Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories: A Longitudinal Mixed-method Study


Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories:

A Longitudinal Mixed-method Study

Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza

Abstract: Using a mixed-method design, this study explores the heterogeneity in 
employment trajectories before and after the transition to lone parenthood in Swit-
zerland. First, we perform sequence and cluster analysis on data from the Swiss 
Household panel to identify typical employment trajectories around the transition 
to lone parenthood, and then estimate their association with individual and house-
hold characteristics (N=462). Finally, we contrast these results with fi ndings from a 
content analysis of narrative interviews with lone mothers residing in Switzerland 
(N=38), focusing on values and norms concerning work and care. We identify fi ve 
employment patterns characterized by either an increase in labor supply (especially 
for those with more/older children) or by stability in or outside the labor market (for 
highly educated or younger mothers respectively). The analyses of the interviews 
provide insights on how employment opportunities and decisions differ by entry 
mode into lone parenthood, the post-separation relationship with the children’s fa-
ther, and the ability to mobilize individual, social and institutional resources. The 
heterogeneity of employment trajectories calls for more attention to within-group 
differences rather than focusing exclusively on the divide between lone and coupled 
mothers. By identifying the multiplicity of factors shaping lone mothers’ decisions 
on their labor market participation, this work feeds into the literature suggesting 
that effective policies encouraging lone mothers’ labor-market participation should 
consider: (i) their normative priorities when facing work and care trade-offs, and (ii) 
the availability of informal and formal support.

Keywords: Employment · Lone parenthood · Mixed-method · Sequence analysis · 
Switzerland

Comparative Population Studies
Vol. 45 (2020): 265-298 (Date of release: 15.09.2020)

Federal Institute for Population Research 2020 URL: www.comparativepopulationstudies.de
      DOI: https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2020-14
      URN: urn:nbn:de:bib-cpos-2020-14en6
    



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza266

1 Introduction

The primary reason why parents have raised children alone in the last 30 years 
has been ever-growing union instability (Nieuwenhuis/Maldonado 2018). The most 
common pathways into lone parenthood in the 21st century are divorce and separa-
tion, while widowhood, pregnancy, or adoption by individuals not living in a couple 
have diminished in importance since the 1980s. Consequently, the share of the pop-
ulation experiencing lone parenthood is growing and becoming increasingly het-
erogeneous. The duration of lone parenthood is falling on average (Bernardi et al. 
2018) but transitions to lone parenthood may imply a process with blurred bounda-
ries rather than an abrupt event (Bernardi/Larenza 2018). Lone parenthood remains 
a predictor of poverty, fragmented work histories, and poor health for parents (e.g., 
Brady et al. 2017; Struffolino et al. 2016).

Lone parenthood is a gendered phenomenon in the vast majority of cases in 
heterosexual couples. Lone parents are mostly women, who often face gender in-
equalities in the distribution of paid and unpaid work combined with poor family-
work reconciliation policies (Hübgen 2018; Nieuwenhuis/Maldonado 2018). In most 
countries, laws and social norms relating to parenthood reinforce such inequalities. 
Even if they have previously entered the labor market, women with children are 
more likely to experience interrupted work histories than men and childless women; 
consequently, they are more frequently secondary earners in couples than men. 
Mothers are therefore more fi nancially vulnerable following separation or divorce 
despite being in employment (e.g., Fisher/Low 2015; Hübgen 2020) and they rely on 
social assistance more often than men (e.g., Kessler et al. 2018).

The effects of transitions to lone parenthood on labor market participation had 
to be considered together with the higher-priority needs of childcare support and 
economic resources within the household. Existing research on lone mothers’ labor 
market participation is mostly based on cross-sectional analyses, showing hetero-
geneities by country (i) in the likelihood of lone mothers’ being employed compared 
to coupled mothers (Looze 2014; Western et al. 2008), (ii) in the responsiveness of 
lone mothers to incentives to move from welfare into work (Athreya et al. 2014), 
and iii) in the timing of transitions into and out of the labor market after lone parent-
hood (Stewart 2009). A few longitudinal studies consider how labor market trajec-
tories before, during, and after lone parenthood differ depending on individual and 
household characteristics (Struffolino/Mortelmans 2018; Zagel 2014). These works 
show at best that employment trajectories before lone parenthood (Stewart 2009) 
and contextual factors, such as the welfare state, infl uence lone mothers’ careers 
afterwards (Zagel 2014). However, they cannot determine the connection between 
objective constraints/resources and subjective perceptions of norms and values re-
garding work and care in infl uencing lone mothers’ employment trajectories. 

We fi ll this gap by adopting a life-course mixed-method approach. First, we re-
construct the trajectories of lone mothers’ labor market participation before and af-
ter the family transition and identify typical patterns. We then estimate the probabil-
ity of different patterns on the basis of individual and household characteristics that 
help or hinder labor market participation. We fi nally contrast these results with the 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 267

fi ndings of the content analysis of narrative interviews focusing on lone mothers’ 
employment decisions in relation to values and norms concerning work and care. In 
this respect, lone mothers face a dilemma: to be a working lone-mother with little 
public support, or to be unemployed and/or reliant on social assistance. Therefore, 
lone mothers – depending on their initial labor market status – may fi nd it preferable 
to reduce or suspend their labor force participation in the short run to cope with 
time and other pressures related to the lone parenthood transition. This short-term 
strategy reduces care costs, but can lead to negative outcomes in the long-run, 
in that it can result in the depreciation of skills and employability and undermine 
the chances of earning suffi cient income in the long-run, when children’s fi nancial 
needs increase (e.g. costs for extra-school activities or investment in higher educa-
tion). Assuming that such dynamics are similar to those of other Western countries, 
there are at least three reasons which make it important to study the Swiss case: 
fi rst, a high divorce rate, resulting in more than 40 marriages in every 100 ending 
in divorce since 2002 (SFSO 2017a); second, the absence of a “general unemploy-
ment problem”, i.e. the employment rate is high and protection in the event of un-
employment is more generous and effective than in other countries; third, limited 
public support for families (Le Goff/Levy 2016), especially for those deviating from 
the “nuclear family norm” (Rossier et al. 2018). Since most studies on the relation-
ship between lone parenthood and employment trajectories have been conducted 
in countries with higher unemployment rates and lower social protection – such as 
the US and the UK – the Swiss case represents a different set of opportunity costs 
for lone mothers. We concentrate on women because, in the Swiss context, they 
represent the large majority of lone parents. Moreover, they have increased needs 
for economic resources and childcare support during lone parenthood in a context 
where traditional gender norms persist. Ultimately, this exposes them to great prac-
tical diffi culties and related moral dilemmas. 

2 Labor market participation before and after the transition to lone 
motherhood

The situation of lone mothers regarding labor market participation is distinctive. 
Theoretically, this population challenges the classic economic approach to the di-
vision of labor within the family (Becker 1981) because lone parents cannot share 
day-to-day care and breadwinner responsibilities with a partner – although both 
care and resources have been found to be shared and pooled unequally within cou-
ples (see Bennett [2013] for a review). Lone mothers’ fi nances depend more on 
women’s labor supply and child maintenance payments. The former depends on 
their childcare needs and the accessibility (availability and economic/social costs) of 
external childcare. Furthermore, because childcare is mostly conceived as a “matter 
for mothers”, mothers sometimes opt not to contravene such a rooted social norm 
and decide not to use childcare services, in spite of their needs and regardless of 
service accessibility (Schenk 2000). 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza268

The increasing heterogeneity in birth cohorts, education, and age distributions 
of lone mothers (OECD 2014) is likely to be refl ected in the different labor-market-
participation pathways and in the different motivations and rationales underpinning 
them. Moreover, a differentiated opportunity structure among lone mothers based 
on individual and household characteristics might lead to increasing within-group 
inequality over the life course. However, researchers have not studied the effects of 
the increasing heterogeneity in lone-parent characteristics extensively. The existing 
longitudinal studies only consider how labor market trajectories during the transi-
tion to lone parenthood are infl uenced by individual and household characteristics 
or how they differ across welfare states (Struffolino/Mortelmans 2018; Zagel 2014). 
Yet differences in the mechanisms behind labor market participation strategies can-
not be identifi ed by survey data. This data can neither reveal subjective motiva-
tions over time nor scrutinize the mechanisms interpreted by individuals as enabling 
them to overcome objective constraints or to activate resources. 

2.1 Obstacles to lone mothers’ labor market participation

Two factors can infl uence lone mothers’ attachment to the labor market. First, the 
decrease in disposable income resulting from the transition to lone parenthood 
(Jarvis/Jenkins 1999; Kalmijn et al. 2007) could push lone mothers to increase their 
labor supply. Second, lone mothers face competing resource demands due to the 
dual responsibility of being the main breadwinner and the primary caregiver (Haux 
2013). The outcome depends on the availability of opportunities to externalize child-
care and the associated costs, the value of individuals’ skills on the labor market, 
and the economic support they can obtain from the nonresident parent or from pub-
lic benefi ts. These two mechanisms, however, can behave differently depending on 
the life-course phase at which lone parenthood occurs. This, in turn, is indirectly 
associated with household composition.

