Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan (2015) show that among married couples in the United States, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of 50%. They argue that this drop is consistent with a gender identity norm prescribing that a husband should earn more than his wife. We investigate this phenomenon in Canada at the national level but also across provinces. First, we document the presence of gender norms in Canada over the 1990-2014 period using three international data sets (the World Value Survey, the European Values Study and the International Social Survey Program). We find that Western Canada is relatively more traditional than Eastern Canada. Then we show that it exists a significant discontinuity at the 50% threshold in the distribution of the wife’s relative income, using the 2006 and 2016 Census data. This discontinuity is larger in Ontario and Western Canada than in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.
Maéva Doumbia : Department of Economics, Université Laval.
Marion Goussé : Department of Economics, Université Laval.
Marion Goussé gratefully acknowledges financial support from FRQ-SC. Part of the analysis presented in this paper was conducted at the Quebec Interuniversity Centre for Social Statistics which is part of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN). The services and activities provided by the QICSS are made possible by the financial or in-kind support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Statistics Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS) and the Quebec universities. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the CRDCN or its partners.
