hello everyone it’s really really nice
to meet y’all my name is Johanna and I’m
a researcher in economics and one
question that I’m very interested in in
my work is the opportunities that people
have to pursue their goals and dreams in
their lives so if you all take a second
and like quickly try to picture in your
minds
what your own goals are for your own
future okay so some of you might picture
that dream job that great career and
then others you may think of family
loving relationship maybe children at
least those are part of what I think of
when I think of these things and the
research that I’m going to talk about
today shows that even today in Sweden
women are substantially less likely to
be able to achieve those goals than men
are and as a background I’d like to tell
you a story that happened when I was out
presenting my work because when I am out
talking about family and career people
tend to come up afterwards and we want
to discuss their own experiences and
that’s great because you find out lots
of stuff about people and in this
particular case a woman was talking
about some friends of hers this friend
that was pursuing the position of mayor
in Italy and it was really this woman’s
dream to become a mayor and she was
campaigning really hard and her husband
was helping her to become a mayor he was
out on the campaign trail with her but
then after a very close election it
ended up that she lost unfortunately and
the husband was sad but then he confided
in this friend that actually he wasn’t
that sad he was actually can be relieved
that she didn’t get this position after
all so she would still be in her less
demanding job and so what this story
highlights is that there can be these
conflicts between your career goals in
life and your family situation and in
our research me and my colleagues what
we researched was in Sweden what the
impacts are on women’s and men’s
relationships from getting to these top
jobs in politics and also in business so
I’m going to tell you first how we
analyze politics and we picked two jobs
top jobs in Swedish politics in
Parliament in Sweden in every electoral
districts parties offer electoral
ballots and so say your party wins five
seats you count those five seats from
the top of the ballot so for twenty year
period in nine elections we could find
in Swedish data all the marginal
candidates on those lists in this case
the fifth person that barely got into
Parliament and the sixth person that
wanted to be a parliamentarian but in
the end couldn’t get in so we selected
from Swedish data all those close
contestants for Parliament and another
point of data where we could find good
data on promotions and people who lost
promotions is for mayor in Sweden we
have 300 municipalities and in each
municipality you have a right bloc of
parties right-wing bloc competing
against the left-wing bloc and each one
has a candidate for mayor so suppose
that you guys on this side are the
left-wing parties and you guys are the
right-wing parties if you guys win 50
percent of the council seats your
candidate for mayor becomes mayor and
unfortunately for this side your
candidate becomes opposition leader so
they’re like the Italian woman that
ended up not becoming mayor after all
and so for these nine election periods
and every one of the 300 municipalities
we pick out in the data all these rivals
people who wanted to become mayor and
we’re of some people ended up getting
the position and in Sweden thanks to
personal identity sure numbers we have
very good data and we know for everyone
in this data set precisely if they were
married or divorced in each individual
year and we also know many other
background variables about these people
so using this data we can go for years
prior in time to when this election
happened and we can compare the women
who lost to the women who
and we can compare many variables and
here is just an example the women who
were promoted are very similar in these
variables to the women who were not
promoted they are similar age they’re
similarly likely to have children they
have been married for similar lengths of
time and make similar amount of money
and the same thing happens in the data
for men the men who win and lose are
also very similar to each other on these
observable characteristics
okay so keeping in mind that these
people are very similar to each other
the winner and the losers we can then go
for years back in time before each one
of these elections and we can plot in
the graph and the probability to remain
married so we take all these candidates
and we restrict the data to the people
who are married four years prior to the
election this is 70 percent of the men
and 60 percent of the women so this
figure starts it starts to count down on
the horizontal axis to the election –
four years – three years and the line
starts at one because by construction
100 percent of the people in the data
are married and then each year a certain
number of relationships fall apart so we
see a declining trend in the proportion
that remained married to their partner
and in this figure these gray lines
right now they show the development in
the probability remain married for
people who did not get the promotion and
the promotion happened here happens here
at this black line and then year one is
the first year on the job etc okay so
now we’re going to look at the
development for men who did get the
promotion okay so when I add the line
for men you can hardly see it because it
perfectly overlaps with the line for men
who lost the promotion so there’s really
no difference here the probability to
remain married for men but when we
examined women who got the promotion it
was clear that leading up to the
election there was no difference between
the winning and losing candidates
but immediately once the women who make
up the black line who were promoted to
these top jobs in politics once they get
