A Marriage Bar is the requirement that women working in certain jobs must leave that job when they marry. In the twentieth century, Marriage Bars were not unusual internationally. For example, they were in place in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Ireland also had a Marriage Bar. In most countries, they were abolished in the 1950s at the latest. Ireland’s Marriage Bar is somewhat unique in this respect since it was only abolished in the 1970s. This means that many of the women who were affected by it are still alive.
Dr. Irene Mosca (Maynooth University) and Prof. Robert E. Wright (University of Glasgow) have recently carried out research concerned with the Irish Marriage Bar. Their research focuses on three issues. First, data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) is used to examine how widespread the Marriage Bar was in Ireland. TILDA is the first nationally-representative study that asks women about their personal experience of the Marriage Bar. Second, TIILDA data is used to investigate the long-term consequences of the Marriage Bar. This is achieved by comparing the outcomes of women who were affected by the Marriage Bar with the outcomes of women who were not. Four groups of outcomes are considered: (1) family-related; (2) labour market-related; (3) economics-related and (4) health-related. Third, census data is used to investigate whether the presence of a Marriage Bar affected the behaviour of women. One might expect that the presence of a Marriage Bar would affect decisions relating to marriage, education, employment and occupation. If this is the case then conclusions relating to the long-term consequences of the Marriage Bar are questionable.
There are three main findings. The first is that the Marriage Bar was widespread and was not confined to specific sectors or occupations. The second is that there are some differences in long-term outcomes between women affected and not affected by the Marriage Bar. Most notably, women affected by the Marriage Bar have shorter working lives, lower individual income but higher household wealth at the time of interview, more children and more educated children. However, there appear to be no differences in the physical, mental and cognitive health at time of interview between women affected and not affected by the Marriage Bar. The third finding is that there is no evidence that the Marriage Bar altered women’s behaviour, with respect to marriage, education, employment and occupation, in a major way.
The consequences of the Marriage Bar is a serious topic of current debate. One outcome is that it created a group of women who do not have the minimum number of contributions needed to qualify for a (full) state pension. Since the Irish Marriage Bar was effectively institutionalised legal gender discrimination, Mosca and Wright believe that those women whose lives were irreversibly disadvantaged should be compensated. However, in the 2010 National Pension Framework, the Irish Government declared that “it cannot address shortcomings which have arisen from gaps in social insurance coverage in the past”. As indicated above, there are many women who are alive who were forced to leave their jobs because of the Marriage Bar, However, as every year passes, there are fewer and fewer of them. Given prevailing mortality rates, in a decade from now there will only be a small number who are still alive. Mosca and Wright argue that collecting more information from the women affected should be a research priority.
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This paper is forthcoming in The Economic and Social Review. A working paper version of the paper is available here
