Dual earner and dual career couples in contemporary Italy

Based on a national longitudinal data set, this essays analyses the conditions that favour the formation of dual earner, and specifically dual career couples in Italy, i.e., in a country characterized by comparatively low women’s labour force participation and intra-generational mobility. Dual career couples include all couples in which both spouses belong to the higher occupational classes according to Erikson’s and Goldthorpe’s classification. Using EHA and cross-lag models, we have tested the role of women’s education and occupational position in supporting their attachment to the labour market throughout the family formation years. We found that, although dual earner couples are comparatively fewer in Italy than in other countries, dual career ones are, in relative terms, the most common kind within them. We have also explored the role of homogamous marriages in shaping the possibility that a couple develops first as a dual earner and second as a dual career one. The school credentials possessed and the occupations performed by the spouses do not affect their respective career mobility chances. Particularly, contrary to findings of other studies, the husband’s education and occupational position has no impact on the wife’s occupation, except, negatively, when he is better educated than she is. Dual career marriages seem to be more the result of original homogamous characteristics of spouses than of a reinforcing impact of the social capital of highly educated husbands.