promoted they start divorcing at a much
faster rate
they actually divorced twice as fast as
the control group and four years into
the job when were at time point four
there’s a seven percentage point
difference in the divorce rate of these
two groups okay so here we have women
who on average have invested about like
20 years in this relationship and it
seems like they are giving it up as they
get this promotion hmm so another sector
that we looked at whilst the private
sector promotions to CEO in private
firms and in private firms we
unfortunately don’t know who applied for
the position but lost so we can only
compare men and women who were promoted
so this graph here shows the probability
to remain married for people who became
CEO in Swedish firms with more than 100
employees and who were previously an
employee in that firm so they were
promoted from working in the firm to
being the leader of the firm and this is
a development over time for men and if
we compare it to women who started this
position in time point one again we saw
the same pattern that once women get
this promotion they start divorcing at a
much faster rate than the men who got
this promotion hmm
so this could seem like I’m delivering
some bad news here and when we saw these
results – we were quite surprised that
we wanted to know what was causing this
divorce effect among women so a first
thing that we looked into was that
perhaps these women find new partners
when they promoted they might find more
attractive new matches and maybe that’s
why and we could immediately reject that
that was the case since we know who
finds a new partner in each year we
could see that when we looked six years
after these people became promoted
the women who were promoted and divorced
were actually the least likely out of
any group to have remarried or found a
new cohabitant so clearly didn’t seem
like they were divorcing because they
were finding new and better men around
so what could it be then that is causing
this we looked into different types of
characteristics of these couples and
something that was very apparent in the
data was that these women despite
reaching the top of the income
distribution many of them are still in
very traditional marriages so even in
Sweden if our labour market has become
much more gender equal over time when we
are working women are reaching the top
if you look at who marries who that
pattern is still very traditional and it
hasn’t changed very much in the last
decades so by a gender traditional
couple formation you have the woman
being younger doing more work in the
household the relationship really
focusing around the career of the
husband and this is true even for women
who reached the top of hierarchies they
are usually married to someone where the
relationship focuses on his career so
looking at the politicians one good
measure of the gender equality in the
couple is to look at the age gap between
the two people because when people are
married to someone who is more equal to
their own age usually they split other
things more equal as well so this shows
the distribution of those age gaps for
politicians and for women I’ve marked
the pink bars are the women politicians
in this data set who are married like
where the woman politician is younger so
traditional couples and the blue bars
are the men who are older than their
spouse so clearly here women are the
younger person in the couple and men are
the older person but for women we can
split these couples into more or less
equal so we redid our entire divorce
analysis on couples that are closer in
age and those that are where she is more
like younger than him by a greater
margin so what we found was clearly
when the couple is more equal with a
smaller age gap we didn’t see in a
divorce effect we’re very small divorce
effect at least but in these couples
where the woman was much younger than
the husband that’s where we could see an
even larger divorce effect than the
baseline and we can divide the data into
more measures of an equal couple for
example how you split parental leave so
here this politician meant they didn’t
take that much parental leave so we had
to be generous with our definition of a
gender equal couple and so the finding a
gender equal couple as the husband doing
10% or more of parental leave even so in
those couples where you were splitting
more equally we didn’t see any divorce
impact for women who were promoted
compared to women who were not promoted
there was just a point 2% margin instead
of a 7% percentage point margin that I
talked about before but in the way in
the relationships that were more unequal
were women did the most of the parental
leave there was again that big impact of
the promotion on divorce so even if we
think of like when people form their
couple of course they’re in love and
everything and this is the match that
they want but people might be or
especially women they might be unaware
that the formation the way they marry
especially if they marry someone who’s
more their superior than their equal
that this could have this ripple effect
into their future likelihood of keeping
that relationship if they also want to
realize their career goals hmm so what
can women and what can men do to get out
of this problem and get give people more
equal chances to pursue both their goals
of the career and the goals of the
loving relationship I think that as
women we can kind of set our dating apps
and our mindsets more into finding our
equal partner in life rather than
looking for the superior man where the
relationship is more revolving around
his career than around both people’s
careers
as a society allowing more women headed
households more men headed household and
more equal households to coexist we can
get to this society where both men and
women have equal opportunities of
reaching goals of both career and family
thank you
[Applause]