Individual characteristics
When lone parenthood occurs at an earlier age, individuals who did not complete 
formal education can be excluded from the labor market or may end up in low in-
come jobs due to their lower qualifi cation and employability levels. Hence, very 
young lone mothers often fi nd themselves in a spiral of cumulative disadvantage 
that affects life domains beyond employment; this makes it even harder for them to 
subsequently improve their qualifi cation level (Jaehrling et al. 2015). 

Pursuing higher education, hence entering the labor market at a higher age, gen-
erally corresponds to stronger labor market attachment (Eurostat 2017). Women 
who choose to leave the labor market temporarily after having children or who sub-
stantially reduce their labor supply to provide childcare due to adequate income 
from the partner, may have to reconsider this after separation. Women who have 
been lone parents since the transition to motherhood may also have to reconsider 
their engagement with paid work. In both cases, women with relatively low educa-
tion levels might have to reduce their labor supply because they cannot afford full-
time childcare due to insuffi cient earnings. Alternatively, they could simply drop out 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 269

of the workforce because of the low opportunity costs. In contrast, having at least 
some college education is generally associated with stronger labor market attach-
ment: after the transition to lone parenthood, these mothers can either increase 
their labor supply or work in more fl exible jobs (e.g., part-time work) when generous 
and regular child maintenance support from the father makes up for the reduced in-
come. However, declines in human capital investment during marriage as the result 
of unemployment/inactivity, may hinder the uptake of paid work.

Household composition
In contexts where childcare cannot be outsourced due to poor state welfare provi-
sion or the high costs involved, the presence of more than one child (at least one of 
whom is very young) is crucial in prompting lone mothers to give up paid employ-
ment and provide childcare as their main occupation (Damme et al. 2009). Start-
ing to cohabit with a (new) partner represents an additional source of variation in 
household composition that might have implications for lone mothers’ labor market 
participation. Exploring these aspects has become possible only recently: using 
high-quality data, recent fi ndings highlighted the fact that the presence of a resident 
and non-resident partner plays an important role within lone mothers’ decisions 
in different life domains and have an effect on their wellbeing (Bastin 2012; Bastin 
2019; Fux 2011; Langlais et al. 2016).

Norms and values
Adjustments in labor supply may be infl uenced by cultural expectations regarding 
women’s work-family balance (Bakker/Karsten 2013; Krüger/Levy 2001). Traditional 
gendered norms concerning motherhood generally support an unequal division of 
paid and unpaid work between mothers and fathers and become a trap for moth-
ers when they enter lone parenthood, unless fathers change their approach/atti-
tudes. Having said that, norms may differ depending on mothers’ socioeconomic 
circumstances. Indeed, from a normative point of view, working middle-class moth-
ers are generally encouraged to limit workforce participation in the interest of their 
children (see Hennessy [2015] for a review). This is problematic as, for example, 
it may prevent employers from offering promotion to lone mothers, fearing that 
they would not be able to work more, as they would wish to provide adequate care 
for their children. At the same time, work-fi rst policies emphasize the value of per-
sonal autonomy and fi nancial independence for mothers in need of social support 
(Brady 2019; Millar 2019). Hence, based on a specifi c interpretation of the work-fi rst 
discourse, lower-class lone mothers are encouraged to work to increase their resil-
ience to fi nancial strain, but this may entail moral dilemmas: such policies may over-
look the complexity of their individual situation and ignore how their actions will 
affect their signifi cant others. For example, mothers who take up a job suggested by 
the authority providing welfare assistance may suffer if their parental relationship 
worsens and they are not receiving adequate childcare support. Subjective percep-
tion and assessment of existing norms also play a role. Lone mothers in the same 
position may still interpret it differently and decide not to comply with prevailing 
social norms, depending on their personality, education and past life experience 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza270

(Larenza 2019). This is also the case with norms regarding mothers’ labor market 
participation and use of childcare facilities (see above). For example, mothers in 
highly qualifi ed jobs may strive to increase (or keep up) their (high) level of labor 
market participation because they think this is important for their own wellbeing and 
their children’s future development, while being stigmatized by colleagues for being 
neglectful and irresponsible. 

3 The Swiss case

In Switzerland, around 15.2 percent of children under the age of 18 live in onepar-
ent households and around 50 percent of the divorces involve children (OECD 2011 
based on 2007 data). Around 14 percent of households with children under 25 are 
lone parent households, and the great majority of these (84 percent) are headed by 
a mother (SFSO 2017b). A lone parent household’s income is far lower than that of 
other households – the only household group with lower income is that of individu-
als aged over 65 and living alone (SFSO 2017b, spefi cically for years 1998-2009). 
This is partially explained by the gender inequalities in the labor market (Branger et 
al. 2003). Women’s labor market participation is higher in Switzerland than in other 
European countries (OECD 2015b), but they are mostly concentrated in part-time 
jobs and this is not exclusively a matter of choice. After the birth of the fi rst child, 
mothers reduce their employment rate and rarely manage to increase it again after-
wards (Bühler/Heye 2005). Lack of statutory parental and paternity leave also con-
tributes to this (Valarino 2014). The labor market activity rate for women in Switzer-
land has increased in recent years (from 68 percent in 1991 to 79 percent in 2014), 
but differences between men and women persist in this respect and in the pay gaps, 
which have even increased over time (Bühlmann et al. 2012). 

After separation or divorce, custody is still customarily assigned to mothers, al-
though a recent reform introduced an obligation for the judge to consider if shared 
custody is possible, and if one of the parties (the mother, the father, or the children) 
requires it despite the opposition of any of the other parties.1 Mothers are often the 
creditor of maintenance payments for their children. The amount may vary signifi -
cantly depending on the agreement between the parents or on the method of cal-
culation adopted by the judge if no such agreement exists. However, at least 20 per-
cent of non-custodial fathers violate such obligations, according to current statistics 
(Arnold/Knöpfel 2007). Lone parents are formally subject to the same rights and 
duties as coupled/married parents under Swiss family law. However, there is a clear 
bias in favor of formerly married parents in that, after separation, pension contribu-
tions can only be split between parents who were married (Larenza 2019). 

Switzerland is an ideal context in which to disentangle the relationship between 
the transition to lone parenthood and employment because of its social policies 

1 Such a reform was passed in 2017, meaning that none of the parents in this study were subject 
to it.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 271

which may affect employed parents in this transition. On the one hand, unemploy-
ment benefi ts are more generous in Switzerland than in other OECD countries 
(OECD 2015a). Similarly, social assistance is also more generous in relative terms, 
but access may differ depending on the regulations in the individual cantons (Ob-
inger 1999; cantons are the federated states of the Swiss Confederation). On the 
other hand, work-family reconciliation policies are weaker here compared to other 
Western welfare states. Existing studies show poor availability of childcare services 
across the country (e.g. Bertozzi et al. 2005).

Against this backdrop, individuals’ professional trajectories are less vulnerable 
to the scarring effects of unemployment than elsewhere: longer job-search peri-
ods may reduce the risk of having to accept low-quality and unstable temporary 
jobs in the short term rather than better opportunities in the long term. However, 
despite the dramatic increase in the use of non-family daycare in the last decade, 
facilities are still relatively expensive and underprovided (Schlanser 2011). As a con-
sequence, there is widespread use of non-institutional childcare (both formal and 
informal): in 2013, 21,30 percent of children aged 0-3 used both institutional and 
non-institutional childcare, 35 percent only non-institutional (SFSO 2017b). Lone 
parents with poor networks and limited economic resources might face additional 
obstacles when having to combine work and care.

Finally, residential mobility may also be diffi cult due to the federal nature of 
the welfare state, i.e. policies that are crucial for lone mothers are administered 
at the cantonal level (e.g. children’s allowances, taxation rules, social assistance, 
and childcare). Advances of maintenance payments represent a typical example of 
a policy targeted at lone parents that differs across cantons in terms of duration, 
amount and eligibility criteria. Such factors may lead mothers to adjust their labor 
market participation if they only receive the benefi t for a short period, for example.

In summary,  lone mothers face a dilemma: to be a working-lone-mother with lit-
tle public support, or to be unemployed and/or rely on social assistance. Therefore, 
lone mothers – depending on their initial labor market status –may fi nd it preferable 
to reduce or suspend their labor force participation in the short-run to cope with 
time and other pressures related to the lone parenthood transition. This short-term 
strategy reduces care costs but can lead to negative outcomes in the long-run. It 
can result in skills and employability depreciation and undermine the chances of 
earning suffi cient income in the long-run when children’s fi nancial needs increase 
(e.g. costs for extra-school activities or investment in higher education). Assuming 
the situation is similar to that in other Western countries, there are at least two good 
reasons for studying the Swiss case: fi rst, the high rate of divorce (more than 40 
marriages in every 100 have ended in divorce since 2002 (SFSO 2017a)); second, 
the absence of a “general unemployment problem” (the employment rate is high 
and protection in case of unemployment is more generous and possibly more ef-
fective than in other countries). Since most studies on the relationship between lone 
parenthood and employment trajectories are conducted in countries with higher 
unemployment rates and worse social protection – such as the US and the UK – the 
Swiss case represents a different set of opportunity costs for lone mothers.



