Why Women Move For Their Husbands’ Jobs

It’s more complicated than you might expect:

The study, recently published in the journal Demography, does not dispute the tendency to move for a husband’s career. Rather, the new study takes issue with the reasons behind the move. The big take-away: Women enter professions that make it easy to work anywhere, and move for any reason, including for a spouse. Men choose careers in fields that are geographically-constrained. In other words, men have to move in order to move up.

“The tendency for men to move more often than women is completely explained by the types of jobs they enter, not that they are men or women,” [study author Alan] Benson said in an interview. “Men who enter female-dominated jobs don’t tend to move as much for work. If you look at women who enter male-dominated jobs, they tend to move a lot.”

And if you look at women who are not married, they relocate for a job less often than men do.

Shane Ferro reads through the same study:

This segregation, Benson finds, is particularly pronounced among people with college degrees.

There are a lot of things this could mean. One of those is that women happen to like more flexible jobs. Another is that women feel a lot of pressure, from a young age, to sort themselves into flexible jobs.

At the end of the day, this goes back to a common conclusion from research concerning gender and careers: women often trade a lot of earning potential for flexibility, for better or for worse.