What does democracy mean for married women in the labor market? Married women are more actively looking for work but are still more likely to be unemployed than men. However, the expansion of education in the democratic era has significantly influenced how she weighs her potential wages and her husband's earnings when deciding whether to look for work.
This month, as South Africa celebrates Independence Day, it is important to pause to reflect on what changes 1994 brought for women.
The end of apartheid brought with it a series of legislative changes that expanded women's freedom and increased the share of women actively looking for work. In the three decades since, the share of women aged 25 to 59 actively looking for work has increased from 40% to 65%, one of the more measurable changes of the post-apartheid era. But just because more women are looking for work doesn't mean more women are at work. Women's employment has not kept pace, and women are more likely to be unemployed than men, a gap that has barely shrunk in a decade.
The reasons for any woman's decision to seek work are complex, but for married women who pool time and money with their spouses, trade-offs are particularly salient. However, it is much more difficult to answer what exactly motivates that decision, and whether it has changed as the democratic era has unfolded. There is surprisingly little evidence base on this question in South Africa. Answering this requires understanding two factors that influence a married woman's decision to find work: what she can earn herself, and what her partner already brings home. If his own potential wages increase, does he become more likely to seek employment? And if her partner earns more, do her chances go down? These are the self-price and cross-price elasticities of labor supply, measuring how sensitive a woman's decision to work is to her own potential wages, on the one hand, and to her partner's earnings, on the other.
In the United States and Europe, both effects were strongly felt – a woman was more likely to seek work when her own potential wages were higher, and less likely to seek work when her partner earned more, reflecting a world in which the household ran on a single income and a woman's paid work was discretionary rather than essential. Over the past half century, both effects have steadily weakened as women have become more connected to the labor market per se. Whether the same change has occurred in South Africa, and what has driven it, is a different and much less settled question, and the picture that emerges from two decades of data is more complex than might be expected.
change in trend
Both wage effects weakened in the 2000s, then stabilized and in some cases began to strengthen again in the 2010s. In particular, a husband's high earnings, which once prevented his wife from looking for work, has lost its strength over the two decades of the study. In the early 2000s, increases in a husband's salary reduced the likelihood that his wife would seek employment. By 2010, the same increase in their earnings had less impact on their decision.
COVID-19 quickly disrupted this trend and both effects weakened again. Stabilization and partial reversal in the 2010s was most pronounced among groups with greater labor market advantages: white women and those with tertiary education. Overall, South Africa's level of wage sensitivity is roughly equivalent to high-income countries such as the United States, France and the Netherlands.
Figure 1: Own and cross-price labor supply elasticities of married or cohabiting women over time
Notes: Author's own calculations using the Post-Apartheid Socio-Economic Series (PASES). Results are weighted using StatsSA individual weights. The sample is married or cohabiting women aged 25 to 59, living with employed spouses or partners over the age of 70. The left panel shows the elasticity of own price, how sensitive a married woman's decision to look for work is to her own potential wage. The right panel shows the cross-price elasticity of how sensitive that decision is to its partner's earnings. Each panel shows a linear fit, a locally weighted regression fit, and annual elasticity estimates with 95% confidence intervals. The vertical red dashed line indicates 2020. The horizontal red dashed line indicates zero.
The pattern of the 2000s makes intuitive sense. When unemployment is high and job lines are long, getting a job matters more than its pay, and so a woman's own potential wages are no longer the deciding factor in whether she finds work. But the 2010s tell a different story. Female unemployment did not decline, if anything, it worsened after the 2008 global financial crisis. So why would married women be more sensitive to wages when their chances of finding work were no better?
Education is a turning point
Answering this question is complex, but one clue points to one of the most important changes of the post-apartheid era: the expansion of access to education. The change in wage sensitivity occurs almost exactly the moment the average married woman crosses a specific threshold – completing matriculation. That threshold matters because this is the point where employment prospects improve significantly. A woman with a matriculation certificate has a much higher chance of getting a job than a woman without a matriculation certificate. As more women crossed that threshold in the 2010s, which was a direct result of post-apartheid investment in schooling, their sensitivity to what they could earn began to stagnate or increase.
In other developing countries it is not unusual for women to have more education as they exit the labor market. Once their husbands start earning enough, wives will be less inclined to do menial jobs if not necessary, freeing them to spend more time at home and, for some, saving them the stigma of physical work. But typically once women begin obtaining tertiary education and filling white-collar jobs, they choose to capitalize on their greater earnings and career prospects. So why would tertiary educated and advantaged women in South Africa be the ones who have become more sensitive to pay? This question is not yet settled, and the South African pattern challenges to some extent conventional ideas about how labor markets develop.
Even as more women have entered paid employment, they are still taking on the lion's share of unpaid domestic and care work. Thirty-two years after democracy, married women's models of when to work are dynamic and changing as they balance the burden of paid and unpaid work. This change is closely linked to the expansion of freedoms granted to women at the beginning of democracy, as well as the broad-based expansion of their levels of education.
Written by Amy Thornton, Econ3x3