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza272

4 Data and methods

4.1 Analytical strategy

We applied a mixed-method analytical strategy using a large-scale quantitative pan-
el survey and a qualitative panel based on semi-structured interviews. We conduct-
ed a sequential exploratory/explanatory data analysis in which the content analysis 
of the interviews both anticipated and followed the quantitative analysis (Creswell 
2003). We started by analyzing the interviews to explore the important factors for 
employment decisions. This was the basis for selecting the explanatory and control 
variables in the quantitative multivariate models that estimated the probability of 
following the different employment patterns identifi ed by cluster analysis on indi-
vidual employment trajectories associated with lone parenthood. We then returned 
to the interviews and classifi ed the cases according to the similarity of lone moth-
ers’ employment trajectories to the main characteristics of the patterns represented 
by the clusters. Finally, we reconstructed the decision-making process around labor 
market participation. The rationale behind using such a mixed-method approach 
was twofold. First, it allowed consideration of the proportion of lone mothers rep-
resented in a given employment pattern (and their characteristics in the Swiss con-
text). Second, it enabled us to understand such patterns by qualitatively exploring 
the moral dilemmas surrounding work and care, that is the perceived obligations 
and constraints faced by these women. All three authors liaised constantly regard-
ing interpretation of the data from both types of analysis. 

4.2 Identifying typical employment trajectories before, during, and 
after the transition to lone parenthood 

The SHP collects longitudinal sociodemographic information and data on the living 
conditions of a representative sample of the Swiss population from 1999. However, 
only the 2001 and 2013 waves include a retrospective biographical calendar that 
enables the reconstruction of (among others) complete trajectories for living ar-
rangements, partner relationships and changes in civil status, family events, profes-
sional activities. For these two waves it is therefore possible to identify a subsample 
of women who have been lone mothers at some point (due to separation/divorce, 
widowhood, or  not living with a  partner at childbirth), including before 1999. We 
further selected the sample to retain women who experienced the fi rst transition 
to lone parenthood as an 18-54 year-old living with at least one child under age 18. 
The fi nal sample consists of 478 women (4.2 percent of the initial 2001 and 2013 
samples pooled). 

Instead of considering single and isolated points in time, we rely on the theo-
retical and methodological framework of sequence analysis to consider longitudinal 
employment patterns as a whole (Abbott 1995). In other words, we do not simply 
estimate the timing or the probability of specifi c transitions between states (e.g. 
from employment to unemployment), but look also at “process outcomes”, which 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 273

are career confi gurations conceptualized as the succession of different spells in dif-
ferent types of employment/unemployment as they unfold over time. 

For this purpose, we reconstructed employment sequences for the 478 women 
in the analytical sample spanning 2 years before and 7 years after the transition to 
lone parenthood: opening the observational window before lone parenthood allows 
us to capture some of the effect on labor supply choices for women who anticipate 
a separation and start to increase their working hours accordingly. Each year of 
these 10-year sequences (the year when lone parenthood commences, 2 before, 
and 7 after) was coded according to the labor market situation at that point in time: 
part-time (between 20 and 89 percent of a 40-hour working-week) or full-time (90-
100 percent) employment as employee or self-employed, or out of the labor force 
(either in unemployment or inactivity).2

Cluster analysis was used to detect typical employment trajectories before and 
after the transition to lone parenthood. The clustering procedure implies the com-
putation of a pairwise dissimilarity matrix. Because the duration of the spells is of 
primary importance when evaluating the salient dimensions of working trajectories 
(such as stability), we used Optimal Matching with insertion/deletion costs equal 
to 1 and substitution costs equal to 2. This setting is theoretically more sensitive 
to differences in order than to those in timing of a state’s appearance along the 
sequences (Studer/Ritschard 2016).3 We applied the partitioning-around-medoids 
clustering algorithm (Kaufman/Rousseeuw 2005) to the dissimilarity matrix to group 
sequences in such a way that it maximizes both internal homogeneity and exter-
nal heterogeneity. Medoids are representative sequences that have the smallest 
dissimilarity to the other sequences of the cluster they belong to. The average sil-
houette width (ASW) criterion is commonly used to measure the coherence of the 
assignment of each sequence to a cluster. ASW can vary between -1 and +1 (min./
max. coherence): for our data, a fi ve-cluster solution displayed an ASW value of 
0.63, which indicated a strong structure in the data (Studer 2013). A partition can be 
considered as satisfactory if it identifi es the most relevant types from a substantive/
theoretical point of view with respect to the research question (Piccarreta/Studer 
2019). In our case, a 5-cluster solution identifi es substantively meaningful pathways 
that  resonate with the experiences of mothers in the qualitative sample. A compre-

2 We combined unemployment and inactivity, as the vast majority of spells out of the labor force 
were characterized by inactivity: the average number of years spent in unemployment is 0.18 
(versus 2.16 in inactivity). We ran all the analyses keeping the two states separate: the unem-
ployment spells were residual, meaning that they did not contribute to creating an independent 
group even when allowing for solutions with a larger number of clusters and cases including 
some unemployment episodes scattered across different clusters. Results of the multinomial 
logistic regression for cluster assignment with clusters based on four states are highly consist-
ent with those presented here. 

3 Given the small number of states we use to code sequences and sequence length, when con-
ducting robustness checks using alternative costs (e.g. Longest Common Subsequence, inser-
tion/deletion equal to 2 and substitution equal to 1 among others), cluster solutions are highly 
correlated and results of the multinomial logistic regression are consistent in terms of the direc-
tion and the signifi cance of the effects. Results are available upon request.



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza274

hensive discussion of the reasons why we opted for a 5-cluster solution and the 
implications for within-sequence heterogeneity can be found in the notes to Figure 
A1 and A2 in the Appendix. 

Finally, we estimated a multinomial logistic regression model for the probability 
of membership of the 5 typical employment trajectories identifi ed by the cluster 
analysis as a function of individual characteristics and household composition. The 
latter are operationalized as: education (up to lower secondary, upper secondary, 
or tertiary); age of the woman when the transition to lone parenthood occurred (18-
24, 25-30, 31-40, or 41-54); number of children under 18 living in the household (1, 
2, or 3+); age of the youngest child (0-2, 3-5, 6-10, or 11-18). All the variables refer 
to when the transition occurred. Following the literature, the model is adjusted for 
the type of entry into lone parenthood (unpartnered at fi rst childbirth, separation, 
or widowhood); year of transition to lone parenthood (up to 1979, 1980-1989, 1990-
1995, or 1996-2005); nationality at birth (Swiss or other); wave (2001 or 2013). The 
results will be presented as adjusted predictions at group specifi c means (Long/
Freese 2014). The results expressed as exponentiated coeffi cients are available 
upon request.4

Three aspects need to be acknowledged. First, variables for which it might have 
been important to adjust the model are not available in SHP (for example, social 
support with care or the receipt of regular child maintenance support from the other 
parent). Second, we could not adjust the models for time-varying variables, as their 
change in value over time is endogenous to the longitudinal process captured by 
the clusters. Sequence analysis is a powerful analytical tool for uncovering pat-
terns in longitudinal categorical data, but when clusters are used as the dependent 
variable in a regression framework they are crystallized in their temporal unfolding. 
For example, the regression models cannot include indicators for changes in the 
fi nancial situation of the household over time caused by the presence of a (new) 
co-resident partner or changes in external support for childcare provided by (new) 
non-resident partners. Finally, we could not detect the presence of a non-resident 
partner in the retrospective biographical data. Therefore, we could not model the 
presence of a non-cohabiting partner at childbirth. 

4.3 Content analysis of the qualitative interviews

The waves of the qualitative panel were collected in “The Multiple Paths of Lone 
Parenthood”5 project on lone parents residing in the French-speaking part of Swit-

4 Sequence analysis is performed using the software R version 3.6.3 (R Core Team 2020) and 
the R packages TraMinerR and TraMineRextras (Gabadinho et al. 2011; Ritschard et al. 2013). 
Regression models are estimated using STATA 16.