to meet y’all my name is Johanna and I’m
a researcher in economics and one
question that I’m very interested in in
my work is the opportunities that people
have to pursue their goals and dreams in
their lives so if you all take a second
and like quickly try to picture in your
minds
what your own goals are for your own
future okay so some of you might picture
that dream job that great career and
then others you may think of family
loving relationship maybe children at
least those are part of what I think of
when I think of these things and the
research that I’m going to talk about
today shows that even today in Sweden
women are substantially less likely to
be able to achieve those goals than men
are and as a background I’d like to tell
you a story that happened when I was out
presenting my work because when I am out
talking about family and career people
tend to come up afterwards and we want
to discuss their own experiences and
that’s great because you find out lots
of stuff about people and in this
particular case a woman was talking
about some friends of hers this friend
that was pursuing the position of mayor
in Italy and it was really this woman’s
dream to become a mayor and she was
campaigning really hard and her husband
was helping her to become a mayor he was
out on the campaign trail with her but
then after a very close election it
ended up that she lost unfortunately and
the husband was sad but then he confided
in this friend that actually he wasn’t
that sad he was actually can be relieved
that she didn’t get this position after
all so she would still be in her less
demanding job and so what this story
highlights is that there can be these
conflicts between your career goals in
life and your family situation and in
our research me and my colleagues what
we researched was in Sweden what the
impacts are on women’s and men’s
relationships from getting to these top
jobs in politics and also in business so
I’m going to tell you first how we
analyze politics and we picked two jobs
top jobs in Swedish politics in
Parliament in Sweden in every electoral
districts parties offer electoral
ballots and so say your party wins five
seats you count those five seats from
the top of the ballot so for twenty year
period in nine elections we could find
in Swedish data all the marginal
candidates on those lists in this case
the fifth person that barely got into
Parliament and the sixth person that
wanted to be a parliamentarian but in
the end couldn’t get in so we selected
from Swedish data all those close
contestants for Parliament and another
point of data where we could find good
data on promotions and people who lost
promotions is for mayor in Sweden we
have 300 municipalities and in each
municipality you have a right bloc of
parties right-wing bloc competing
against the left-wing bloc and each one
has a candidate for mayor so suppose
that you guys on this side are the
left-wing parties and you guys are the
right-wing parties if you guys win 50
percent of the council seats your
candidate for mayor becomes mayor and
unfortunately for this side your
candidate becomes opposition leader so
they’re like the Italian woman that
ended up not becoming mayor after all
and so for these nine election periods
and every one of the 300 municipalities
we pick out in the data all these rivals
people who wanted to become mayor and
we’re of some people ended up getting
the position and in Sweden thanks to
personal identity sure numbers we have
very good data and we know for everyone
in this data set precisely if they were
married or divorced in each individual
year and we also know many other
background variables about these people
so using this data we can go for years
prior in time to when this election
happened and we can compare the women
who lost to the women who
and we can compare many variables and
here is just an example the women who
were promoted are very similar in these
variables to the women who were not
promoted they are similar age they’re
similarly likely to have children they
have been married for similar lengths of
time and make similar amount of money
and the same thing happens in the data
for men the men who win and lose are
also very similar to each other on these
observable characteristics
okay so keeping in mind that these
people are very similar to each other
the winner and the losers we can then go
for years back in time before each one
of these elections and we can plot in
the graph and the probability to remain
married so we take all these candidates
and we restrict the data to the people
who are married four years prior to the
election this is 70 percent of the men
and 60 percent of the women so this
figure starts it starts to count down on
the horizontal axis to the election –
four years – three years and the line
starts at one because by construction
100 percent of the people in the data
are married and then each year a certain
number of relationships fall apart so we
see a declining trend in the proportion
that remained married to their partner
and in this figure these gray lines
right now they show the development in
the probability remain married for
people who did not get the promotion and
the promotion happened here happens here
at this black line and then year one is
the first year on the job etc okay so
now we’re going to look at the
development for men who did get the
promotion okay so when I add the line
for men you can hardly see it because it
perfectly overlaps with the line for men
who lost the promotion so there’s really
no difference here the probability to
remain married for men but when we
examined women who got the promotion it
was clear that leading up to the
election there was no difference between
the winning and losing candidates
but immediately once the women who make
up the black line who were promoted to
these top jobs in politics once they get
promoted they start divorcing at a much
