When education is not enough: the persistence of the male breadwinner model in Turkey

This study examines how educational attainment and the presence of young children are associated with household employment arrangements in Turkey. While existing research typically focuses on individual-level labor supply, this paper adopts a household-level perspective to analyze couples’ joint employment behavior. Using the nationally representative Turkish Household Labor Force Survey data for 2004–2023, we construct a 20-year pooled dataset containing approximately 10 million observations. We estimate a multinomial logistic regression model and compute predicted probabilities. The results show that the wife’s educational attainment is the strongest predictor of couples’ employment behavior. However, this association weakened over time, and a notable convergence occurred between highly educated and low-educated couples, driven by the erosion of the dual-earner model among the former and the strengthening of it among the latter. The presence of young children – especially infants and toddlers – remains a decisive factor reinforcing the male breadwinner model. Moreover, the association between having a child aged 0–2 and adopting the male breadwinner model has intensified over time among couples in which the wife is highly educated. Overall, the transition away from the male breadwinner model appears to be gradual and uneven.