Career Choice, Marriage-Timing, and the Attraction of Unequals

Sylvain Dessy () and Habiba Djebbari

Abstract: Both men and women wish to have a family and a rewarding career. In this paper, we show that the under-representation of women in high-powered professions may reflect a coordination failure in young women's marriage-timing decisions. Since investing in a high-powered career imposes time strain, it precludes early participation in the marriage market. Delayed participation in the marriage market has a higher cost for women than for men because women have shorter fecundity horizons. Marriage prospects of high-powered women depend on the marriage-timing decisions of younger women. Under these assumptions, we show that women's marriage-timing decisions exhibit strategic complementarities. Coordination failures in women's marriage-timing decisions lead to persisting gender differences in career choices. Yet, differential fecundity is only necessary, but not sufficient to obtain gender inequality in high-powered professions. We discuss social changes that solve the coordination failure while achieving a Pareto-improvement in the society at large.

Keywords: Marriage-timing; high-powered career; supermodular game; strategic complementarities; multiple equilibria; coordination failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2005/CIRPEE05-07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Career Choice, Marriage-Timing, and the Attraction of Unequals (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:lacicr:0507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().