of job-related migration among couples. Despite significant increases in women's education, earnings, labor force participation, and work attachment (Costa & Kahn, 2000), the long-distance migration of families continues to be undertaken for the advancement of men's careers. Female partners suffer considerable losses in terms of economic achievement and career prospects (see, e.g., Boyle, Cooke, Halfacree, & Smith, 2001; Cooke, 2008b; Jacobsen & Levin, 1997; Shauman, 2010, and the references therein). The significant attention these gender disparities have received must be understood in the context of labor market research, which reveals that gender differences in mobility outcomes are mostly found only among couples. Single women, like single men, are reported to profit from job-related spatial mobility by taking advantage of better job offers and employment opportunities in distant regions (Geist & McManus, 2012; Jacobsen & Levin, 1997; Maxwell, 1988; van Ham, Mulder, & Hooimeijer, 2001; Zaiceva, 2010). Particularly for highly qualified single workers, spatial mobility has been shown to foster career progress regardless of gender.These patterns of inequality have also very much challenged theoretical explanations. Previous attempts to explain gender disparities have primarily focused on internal determinants and decision making within couples largely by referring to either microeconomic models of utility maximization and bargaining between partners or sociological theories of gender role ideology. Therefore, the theoretical and empirical efforts have focused on the ongoing and unresolved debate about which explanation to favor (for a review, see Cooke, 2008b). General criticism of these approaches has recently emerged, indicating the dearth of structural explanations that take into account how gender inequalities in the external labor market influence the mobility opportunities of men and women (Shauman & Noonan, 2007). In particular, studies that have analyzed the impact of occupational sex segregation on gender-specific migration opportunities and returns have surfaced in the mobility literature but remain inconclusive about the factual empirical relevance of such structures (Perales & Vidal, 2013; Shauman, 2010; Shauman & Noonan, 2007).We aim to contribute to the existing literature by adopting a third position. From this perspective, structural and individual-level approaches do not present alternative explanations but instead need to be combined. We therefore focus on how macro-level opportunity structures interact with individual incentives and couples' decision-making processes to create gendered patterns of migration outcomes. In particular, we argue that testing the theories noted above may remain incomplete and misleading if this interaction is not taken into account. We address and extend the existing research in three ways.First, with respect to the structural dimension, we explicitly take into account regional labor market structures, namely, gender-specific wage and employment opportunities in the destination and origin regions. Although regional determinants are implicit in most structural and individual-level approaches, they are rarely incorporated directly into empirical analysis.Second, in regard to theories of decisionmaking within couples, we draw on recent debates about the relevance of bargaining theories that have increasingly been proposed as a theoretically more straightforward and empirically more adequate extension to the prevailing household-utility-maximizing models (Lundberg & Pollak, 2003; Ott, 1992).Third, we apply this integrated approach to the job-related migration decisions and outcomes of couples in East and West Germany. …