Unemployment and marriage status

Per FRED Blog, unemployment statistics reveal a striking pattern when viewed by marriage status. Married men and women's unemployment rates move in sync across business cycles—though historically separated by roughly two percentage points, that gap narrowed by the nineteen-nineties. More dramatically, women heading single-parent households face unemployment rates considerably higher than married women. The reason involves incentives built into how we measure unemployment—which counts only those actively seeking work. When one spouse has income, the other may voluntarily leave the labor force entirely rather than search for a job, lowering their jobless rate by definition. Women maintaining families face different pressures and are more likely to search intensively and continuously for work, keeping their unemployment rate elevated. In other words, marriage status shapes not just who's employed, but who stays in the job market at all.

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