Career, Private Life, and Well-Being among College-educated West German Women

Abstract

This paper is about the compatibility of a career and a private life among collegeeducated West German women. More precisely, it explicitly investigates the degree to which the concurrence of career and cohabitation or motherhood can affect women's well-being. I attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with estimating this causal relationship by using fixed-effects models. Thus, I exploit the variation over time for each individual woman in order to estimate the interaction effect of career and private life on life satisfaction. The results suggest that only a small fraction of women achieve career and cohabitation or motherhood simultaneously. In addition, this proportion remains small across the younger birth cohorts of college-educated females. More importantly, the estimates do not show greater life-satisfaction gain for those women who have both - a career and a private life. To the best of my knowledge, no previous study has examined this link between career and cohabitation or motherhood for female graduates in Germany.