faster rate
they actually divorced twice as fast as
the control group and four years into
the job when were at time point four
there’s a seven percentage point
difference in the divorce rate of these
two groups okay so here we have women
who on average have invested about like
20 years in this relationship and it
seems like they are giving it up as they
get this promotion hmm so another sector
that we looked at whilst the private
sector promotions to CEO in private
firms and in private firms we
unfortunately don’t know who applied for
the position but lost so we can only
compare men and women who were promoted
so this graph here shows the probability
to remain married for people who became
CEO in Swedish firms with more than 100
employees and who were previously an
employee in that firm so they were
promoted from working in the firm to
being the leader of the firm and this is
a development over time for men and if
we compare it to women who started this
position in time point one again we saw
the same pattern that once women get
this promotion they start divorcing at a
much faster rate than the men who got
this promotion hmm
so this could seem like I’m delivering
some bad news here and when we saw these
results – we were quite surprised that
we wanted to know what was causing this
divorce effect among women so a first
thing that we looked into was that
perhaps these women find new partners
when they promoted they might find more
attractive new matches and maybe that’s
why and we could immediately reject that
that was the case since we know who
finds a new partner in each year we
could see that when we looked six years
after these people became promoted
the women who were promoted and divorced
were actually the least likely out of
any group to have remarried or found a
new cohabitant so clearly didn’t seem
like they were divorcing because they
were finding new and better men around
so what could it be then that is causing
this we looked into different types of
characteristics of these couples and
something that was very apparent in the
data was that these women despite
reaching the top of the income
distribution many of them are still in
very traditional marriages so even in
Sweden if our labour market has become
much more gender equal over time when we
are working women are reaching the top
if you look at who marries who that
pattern is still very traditional and it
hasn’t changed very much in the last
decades so by a gender traditional
couple formation you have the woman
being younger doing more work in the
household the relationship really
focusing around the career of the
husband and this is true even for women
who reached the top of hierarchies they
are usually married to someone where the
relationship focuses on his career so
looking at the politicians one good
measure of the gender equality in the
couple is to look at the age gap between
the two people because when people are
married to someone who is more equal to
their own age usually they split other
things more equal as well so this shows
the distribution of those age gaps for
politicians and for women I’ve marked
the pink bars are the women politicians
in this data set who are married like
where the woman politician is younger so
traditional couples and the blue bars
are the men who are older than their
spouse so clearly here women are the
younger person in the couple and men are
the older person but for women we can
split these couples into more or less
equal so we redid our entire divorce
analysis on couples that are closer in
age and those that are where she is more
like younger than him by a greater
margin so what we found was clearly
when the couple is more equal with a
smaller age gap we didn’t see in a
divorce effect we’re very small divorce
effect at least but in these couples
where the woman was much younger than
the husband that’s where we could see an
even larger divorce effect than the
baseline and we can divide the data into
more measures of an equal couple for
example how you split parental leave so
here this politician meant they didn’t
take that much parental leave so we had
to be generous with our definition of a
gender equal couple and so the finding a
gender equal couple as the husband doing
10% or more of parental leave even so in
those couples where you were splitting
more equally we didn’t see any divorce
impact for women who were promoted
compared to women who were not promoted
there was just a point 2% margin instead
of a 7% percentage point margin that I
talked about before but in the way in
the relationships that were more unequal
were women did the most of the parental
leave there was again that big impact of
the promotion on divorce so even if we
think of like when people form their
couple of course they’re in love and
everything and this is the match that
they want but people might be or
especially women they might be unaware
that the formation the way they marry
especially if they marry someone who’s
more their superior than their equal
that this could have this ripple effect
into their future likelihood of keeping
that relationship if they also want to
realize their career goals hmm so what
can women and what can men do to get out
of this problem and get give people more
equal chances to pursue both their goals
of the career and the goals of the
loving relationship I think that as
women we can kind of set our dating apps
and our mindsets more into finding our
equal partner in life rather than
looking for the superior man where the
relationship is more revolving around
his career than around both people’s
careers
as a society allowing more women headed
households more men headed household and
more equal households to coexist we can
get to this society where both men and
women have equal opportunities of
reaching goals of both career and family
thank you
[Applause]
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