Braunheim, Lisa; Gapta, Laura (2024)
In: Heller, Ayline; Schmidt, Peter (Hrsg.): Thirty Years After the Berlin Wall. German Unification and Transformation Research. London: Routledge: 245–266
DOI: 10.4324/9781003427469-14
Previous research showed that unemployment influences life satisfaction not only of the directly affected person, but also of their partner. In Germany, unemployment experiences differ between East and West: Different gender roles resulted in diverging women’s labor market participation between regions. Data from the Socio-Economic Panel between 1990 and 2021 (Nrespondents = 21,782) were used to compute fixed-effects regression models, to assess how the partner’s job loss affected the own life satisfaction. Factors including living in East or West Germany, sex, and becoming the household’s main earner all moderated this effect. The sex-related differences in proportional contributions to the household income as well as the consequences of the partner’s job loss were smaller in East Germany. Mediation analyses showed that the tested effects were fully mediated by the directly affected partner’s diminishing life satisfaction among East German men and women and in West German men. Only West German women suffered from job loss directly. Conclusion: Unbalanced economic contributions to households or more traditional gendered work roles were more prevalent in the West. As their household incomes heavily relied on male contributions, becoming the household’s main earner was a protective factor for West German men, and West German women were the only ones specifically suffering from their partner’s job loss.