Changing Household Composition and Female Household Heads--Causes and Implications.

Labor market investigations attribute the weak labor force participation of German women to traditional role patterns. This article explores whether this interpretation can be confirmed by an alternate indicator--the proportion of female household-heads. Using PSID-GSOEP panel data, changes in the proportion of female household-heads are decomposed into changes in household composition (structural effect) and changes in role patterns (emancipatory effect). The empirical results indicate traditional role patterns to be more likely in US than in German partner-households. Both the increasing numbers of female headed households and the high emancipatory effect point to a redefinition of traditional role patterns in Germany. On the other hand bivariate as well as multivariate approaches prove only a weak causal relationship between the gender of household head and age, education-level and employment-level of both partners.