According to researchers at the IFO Institute in Munich, the average cost of marriage accounts for one-fifth of income, and they released their findings on Friday, which coincided with the same remuneration day.
“Our research shows that in marriage, there is an increase in income differences between men and women, which has nothing to do with the birth of children,” said IFO researcher Elena Herold. She added that the impact became obvious within the years after marriage.
The same remuneration day – marked on March 7 in Germany, or the term of 18% – symbolically represents the average year for which women work for free, while the salary men receive for the same labor.
According to Herold, men have no major abnormalities in watching how the income of men and women changes compared to the year before the wedding. However, for women, she said there has been a big decline in years.
“It’s not only due to marriage, but it’s often arrived in the years after the wedding. But even if you address this impact, women’s income will be reduced by 20 percent,” she said, including the effects of having a baby, even about half.
She notes that the difference is through marriage rather than cohabitation: “For couples who live together before marriage, we see no difference in the effects of those who only attend with the wedding.” She adds that the greater legal security provided by marriage is supposedly encouraged women to reduce working hours.
Hourly wages are not affected
The decline in income is not due to lower wages for women. Due to marriage, there is no significant change in hourly income. Instead, about one in 10 women stopped working altogether and one in five less of the rest, which had been impacting for several years.
Relatedly, the work done by women in the household has increased by about one-fifth – excluding parenting. This was not observed in men, the study found.
According to this study, one of the reasons for reducing working hours is the inhibitory effect in the tax system. “A quarter of the decrease in married women’s income is due to standard marital relief,” Errold said.
Another aspect is gender roles. “We see fewer negative effects for women who grew up in East Germany before the reunification,” Errold said.
The decline in women’s income after marriage is not only a German phenomenon.
Erod said detailed international comparisons of income data are hard to obtain: “But if you look at how many women stop working completely in the years after the wedding, Germany is about the middle of Europe. In the Netherlands or Ireland, the rates are much higher, as well as in Switzerland or Greece.”
