Gender, Nonstandard Schedules, and Partnership Quality: Exploring Heterogeneous Effects Through a Quasi-Experiment

Riley Taiji , University of Oxford

This study explores how nonstandard schedules (i.e., employment during nights, evenings, and weekends) affect partnership quality (PQ). While this relationship has been explored in the past, few attempts have been made to correct for the complex and competing channels of selection into nonstandard schedules, which may have contributed to inconsistent findings across previous research. Accordingly, the current study employs matching and propensity score stratification techniques to simulate randomization and test for patterns of positive/negative selection on a sample of 20,647 workers in co-resident partnerships included in the UKHLS. Results indicate that after correcting for baseline selection, nonstandard schedules only negatively affect PQ when worked by women. Crucially, women’s nonstandard schedules take the largest tolls on the partner of the worker rather than the worker herself. This is tied to a third finding: women positively select into nonstandard schedules on the basis of their own but not their partner’s perceived PQ.

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 Presented in Session 136. Families and Work