Female Labour Force Participation After Divorce: How Employment Histories Matter

This article focuses on the labour market decisions of divorced women, surrounding the time of the factual separation. We build on earlier research, but explicitly distinguish between homemakers and unemployed women. Using retrospective data gathered from a sample of 1251 Flemish women from the Divorce in Flanders project (DiF 2009–2010), we performed anticipation-controlled event-history analysis to estimate the probability of an employment increase around the time of separation. We find that: (a) women were twice as likely to increase their employment for a short period of time after the separation, (b) there was an increasingly negative relationship between employment intensity at the time of separation and the probability of increasing employment immediately afterwards, and (c) observed differences between homemakers and unemployed women were likely due to compositional differences at the time of separation.