14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by Marybeth Mattingly and Kristin Smith from the Carsey Institute concluded that during recession periods, women enter the workforce if their husbands become unemployed.
Given the recent recession, in the world and in the United States, many companies laid off thousands of people, complicating the lives of their families.
And as everybody is revising their spending and income possibilities, more and more women get a job and even become the main breadwinners in their family.
The two researchers explain that “with many of the recent layoffs coming from male-dominated fields, families are relying on wives as breadwinners to a larger extent than during a recent period of relative prosperity.”
Their study analyzed the likelihood that wives will go to work or even start looking for a job when their husbands stopped working, between the prosperity period going from May 2004 to 2005, and the more difficult period of May 2007-2008.
Wives of husbands who stopped working during the recession period, had almost three times the odds of entering the labor force as compared to those whose husbands kept their jobs.
This theory is called “the added worker” theory, and says that housewives may seek work as a substitute for their husbands' job, if they become unemployed, and that this is more likely to occur during a recession period.
This employment trend is present for decades and was accelerated by the current crisis, showing changes in gender roles in the family, highlighting equity in the workplace and the balance between family and work.
This trend can also be observed during more prosperous times, when a husband stops working and his part-time working wife increases her hours.
Even in health and education, which are two female dominated occupations, working hours increased during the recent recession, in order to create a more reliable income source for families.
The findings were published in an article in Family Relations, AlphaGalileo reports.