5 The project, currently ongoing, is headed by Laura Bernardi within the National Center for Com-
petence “LIVES. Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives” project funded in 2012 
by the Swiss National Science Foundation. More information is available on the project web-
site: https://www.lives-nccr.ch/en/page/multiple-paths-lone-parenthood-n3912. A summary of 
the empirical work conducted within the project can be found at https://www.lives-nccr.ch/en/
newsletter/lone-parenthood-life-course-n2622. 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 275

zerland. The fi rst wave contains 38 interviews conducted in 2012-2013 with lone 
mothers who had sole physical custody of at least one child between ages 0 and 
13 at the time of the fi rst interview and who had no co-resident adult.6 31 moth-
ers agreed to be re-interviewed in 2015. Therefore, we could draw on longitudinal 
qualitative material from two time-points for the large majority of our initial sample. 
Individuals were recruited through a multiple-entry snowball approach and follow-
ing a purposive sampling scheme aimed at maximizing the variability in education 
levels and patterns of entry into lone parenthood. The research design focused 
on the presence of one or more very young children (mostly 0-9 year-olds), who 
require more care compared to adolescents. For 36 mothers the transition to lone 
parenthood occurred 0 to 7 years prior to the fi rst interview. The observational win-
dow from entry into lone parenthood until the fi rst wave was 4 years on average 
(min. 0, as one mother was pregnant at the time of the interview, and max. 14). At 
the second interview, 6 years had passed on average since participants’ transition 
to lone parenthood (min. 2 and max. 16). This sample complemented the analysis 
of the SHP subsample, as participants’ stories included biographical information on 
the life-course prior to the transition to lone parenthood up to a substantial number 
of years after that.

The interview guidelines encompassed: the narrative reconstruction of educa-
tional, residential, employment, health and family trajectories; information on the 
current relationship with the noncustodial parent (negotiations over custody and 
child maintenance); individuals’ social networks; and access to various kinds of in-
stitutional and informal support. The semi-structured nature of the interviews al-
lowed the subjective motivations underpinning specifi c lone mothers’ behaviors 
to be elicited in each domain. This was particularly useful for understanding how 
interviewees defi ne and/or interpret norms and values associated with parenting, 
reconciling work and private life, and the extent to which their decisions in the pro-
fessional domain were inspired by such norms and values. Ex-post rationalization 
biases were tackled in two ways. First, by eliciting inconsistencies in the interview-
ees’ discourse through specifi c questions, we could identify and address a mean-
ingful “reconstruction” of the past. Second, the longitudinal setup allowed us to 
identify potentially divergent interpretations of the same event across waves. Hav-
ing said that, it was important to retain attempts to renegotiate events as important 
pieces of information, as they allowed us to make sense of interviewees’ changes of 
perspective on their life events. 

6 Our interest was in exploring “solo” living in all its variety, so we left open the kind of relation-
ship with the father of the child or a new partner. This yielded a great variety of situations which 
were relevant for the different levels of emotional and/or practical support (or the lack of it) 
but less for the mothers’ decision regarding employment. This is possibly due to the fact that 
a partner who is not invested in cohabitation is of limited relevance in terms of economic and 
employment decisions. We cannot exclude some social desirability bias to social norms sur-
rounding fi nancial responsibilities.



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza276

Qualitative materials include full transcriptions, fi eld notes, and comprehensive 
case summaries. Moreover, during the semi-structured interview we asked the in-
terviewees to fi ll in a biographical calendar similar to the one completed by the SHP 
interviewees on employment, partnership and parenthood trajectories. This permit-
ted us to place the information collected during the two qualitative waves within the 
individuals’ broader life courses.7 Drawing on Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2006), 
we used a combination of inductive and deductive coding to capture the motivation 
for taking paid work before and after lone parenthood. Initial nodes: the possible 
trade-offs and compatibilities with parenting, factors like the accessibility of public 
support; the regularity of maintenance payments from the father and uncertainties 
related to custody; support from the social network including a new partner, as well 
as the health of the lone mother, her child/ren, or their father. Finally, we developed 
a dual perspective for analyzing the data (Holland et al. 2006; Kuckartz 2019; Lar-
enza 2019): a longitudinal examination of each story (data as cases) and categorical 
examination across stories to identify commonalities and divergences in individual 
trajectories (data as content category). This was valuable as it allowed us to profi t 
from the systematicity of constant comparisons through content analysis and from 
the consideration of the subjective reconstructions through case narration. 

4.4 Summary statistics

Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for the independent variables relative to both 
the quantitative and the qualitative samples. The right column shows that the distri-
bution of the interviewees according to the major variable of interest for the quan-
titative analyses matches the distribution of the qualitative sample relatively well. 
This is useful for triangulating the results from the two data sources. 

Two differences between the samples are notable. First, women in the qualita-
tive sample had experienced lone parenthood for 4 years on average prior to the 
fi rst interview. This choice was deliberate because we wanted their retrospective 
account of the transition to lone parenthood to be relatively close to the time of the 
interview. Second, women with a lower secondary education are underrepresented 
in the qualitative sample. The diffi culty in sampling individuals belonging to disad-
vantaged groups is a well-known issue in qualitative data collection (Abrams 2010; 
Penrod et al. 2003). Our results are conservative given the association between low 
education level and higher exposure to the risk of unemployment, poverty, and dif-
fi culties in combining work and care.

7 Each interview lasted between 1 and 3 hours and was taped and fully transcribed. To protect 
participants’ identities, their real names together with the names of the people they mentioned 
were substituted with pseudonyms. The coding was conducted using the software Nvivo (ver-
sion 11).



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 277

Tab 1: Distribution of the main independent variables across the quantitative 
and qualitative samples

SHP 2010 & 2013 Qualitative interviews 
(% and N)

Education
Lower secondary 41.9 7.9 3
Upper secondary 45.6 44.7 17
Tertiary 12.6 47.4 18

Age upon becoming lone parent
18-24 11.6 5.3 2
25-30 26.8 26.3 10
31-40 44.1 57.9 22
41-54 17.5 10.5 4

Number of children upon becoming lone parent
1 52.2 60.5 23
2 35.0 34.2 13
3+ 12.9 5.3 2a

Age of the youngest child upon becoming lone parent
0-2 37.5 71.0 27
3-5 19.7 23.7 9
6-10 26.3 5.3 2
11-18 16.5 0.0 0

Type of entry into lone parenthood
Unpartnered upon birth of fi rst child 23.3 18.4 7
Separation 68.0 76.3 29
Widowhood 8.7 5.3 2

Year upon becoming lone parent
Up to 1979 26.4 0.0 0
1980-1989 26.5 0.0 0
1990-1995 18.4 0.0 0
1996-2005 28.7 5.3 2
2006-2013  94.7 36

Nationality at birth
Swiss 83.6 76.3 29b

Other 16.4 23.7 9

N 478 100.0 38

a In one case the mother had two children from a previous relationship. 
b Six women migrated to Switzerland by the age of 15 and in most cases obtained Swiss 

naturalization. 

Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, biographical calendar 2001 and 2013 (weighted); 
qualitative panel “The Multiple Paths of Lone Parenthood”, wave 1 (2013). 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza278

5 Results

5.1 Employment trajectories before and after the transition to lone 
motherhood

Figure 1 displays the fi ve clusters which represent different typical employment 
pathways spanning the 2 years before and 7 years after the transition to lone par-
enthood. Each subplot contains 30 representative individual sequences of the se-
quences allocated to each group. Almost 80 percent of lone mothers in the sample 
belong to one of three clusters that are strongly characterized by stability in one 
single state: out of employment, part-timers, and full-timers. Most of the individuals 
who were assigned to these clusters do not change their labor supply after the tran-
sition to lone parenthood: the overwhelming majority maintains steady attachment 
(29.5 percent in part-time and 29.9 percent in full-time jobs) or remain in/leave the 
labor force after the transition to parenthood (16.9 percent).

The remaining 23 percent of lone mothers were allocated to the two remaining 
clusters, namely the returners and the strengtheners. In the case of cluster 2 return-
ers (12.1 percent), mothers’ employment trajectories are characterized by two or 
more years out of the labor force before and/or around the transition to lone parent-
hood that develop over time towards stable part-time employment. Some of these 
lone mothers may have been young when they became a lone parent, meaning that 
inactivity might actually conceal time spent in education. With respect to cluster 4 
strengtheners (11.5 percent), the characteristic shared by the vast majority of moth-
ers’ trajectories in this group is having spent between 1/3 and 1/2 of the time-span 
in part-time work and the rest in full-time work from/some years after the transition 
to lone parenthood. We acknowledge that some women (24 percent within this clus-
ter) are actually “reducers”, as they move from full-time to part-time work or from 
part-time work to out of the labor force. This pattern did not emerge as a separate 
cluster although it is of substantive interest. As highlighted in the methods’ sec-
tion, cluster analysis is a data reduction technique and (like all techniques of this 
kind) it requires a certain amount of simplifi cation to let substantively meaningful 
(and interpretable) trends/patterns in the data emerge. “Simplifi cation” in the case 
of cluster analysis applied to sequences means that we have to accept a degree of 
within-cluster heterogeneity in order to identify groups of sequences that represent 
a similar process. 

