Career Prioritizing in Dual-Earner Couples and Spouses' Relative Career Gains to Major Decisions.

Prioritizing husbands' careers over wives' careers should theoretically constrain wives' career advancement and contribute to the gender wage gap. However, past research has not systematically tested how career priority in decision-making affects decision outcomes. This paper is the first to offer a behavioral operationalization of career prioritizing in family migration decisions and test whether the prioritized spouse indeed experiences better relative outcomes. I analyze dual-earner couples' reports on 73 decisions about whether and where to move. As predicted, husbands' careers fare better than their wives' careers when he has a job lined up before the decision made, when he finds a job before she does, when only the wife makes a job change, and when his career is given as the main reason for choosing that option. Decisions resulting in moves are relatively better for husbands than for wives, compared to decisions not to move. Surprisingly, spouses' relative career gains are not significantly related to whose career initiated the situation, or whether the wife had a job lined up. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]