Recessionary Labor Markets and Male Breadwinner Ideology Among Heterosexual, Married Couples

Using the first two waves of the U.S. National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) data, collected before and after the economic recession in early 1990s, I assess the relation of recessionary labor markets to individual belief in the male breadwinner ideology.  Recessionary labor markets are particularly interesting in studying the economic contexts that shape the male breadwinner ideology because economic recession could exacerbate the long-term secular trend toward great economic insecurity that has had the interesting consequence of reducing gender inequality in a labor market (Bernhardt, Morris and Handcock 1995). When the economy is in recession, traditional male breadwinners’ standing may be more precarious, and the division of household labor may change if others need to go to work or increase their hours (Berik and Kongar 2013). In other words, there are two ways that differences in the economic arrangements operating in different regions could be related to attitude change. First, levels of gender inequality that vary across local labor markets can provide an economic ground for the sustainability or decline of shared sentiment toward the male breadwinner ideology (Ridgeway 2011). A normative expectation at the community level can be translated into individual attitudes through social interactions with others who live and work in the area (Bolzendahl and Myers 2004). Second, recessionary labor markets could also shape the attitudes of residents regarding the male breadwinning ideology because of experiences with household-level work rearrangement. Women’s paid working hours within a two adult household often increase during recessionary times as an income-smoothing strategy (Berik and Kongar 2013). Shared responsibility for earnings that arises in the event of an increased women’s contribution can lead men to endorse a less traditional attitude about the gender of breadwinners (Zuo 1997). 

Since I use the first two waves of the NSFH data, two observations are available per individual. I use a random intercept model to exploit this panel data structure. A random intercept model allows dependency among observations within the clustering unit, which is an individual in this study, by introducing a person-specific term that randomly varies across individuals. Findings of this study suggest that individuals have less traditional attitudes about the appropriate gender of a primary earner when they reside in a local labor market where average earnings of women are closer to those of men. This suggests that a local labor market is an important level of analysis in understanding individual attitudes about the male breadwinner ideology. Also, the results of this study suggest that all individuals do not experience recessionary labor markets in the same way.  The ways households respond to economic insecurity in recessionary labor markets, for example, with household labor rearrangement and its consequences for women’s relative income in a two adult household, does shape individual perception of who should be a primary earner even when individuals are embedded in the same labor market.