5.2 The role of individual characteristics and household composition 
for employment trajectories

Figure 2 displays the adjusted predictions at group specifi c means for cluster mem-
bership by individual characteristic (panel (a)) and household composition (panel 
(b)). A younger age (18-24) at the transition to lone parenthood corresponds to a 
slightly higher likelihood of being among those out of employment or full-timers 
(24 and 53 percent respectively). Being older when experiencing lone parenthood is 
associated with a much lower probability of being inactive, combined with a higher 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 279

Fig. 1: Individual employment trajectories before and after the transition to 
lone parenthood: 5-cluster solution

Notes: For each cluster, 30 representative sequences are shown (Fasang/Liao 2014) and 
ordered by the employment status at time t0 (x-axis), indicating the year when the transi-
tion to lone parenthood occurred. The assessment of the representativeness can be found 
in Figure A3 in the Appendix.

Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, 2001 and 2013. N=478. 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza280

F
ig

. 
2
: 

A
d

ju
st

e
d

 p
re

d
ic

ti
o

n
s 

(p
e

rc
e

n
ta

g
e
 p

o
in

ts
) 

a
t 

g
ro

u
p

 s
p

e
ci
fi 

c 
m

e
an

s 
fo

r 
a
ss

ig
m

e
n

t 
to

 t
h

e
 c

lu
st

e
rs

8
7

51
8

26

11
20

27
12

30

23
8

27
9

33

15
15

32
11

27

9
15

37
12

27

24
12

20
11

33

24
4

13
6

53

15
13

29
11

32

0
20

40
60

80
10

0

pe
rc

en
t

E
du

ca
tio

n

A
ge

 a
t L

P

A
ve

ra
ge

te
rti

ar
y

up
pe

r s
ec

.

lo
w

er
 s

ec
.

41
-5

4

31
-4

0

25
-3

0

18
-2

4 

(a
) I

nd
iv

id
ua

l c
ha

ra
ct

er
is

tic
s

10
11

38
10

30

15
14

33
22

16

7
26

22
5

40

23
7

22
8

40

19
23

26
13

19

8
20

37
10

25

20
7

23
10

40

15
13

29
11

32

0
20

40
60

80
10

0

pe
rc

en
t

A
ge

 y
ou

ng
es

t c
hi

ld

N
r. 

ch
ild

re
n

A
ve

ra
ge

11
-1

8

6-
103-
5

0-
23+21

 

(b
) H

ou
se

ho
ld

 c
om

po
si

tio
n

O
ut

 o
f e

m
pl

oy
m

en
t

R
et

ur
ne

rs
P

ar
t-t

im
er

s
S

tre
ng

th
en

er
s

Fu
ll-

tim
er

s

S
o

u
rc

e
: 

A
u

th
o

rs
’ c

al
cu

la
ti

o
n

s.
 S

H
P

 d
at

a;
 2

0
0
1
 a

n
d

 2
0
1
3
 (

w
e
ig

h
te

d
).

 N
=

4
7
8
. 

Ta
b

le
 A

1
 d

is
p

la
y
s 

re
su

lt
s 

fr
o

m
 t

h
e
 f

u
ll 

m
o

d
e
l.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 281

likelihood of being in long-lasting part-time work and being a strengthener. Tertiary 
education is associated with long-lasting part-time work (51 percent), whereas hav-
ing a lower-secondary education implies higher probabilities of being out of em-
ployment (23 percent) or a full-timer (33 percent) compared to both tertiary and 
upper secondary education. Interestingly, lone mothers with an upper secondary 
qualifi cation are more likely to be returners. 

As far as household composition is concerned, panel (b) shows that the pres-
ence of more than one child in the household is associated with a decrease in inac-
tivity and full-time employment trajectories (from approximately 20 to 8 percent on 
average for those out of employment, and from 40 to 19 on average for full-timers). 
As the number of children in the household increase, lone mothers are more likely 
to be returners (especially when children are 3+). The trend across the age of the 
youngest child in the household is less clear-cut, but two interesting results emerge. 
First, lone mothers whose youngest child in the household is 0-2 or 3-5 years-old 
differ only with respect to a higher probability of being out of employment for the 
former and of being a returner for the latter. Second, lone mothers with the young-
est child aged 6-to-10 are the most likely to strengthen their labor market participa-
tion (approximately 22 percent), while mothers with older children are more likely 
to have held part-time work around the transition to lone parenthood (38 percent).

All differences highlighted so far are statistically signifi cant. In sum, following 
employment trajectories characterized by different degrees of stability in one state 
is associated with different life-course stages signifi ed by the subject’s own age and 
age/number of children, but also with individual resources proxied by education. 
However, a consideration of relational/partnership histories together with norms 
and values is necessary to address the question of why such employment choices 
were made. The subjective accounts from the qualitative interviews will enrich our 
understanding of these dynamics in the transition to lone parenthood.

5.3 A qualitative account of what shaped labor market participation 
around lone parenthood

A range of factors could shape respondents’ employment trajectories before and 
after the transition to lone parenthood: the type of entry into lone parenthood, the 
relationship with the noncustodial parent (when present), and the possibility to mo-
bilize resources (both accumulated (e.g. education, job position) and transient (e.g. 
social and institutional support)). The same fi ve typical patterns of the quantitative 
study emerged in the qualitative study. Specifi cally, 25 single mothers reported lit-
tle variation in employment after the transition to lone parenthood (relatively stable 
arrangements: out of employment, part-timers, and full-timers), while 11 of them 
had either a gradual or a sudden need to change their working arrangements (in-
creasing working hours: returners and strengtheners). One extra category included 
women who faced a turning point in their professional trajectory.



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza282

5.3.1 Relatively stable employment statuses across lone parenthood

Out of employment
Two interviewees were not regularly employed before becoming mothers and did 
not change their status thereafter. They have received social benefi ts since their 
transition to lone parenthood after separation or divorce, which occurred in their 
late-20s/early-30s. Both had a low level of education and very young children at the 
moment of the interview. Pilar’s story is a case in point. She migrated to Switzerland 
as a teenager and worked occasionally until she married at 20. She separated at 25, 
at which time she had two young children (aged 1 and 5). Pilar did not have access to 
adequate legal assistance and was not aware of the existence of public support with 
litigation costs. Hence, she had to accept unfavorable divorce conditions including 
formal shared custody, which turned into de facto full custody (due to the other 
parent’s neglect) and no maintenance for her children. She had no public childcare 
for her small child and could only count on her sister’s occasional support. Conse-
quently, she had little time to look for a job. Pilar is not happy with her situation and 
states clearly that her ex-husband is very unfair. However, she is so powerless that 
the only way to make sense of her situation and tolerate her current circumstances 
is to renegotiate it with herself, saying that what really matters is that her children 
can live with her and not with a neglectful father. Pilar is caught in a moral dilemma 
that she solves by resorting to social norms prescribing good mothering and justify-
ing as a choice what in fact is an imposition: “Anyway, it’s me who has accepted all 
this … if I accepted all this it is for the children … but, him, he doesn’t understand 
anything about that … and now I often have the children at home, I don’t care … I 
love my children”. What both mothers in this category have in common are limited 
socio-economic resources to face the transition to lone parenthood and change 
their professional situation thereafter, and very young children to provide for. As 
Pilar’s story highlights, further potential obstacles to activation in lone parenthood 
include: lack of support with childcare, both from the other parent and from public 
institutions; poor social network to supersede the lack of support with childcare; 
and no fi nancial support with child maintenance. A migrant background may further 
hinder paid work uptake if the person is not aware that support is available from 
public institutions in the country. Finally, Pilar’s story shows how norms around 
motherhood may prevail in the quest for a more egalitarian division of unpaid work. 

