Are married women's jobs career or secondary source of household income? Evidence from a simultaneous probit approach

Abstract

This article examines whether married women in the US treat their jobs as careers or as secondary source of household income. A simultaneous probit model is applied to cross-section data obtained from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I show that married women are more likely to work when the household is less financially constrained, suggesting that their jobs appear more like careers.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Peter Gottschalk for invaluable comments.

Notes

¹ I define woman's career as work that is not out of necessity to financially support the household.

² Obtaining data on the explanatory variables is relatively straightforward, except on LoanVeh, where the PSID reports only up to the first three vehicles financed by loans for each household. In our sample however, there are nine observations displaying three auto loans but more than three vehicles owned. Therefore, the number of unidentifiable households with possibly four auto loans and more would at most be nine, and this constitute a very small proportion of the entire sample.

³ The average family size in the US is 3.18 for 2004. This is based on the American Community Survey by the US Census Bureau. Website: http://factfinder.census.gov