Sex Asymmetry in Family Migration: Familial Gender Roles or Occupational Inequality?

Kimberlee A. Shauman, University of California, Davis

Despite significant increases in women’s labor force attachment, occupational prestige and proportionate contribution to family income, the empirical evidence indicates that long-distance family migration continues to be motivated disproportionately by the employment dynamics of the male partner in married-couple families. Researchers have attributed this sex asymmetry to one of two influences: (1) individual-level human capital disparities between spouses or (2) familial gender role inequality. I test the human capital and gender-role explanations against Mincer's (1978) structural explanation. The structural perspective attributes sex asymmetry in family migration decision-making to sex inequality and segregation the labor market. This analysis uses individual- and family-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), occupation-level data from the 1970-1990 U.S. Decennial Censuses Integrated Public Use Micro Samples (IPUMS), and discrete-time event history models to estimate the influence of individual-, family- and occupational-level characteristics on family migration events.