Part-timers

17 mothers belong to this category and have either tertiary education or an upper 
secondary professional diploma, which are highly valued in Switzerland and nor-
mally give access to relatively well-paid jobs. The main income sources for these 
lone mothers are employment, child maintenance payments, widowhood pension, 
temporary or lump-sum social benefi ts, or a combination of several of these. There 
are two major life-course confi gurations among part-timers. The most common one 
applies to women who have a stable, adequate income, which may include child 
maintenance from the father; these lone mothers could also count on social support 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 283

and appropriate childcare. These women considered part-time employment as an 
ideal working arrangement to fulfi ll their double role of breadwinner and caregiver.8 

For example, Natasha was 26 years old and had a 10-month-old child at the tran-
sition to lone parenthood. When she was in a couple, she was working part-time 
(50 percent) and studying. She fi nished her tertiary education as a lone mother. 
Afterwards she increased her part-time hours (60 percent of full-time hours, and 
then 80 percent), as the child had grown up. For her, this was the right way to bal-
ance caregiving and income-earning. To complete her studies she could count on 
welfare benefi ts (including a scholarship) and a supportive and stable social envi-
ronment, with neighbors ready to provide emergency care, a good relationship with 
the child’s father including a well-functioning arrangement for visitation and child 
maintenance. Unlike Natasha, many women faced signifi cant obstacles to improv-
ing their fi nancial situation after separation. These belong to a second subgroup of 
part-timers. In such cases, mothers could not increase their labor supply because 
they could not easily change their employment conditions, or because they would 
lose income if they did so (childcare-fees are set in proportion to the parents’ in-
come). For instance, Vivianne was 42 years old when she gave birth to her fi rst 
and only child from a non-cohabiting partner. The relationship rapidly deteriorated 
following the birth of the child, the father refused to pay child maintenance and to 
offer any regular childcare support. Vivianne was socially isolated and this is likely 
to have made her even more dependent on the support of the other parent. At the 
time of the interview, Vivianne was working as a professor at between 50 percent 
and 65 percent of full-time hours on largely temporary contracts. She would have 
been happy to increase her employment rate, but her employer offi cially rejected 
her request, yet required her to commit herself to performing extra unpaid work. 
Receiving welfare benefi ts was not easy, as constant changes in her employment 
rate impacted on her eligibility for social assistance. Despite having only one child 
and a high level of education, the two mothers epitomize two different ways of 
viewing and using part-time employment before and after the transition to lone 
parenthood. Natasha adheres to the social norm that mothers should work part-
time: she states that, for her, this is the right compromise which gives her enough 
time for herself and her child, and allows her to improve her career later when she 
will take over from her superiors who are about to leave: “I feel I am not made for 
working full time, because I have a child and my everyday life to cope with … (…)I 
think one must make the most of one’s life, and there are more things to do than just 
work, even though I like my job…”. Vivianne subscribes to the same norm, but has 
a completely different understanding of it: for her, part-time work is a trap which is 
diffi cult to escape, rather than an opportunity. It imposes further (fi nancial) strain on 
her private situation (no support with childcare or maintenance): “There is a prob-
lem with the law and the corporate culture concerning motherhood [there is still a 
lot to do]. I mean, when I said that I needed to increase my worktime because (…) I 

8 The majority of mothers (both single and in couples) in Switzerland work part-time (SFSO 
2017b).



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza284

am a lone parent and I do not receive any child maintenance support. It’s true that 
I did not receive any maintenance. Well, they told me <<It’s your choice>> ... That 
was the answer <<Your private life does not concern us>>”

Full-timers
These six women exhibited different levels of education and types of employment. 
 According to their accounts, how they combined the latter and the relationship 
with the former partner after separation (or the type of welfare support in case of 
death of the other parent) shaped how they experience the transition to lone parent-
hood and the signifi cance they attached to their professional trajectories thereafter. 
When mothers had a stable and very well-paid job before their transition to lone 
parenthood, receiving support with childcare and child maintenance from the for-
mer partner may not be a crucial issue, especially if they were allowed some degree 
of fl exibility in terms of working hours. If the wage allowed for adequate childcare, 
no major upheavals occurred. Working full-time in such cases is not just a matter of 
making ends meet, but rather it seems to fulfi ll the mothers’ desire for full profes-
sional satisfaction and for maintaining high living standards. For example, Doro-
thea had her fi rst child with a cohabiting partner, whom she separated from during 
pregnancy. Dorothea never received fi nancial support from him but was entirely 
able to provide for herself and for her child thanks to her job as a manager in a mul-
tinational company. Dorothea always outsourced care when the child was in pre-
school and had the fl exibility she needed to cope with emergencies. She explained 
that she kept her full-time position and never stopped investing in her career, even 
when her child was very young. This allowed her to live the life she wanted and to 
spend enough time with her children, thanks to the fl exibility she could eventually 
gain with her top-manager position. For some mothers, keeping a full-time position 
was a necessity rather than a choice. This was the case for those who earned aver-
age wages and obtained no support from their former partners and were therefore 
forced to keep their employment rate high enough to make ends meet. Catalina 
explained this clearly. Since her separation she had to live on her wage as an offi ce 
worker. She would have liked to decrease her employment rate from 100 percent 
to 90 percent which would have allowed her to spend a whole afternoon with her 
child during the week, but she was on a tight budget. Remaining in full-time work 
kept her out of poverty. In such cases, staying in full-time work equates with coping 
with a constraint rather than achieving a higher degree of freedom, as is the case 
with Dorothea. In comparison with Catalina, Dorothea’s criticism of the traditional 
form of motherhood has always been one of the main drivers of her career choices. 
However, her socioeconomic condition and wealthy family background allowed her 
to reconcile her values and her actions. Catalina’s decision to accept a full-time job 
was in tune with a traditional view of good mothering, which prescribes that it is 
impossible to take good care of children while in full-time employment. Neverthe-
less, her interpretation of “what is best for a child” was inevitably infl uenced by her 
precarious fi nancial situation, the infl exible worktime, and the impossibility of fi nd-
ing alternative ways to provide adequately for her child.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 285

5.3.2 Increasing working hours during lone parenthood

Returners
Most of these six women withdrew temporarily from the workforce to devote time 
to their young children. After the dissolution of their union, they re-entered the labor 
market. Françoise was in her thirties during her transition to lone parenthood and 
had a professional diploma as a medical assistant. She interrupted her part-time 
work (40 percent) when she became mother of two children, who were 4 and 6 when 
she separated. She then worked on an 80 percent contract during the two years of 
uncertainty and acrimonious negotiations regarding maintenance and custody with 
the children’s father to ensure an adequate standard of living for the family. In some 
cases, the fact that the children were not entitled to maintenance (e.g. because they 
were not recognized by the other parent) infl uenced the mother’s decision to return 
to work, although this might be problematic with young children. For example, Mar-
tine was in a homosexual couple. She was highly educated and was freelancing oc-
casionally in the art fi eld when her partner gave birth to their fi rst child. After giving 
birth to their second child, she gave up working almost entirely. Her partner pursued 
her career while Martine assumed the role of a full-time mother. At separation she 
found herself in a precarious fi nancial situation. She could not claim maintenance 
for her biological child, as there was no legal fi liation between her biological child 
and her ex-partner. In addition, she decided not to claim the alimony set in the part-
nership contract because of the possible negative repercussions this might have on 
the relationship with her ex-partner and the fear of losing contact with her nonbio-
logical child. Martine strove to fi nd work but few positions were available in her fi eld 
that would be compatible with her role as a mother with two young children. She did 
not apply for positions which required a commute or frequent travel. She remained 
unemployed until she could take a part-time temporary job in her fi eld. Unlike the 
fi rst two mothers, Béatrice did not withdraw from the labor market. As with Mar-
tine’s case, she could not receive maintenance for her child and put all her effort into 
searching for work. This involved taking multiple part-time jobs, on-the-job training, 
and some commuting. Béatrice had almost no support with childcare. She resisted 
the stressful everyday organization this would have involved and imposed many 
changes on her small child. To her, this was the only possible way to achieve profes-
sional stability, although she reports that the relationship with her son might have 
been compromised to some extent as a consequence. These cases show different 
approaches to social norms towards motherhood. Françoise and Martine adhered 
to such norms and were primarily involved in childcare, but changed their mind af-
ter their transition to lone parenthood. Their ability to fi nd work was infl uenced by 
the availability of jobs in their respective fi elds. Béatrice always rejected such norms 
and decided to prioritize her career, aiming at building a better future for herself and 
her child. However, she expressed dissatisfaction with her parental life.

Strengtheners
The stories of these fi ve lone mothers feature irregular or non-existent commitment 
on the part of the noncustodial parent, stable careers and the possibility to adjust 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza286

labor supply according to their needs. This is clear in Vanina’s case. She used to 
work full-time before the birth of her child. Her partner took no responsibility for the 
child despite offi cially acknowledging fatherhood. When the couple broke up, the 
child was 3 years old. After two years with no regular payments or childcare support 
from the father, she went back to work full-time. This was possible thanks to the sup-
port she received from her parents and the father’s family. Despite sacrifi cing time 
beyond her paid-work, Vanina decided to remain in full-time work even when the 
father started to pay some maintenance and meet the child more regularly, as she 
could not be sure that this would last. Mothers in this group do not feel the pressure 
of social norms associated with good motherhood – which prescribe part-time work 
for mothers – in any of the phases of their employment trajectories, and change 
their employment rate in response to contingent needs and opportunities. As with 
some full-timers, increasing the time devoted to paid-work may be perceived as 
problematic insofar as it requires giving up time for other activities unrelated to 
childcare, such as continuing education. As Vanina states: “So I cope, but I cope on 
a 90 percent contract. This means that I cannot (…) take courses for the time being. 
I have other projects, other professional projects (…) but fi nancially… I cannot save 
any money because I have to provide for my child alone.” 

