For Whose Sake Do Couples Relocate? Gender, Career Opportunities, and Couples’ Internal Migration in Sweden

Maria Brandén, Stockholm University
Sara Ström, Stockholm University

This paper examines how heterosexual couples’ regional mobility is affected by career possibilities in the man’s and the woman’s occupations – in the country as a whole, as well as in the region where the couple resides. The context is Sweden, a country combining a strong dual-earner norm with a sex-segregated labor market. We perform logistic regressions on Swedish register data, 1998-2007, and study how geographical wage differences, current career, occupational level and wage compression in occupations affect couples’ mobility, and if the effect varies by gender. Our findings indicate that male and female career possibilities often have different effects on couples’ mobility. In particular the effect from wage compression is dependent on gender, whereas the effect from occupational level is not. It seems as if couples adapt somewhat more to the man's career possibilities than the woman’s, even when we adjust for the underlying gender differences in career possibilities.