,
13 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
Today is the 5 year anniversary of my marriage ending! There's nothing like a divorce in the middle of a dissertation to make a feminist economist think about gender norms and heteronormativity impacting economic outcomes. A thread on gender, relationships, and economics: 1/12
Literally two weeks before my ex-husband unexpectedly walked out on me (it sucked!), I wrote this piece in @guardian about my decision to withdraw from the labor force (as a RA) and rely on his earnings to fund my living expenses while dissertating. theguardian.com/money/2014/aug… 2/12
I always come back to Kaushik Basu's "Gender and Say: A Model of Household Behavior with Endogenously-Determined Balance of Power" and think everyone debating a single-earner two-person household should read it. ttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=634781 3/12
One of the places Gary Becker fails in his model of the household is accounting for POWER. Basu's model looks at how decision making within households can endogenously reinforce power disparities. Obviously the social hierarchy between men and women reinforces this. 4/12
So even when single-earner two-person couples make a joint decision for one person to leave the labor force, that person will still end up relatively disempowered within the couple. This is the woman 99% of the time. It was the best choice for us, but not a perfect choice. 5/12
Side bar: withdrawing from the labor force, even for great reasons like babies and dissertations, imposes long-term costs. This research by @mikemadowitz calculating these costs should be kept in mind when making these decisions: americanprogress.org/issues/early-c… 6/12
Two weeks after writing my Guardian piece on being a housewife and suddenly I'm a divorcée. Divorce is always an economic shock because of shared assets. It's established in economics that women face more costs associated with divorce. 7/12
Research from @Prof_CEW finds that single women face the greatest economic insecurity. While married women have more wealth, divorce leads to declines in wealth. Also, other risk factors like caregiving don't go away for women when they get divorced. americanprogress.org/issues/economy… 8/12
Sociologists Holden and Smock suggest it's not just the cost of divorce and loss assets that lead to women's worse outcomes, but “the division of labor during marriage, lower wages paid to women... and the lack of adequate post-dissolution transfers.” jstor.org/stable/2083335… 9/12
Post-dissolution transfers = alimony. The legal framework around divorce can help, but it is not sufficient to account for costly ways women shape their lives around men as determined by gender norms. I wrote about this in @TPM at one year single: talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/in-defens… 10/12
I was "lucky" that I got divorced relatively young and I was almost done making a huge investment in my career. My divorce was finalized the same week I got my PhD. I bounced back (with some debt 😬) and being single is great for your career - I moved to DC for a dream job! 11/12
I learned a lesson that Nicki Minaj echoed when I saw her concert shortly after I graduated and was legally divorced - women should not shape their lives around men. Even with the economic benefits of marriage, it poses serious economic costs to women. Also, get a prenup. 12/12
P.s. this mainly applies to heterosexual couples, but that’s complicated by heteronormativity affecting all couples regardless of their gender composition and also patriarchy sucks.