5.3.3 Turning points 

Employment trajectories characterized by unpredictable and radical changes 
throughout the professional careers could not be identifi ed as a separate cluster 
in the quantitative analytical step, but two of them emerged in the analysis of the 
qualitative interviews. Indeed, turning points in employment trajectories may be 
expected in non-normative forms of parenting. Sarah had a well-paid, full-time job 
as a teacher, and was about to found her ideal family with her partner and their child. 
After some time, she realized that her plan would not work, as her husband was not 
able to take adequate care of their child due to his emotional instability and alcohol 
addiction. Sarah decided to quit her job and go back to university to study, as she 
had always intended. This was a risky decision, as it involved living on a small schol-
arship and came with no certainty of whether she would succeed in her professional 
career after obtaining the degree. Sarah’s decision was unrelated to the normative 
idea of being a “good mother”, as it is grounded in her will to “follow her dreams” 
rather than being dissatisfi ed in a comfortable fi nancial position and a stable and 
well-paid job. A decision similar to Sarah’s may be underpinned for example by 
conformity to social norms, as in Léa’s case. She left a stable but challenging job to 
go back to university, as the job was incompatible with her small child’s care needs. 
Léa could not keep asking her parents for help with childcare, but did not have reli-
able access to childcare either. And so she decided to quit her job and care for her 
child alone. In both stories the change is abrupt and unexpected, as it violates pure 
economic rationality. Childcare needs may play a role in it, but this is not always the 
driver of the turning point.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 287

6 Discussion and concluding remarks

This paper adopts a mixed-method approach to study the employment trajectories 
in the years surrounding the transition to lone parenthood in Switzerland. We used 
biographical calendars from a representative survey to identify typical employment 
histories and connect them to individual characteristics and household composi-
tion. We combine these results with qualitative interviews conducted with lone 
mothers to shed light on the rationales behind different employment trajectories. 

Some labor market participation pathways followed by mothers before, during, 
and after the transition to single parenthood are characterized by stability either 
in employment or in inactivity, some by long-lasting transitions from a low to a 
higher labor supply. This heterogeneity corresponds to how individuals respond to 
the challenges which lone parenthood poses to women’s roles in the labor market 
and as caregivers. Our results show that mothers with individual resources that are 
valued on the labor market (e.g. higher-level education) maintained arrangements 
that either allowed them to perform the dual role of worker and caregiver, or paid 
for childcare in the Swiss context of weak welfare support and high childcare costs. 
The qualitative interviews, however, suggest that even lone mothers with a high 
education level might still fi nd it diffi cult to maintain high labor market attachment 
(or increase/strengthen it), depending on the occupational sector (e.g. arts or cul-
tural management). 

Mothers who increased their labor supply from inactivity to part-time, or main-
tained part-time work are mostly those who had a greater need for income due to 
the presence of more than one child, but who for the very same reasons could not 
work full-time. As emerges from the interviews, when mothers are able to combine 
different types of welfare support, they decide not to increase their labor supply 
even when they have young children. 

More generally, the qualitative interviews not only highlighted how individual 
characteristics and household composition might represent resources or obstacles 
for labor supply decisions around lone parenthood, but they also enhanced our un-
derstanding of these dynamics with accounts of the partnership and relational his-
tories as well as norms and values relating to parenthood. Almost all lone mothers 
saw a clear link between their employment pathway and other pre- and post-transi-
tion processes such as informal or legal negotiations for child custody and mainte-
nance, or the institutional and informal support they could mobilize. Specifi cally, the 
fi ndings clearly call into question the role of the non-resident partner in childcare. 
When mothers are uncertain about the regularity and length of the father’s visits, 
they fi nd it diffi cult to organize their own working (and life) schedule to the point that 
it is diffi cult for them to negotiate better arrangements with employers or to fi nd a 
job. Many lone mothers stress the importance of their own role in supporting the 
father-child relationship despite (or in some cases regardless of) the father’s wishes. 
Such beliefs may give rise to two risks related to their own fi nancial situation and 
therefore their employment choices. First, mothers are more likely to be vulnerable 
in the personal relationship with the noncustodial parent at the moment of separa-
tion: they might accept unfavorable post-separation maintenance arrangements in 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza288

exchange for the noncustodial parent’s commitment to child custody. Second, lone 
mothers could retreat from claiming their rights or avoid complaining about the 
father’s failure to respect the formal agreement and legal obligations. In both cases, 
even if mothers believe that part-time work would be a more suitable arrangement, 
they need to increase their labor supply (ideally up to full-time) to make ends meet. If 
they become unemployed or if work “does not pay”, the poverty risk increases; and 
when work arrangements are at odds with their beliefs, the result may be increased 
stress, with severe consequences for the mother’s mental and physical health. 

Our results suggest several potential directions for future research. First, because 
of the combination of limited unemployment and generous social assistance with 
poor work-family reconciliation policies in Switzerland, the actual overlap between 
employment and welfare trajectories needs to be analyzed. However, because of 
the recruitment strategy for the qualitative sample and very limited information on 
welfare support in the SHP data, these dimensions could not be fully considered 
here. As an example, we could not explore the differences across urban/rural areas 
in the Swiss regions that differ not just in the prevalence of lone parenthood (SFSO 
2017a) but also in terms of welfare systems: we might expect it to be simpler to face 
the transition to lone parenthood where this is a more common family form and 
where public policies are more open to supporting them. The increasing availability 
of combined administrative and survey data will enable better analysis of these joint 
dynamics. Second, the role of re-partnering and of living-apart-together relation-
ships for easier organization of everyday life and its implications for opportunities 
regarding changes in labor market attachment need to be considered more closely. 
A new stream of research drawing on rich longitudinal data has started to scrutinize 
the timing of re-partnering and its consequences in different life domains (Bastin 
2012; Bastin 2019; Langlais et al. 2016; Recksiedler/Bernardi 2019). The longitudinal 
data we use represent a necessary compromise as they are the fi rst to allow the 
analysis of the employment trajectories of lone mothers in Switzerland, but it is not 
possible to account simultaneously for specifi c relationship dynamics and for ret-
rospective employment trajectories. Finally, our focus on mothers meant we could 
not incorporate the perspective of non-resident parents on maintenance and care 
agreements. These elements are identifi ed by lone mothers as crucial when taking 
decisions on their careers. As a possible extension, researchers could analyze the 
narratives of non-resident parents to consider how confl icts between ex-partners 
emerge and are interpreted by both sides. This would allow a greater understand-
ing of the processes shaping mothers’ employment but also its spill-over effects on 
children.

Our fi ndings on the heterogeneity of employment trajectories call for more atten-
tion to within-group differences rather than focusing exclusively on the divide be-
tween lone mothers and mothers in a couple. By showing the multiplicity of factors 
shaping lone mothers’ decisions on their careers, this work feeds into the debate 
about the policies for tackling poverty risk among poor lone mothers with low-level 
labor market attachment (Brady/Cook 2015; Gregg et al. 2009; Ellwood 2000; Brady 
2019). Several European countries (Switzerland included) have addressed this issue 
by implementing so called work-fi rst policies (or activation policies) which specifi -



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 289

cally target lone mothers: these policies imply welfare should be conditional upon 
labor market participation, based on the assumption that paid work is the primary 
way out of poverty. These policies rely on highly normative expectations of what 
constitutes good parenting and often ignore the fact that single mothers cannot be 
treated merely as a work-force waiting for activation: indeed, the empirical evidence 
on the effectiveness of such measures is inconclusive (Blau et al. 2004; Daly 2011; 
Doiron 2004; Hennessy 2005; Millar 2019; Millar/Ridge 2009).

Therefore, this work reinforces the fi ndings of existing literature in urging con-
sideration of at least two points. First, simply compelling these mothers to increase 
their labor supply in exchange for social support is often at odds with their possibili-
ties to do so. Specifi cally, by ignoring issues such as the commitment of the non-
custodial parent towards the children, these policies may not distinguish between 
different situations and thus lead to inequalities. If a mother receives regular sup-
port from the non-custodial parent, she will be able to increase her participation in 
the labor market to improve her household’s fi nancial situation. When this is not the 
case, increasing the labor market supply may simply not be feasible, even if social 
benefi ts are provided to incentivize it. If the lone mother does not receive or cannot 
claim maintenance support, she may not be able to afford work-related expenses, 
including childcare. In turn, without external care support, she may have less time to 
devote to paid work, especially if she is socially isolated. In our qualitative sample, it 
is rare for fathers to be both highly involved in childcare and also remit maintenance 
payments. Of course, the presence of at least one of these forms of support can be 
understood as necessary for giving lone mothers more leverage in combining work 
and care. However, this is never suffi cient in itself as a means to actually improve 
employment prospects: in the few cases of fathers’ involvement, lone mothers also 
benefi ted from other forms of support that complemented those provided by the 
non-custodial father. Likewise, the lack of formal and informal support with child-
care may prevent such mothers from increasing their time in paid work irrespective 
of the normative emphasis placed by work-fi rst policies on personal autonomy and 
fi nancial independence through paid work.

In this respect, the mixed-method design is particularly useful for uncovering the 
relationship between the meanings associated with care, work, and formal/informal 
support for women who come from different backgrounds and who experience lone 
parenthood at different life-course stages. Such meanings constitute a hierarchy of 
priorities which shape their employment decisions. This is crucial for understanding 
the implications of non-normative family transitions and their effects on trajectories 
in other life domains. 

Acknowledgements
This paper benefi ted from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence 
in Research LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives, which is 
fi nanced by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It was realized using the data 
collected by the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), based at the Swiss Centre of Exper-



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza290

tise in the Social Sciences (FORS). The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for 
their highly constructive comments and suggestions. 

References

Abbott, Andrew 1995: Sequence Analysis: New Methods for Old Ideas. In: Annual Re-
view of Sociology 21,1: 93-13.

Abrams, Laura S. 2010: Sampling ‘Hard to Reach’ Populations in Qualitative Research: 
The Case of Incarcerated Youth. In: Qualitative Social Work 9,4: 536-550 [https://doi.
org/10.1177/1473325010367821].

Arnold, Stefanie; Knöpfel, Carlo 2007: Les Parents Seuls Entre Crèche, Place de Travail 
et Aide Sociale. Vol. 8. Document de discussion. Lucerne: Caritas.

Athreya, Kartik; Reilly, Devin; Simpson, Nicole B. 2014: Single Mothers and the Earned 
Income Tax Credit: Insurance Without Disincentives? In: IZA DP 8114.

Bakker, Wilma; Karsten, Lia 2013: Balancing Paid Work, Care and Leisure in Post-Sepa-
ration Households: A Comparison of Single Parents with Co-Parents. In: Acta Socio-
logica 56,2: 173-187 [https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699312466178].

Bastin, Sonia 2012: Dynamik alleinerziehender Mutterschaft: Partnerschaftsverläufe 
in der frühen Elternbiografi e. In: Huinink, Johannes; Kreyenfeld, Michaela; Trappe, 
Heike (Eds.): Familie und Partnerschaft in Ost- und Westdeutschland. Ähnlich und 
doch immer noch anders. Zeitschrift fü r Familienforschung, Sonderheft/9. Opladen: 
Barbara Budrich: 201-228. 

Bastin, Sonia 2019: Single Mothers’ New Partners: Partnership and Household For-
mation in Germany. In: Journal of Marriage and Family 81,4: 991-1003 [https://doi.
org/10.1111/jomf.12575]. 

Becker, Gary Stanley 1981: A Treatise on The Family. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.

Bennett, Fran 2013: Researching Within-Household Distribution: Overview, Develop-
ments, Debates, and Methodological Challenges. In: Journal of Marriage and Family 
75,3: 582-597 [https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12020].

Bernardi, Laura; Larenza, Ornella 2018: Variety of Transitions into Lone Parenthood. 
In:  Bernardi, Laura; Mortelmans, Dimitri: Lone Parenthood in the Life Course. Cham: 
Springer: 93-108 [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63295-7_5].

Bernardi, Laura; Mortelmans, Dimitri; Larenza, Ornella 2018: Changing Lone Parents, 
Changing Life Courses. In:  Bernardi, Laura; Mortelmans, Dimitri: Lone Parenthood 
in the Life Course. Cham: Springer 1-26 [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63295-7_1]. 

Bertozzi, Fabio; Bonoli, Giuliano; Gay-des-Combes, Benoît 2005: La Réforme de l’Etat 
Social En Suisse: Vieillissement, Emploi, Confl it Travail-Famille. Collection le savoir 
suisse. Vol. 27.

Blau, Francine D.; Kahn, Lawrence M.; Waldfogel, Jane 2004: The Impact of Welfare 
Benefi ts on Single Motherhood and Headship of Young Women Evidence from the 
Census. In: Journal of Human Resources 39,2: 382-404.

Brady, David; Finnigan, Ryan M.; Hübgen, Sabine 2017: Rethinking the Risks of Poverty: 
A Framework for Analyzing Prevalences and Penalties. In: American Journal of Sociol-
ogy 123,3: 740-786.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 291

Brady, Michelle 2019: Conceptualizing Activation Policies Targeted at Single Mothers: A 
Case Study of Australia and the United Kingdom. In: Social Politics: International Stud-
ies in Gender, State & Society [https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxz019].

Brady, Michelle; Cook, Kay 2015: The Impact of Welfare to Work on Parents and Their 
Children. In: Evidence Base 3: 1-23 [https://doi.org/10.21307/eb-2015-003].

Branger, Katja; Gazareth, Pascale; Schön-Bühlmann, Jaqueline 2003: Données Sociales 
– Suisse. Vers l’égalité? La Situation Des Femmes et Des Hommes En Suisse, Troi-
sième Rapport Statistique. Neuchâtel: Offi ce fédéral de la statistique.

Bühler, Elisabeth; Heye, Corinna 2005: Avancée et Stagnation Dans La Problématique 
de l’égalité Entre Hommes et Femmes de 1970 à 2000. Neuchâtel: SFSO.

Bühlmann, Felix et al. 2012: Rapport Social 2012. Lausanne: Seismo (Éditions).

Creswell, John W. 2003: Research design: Qualitative and quantitative approaches and 
mixed methods approaches. London: Sage.

Daly, Mary 2011: What Adult Worker Model? A Critical Look at Recent Social Policy Re-
form in Europe from a Gender and Family Perspective. In: Social Politics: International 
Studies in Gender, State & Society 18,1: 1-23 [https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxr002].

Damme, Maike van; Kalmijn, Matthijs; Uunk, Wilfred 2009: The Employment of Sepa-
rated Women in Europe: Individual and Institutional Determinants. In: European So-
ciological Review 25,2: 183-197 [https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcn042].

Doiron, Denise J. 2004: Welfare Reform and the Labour Supply of Lone Parents in Aus-
tralia: A Natural Experiment Approach. In: Economic Record 80,249: 157-176.

Ellwood, David T. 2000: The Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Social Policy 
Reforms on Work, Marriage, and Living Arrangements. In: National Tax Journal 53,4: 
1063-1105.

Eurostat 2017: People Outside the Labour Market. Statistics Explained [https://
ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=People_outside_the_la-
bour_force&oldid=488103; 10.06.2020].

Fasang, Anette E.; Liao, Tim F. 2014: Visualizing sequences in the social sciences: Rela-
tive frequency sequence plots. In: Sociological Methods and Research 43,4: 643-676 
[https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124113506563]. 

Fereday, Jennifer; Muir-Cochrane, Eimear 2006: Demonstrating Rigor Using Thematic 
Analysis: A Hybrid Approach of Inductive and Deductive Coding and Theme Develop-
ment. In: International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5,1: 80-92 [https://doi.org/10.11
77/160940690600500107].

Fisher, Hayley; Low, Hamish 2015: Financial Implications of Relationship Breakdown: 
Does Marriage Matter? In: Review of Economics of the Household 13,4: 735-769 
[https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9292-y].

Flückiger, Yves 1998: The Labour Market in Switzerland: The End of a Special Case? In: 
International Journal of Manpower 19,6: 369-395.

Fux, Beat 2011: Sozioökonomische Situation und soziale Beziehungen von Alleinerzie-
henden. Würzburg: Ergon. 

Gabadinho, Alexis et al. 2011: Analyzing and visualizing state sequences in R with 
TraMineR. In: Journal of Statistical Software 40,4: 1-37 [https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.
v040.i04].

Gregg, Paul; Harkness, Susan; Smith, Sarah 2009: Welfare Reform and Lone Parents in 
the UK. In: The Economic Journal 119,535: F38-F65 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
0297.2008.02226.x].



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza292

Hansen, Hans-Tore et al. 2006: Poverty among Households with Children: A Compara-
tive Study of Norway and Germany. In: International Journal of Social Welfare 15,4: 
269-279 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00469.x].

Haux, Tina 2013: Understanding Employment Barriers for Lone Parents in Great Britain: 
Research Gaps and Missed Opportunities. In: Social Policy & Administration 47,4: 468-
482 [https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12030].

Hennessy, Judith 2005: Welfare, Work, and Family Well-Being: A Comparative Analysis 
of Welfare and Employment Status for Single Female-Headed Families Post-TANF. In: 
Sociological Perspectives 48,1: 77-104 [https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2005.48.1.77].

Hennessy, Judith 2015: Low-Income and Middle-Class Mothers Gendered Work and 
Family Schemas. In: Sociology Compass 9,12: 1106-1118 [https://doi.org/10.1111/
soc4.12333].

Holland, Jennifer; Thomson, Rachel; Henderson Sheila 2006: Qualitative Longitudinal 
Research: A Discussion Paper. Families and Social Capital Working Papers. London: 
South Bank University.

Hübgen, Sabine 2018: Only a Husband Away from Poverty’? Lone Mothers’ Poverty 
Risks in a European Comparison. In: Bernardi, Laura; Mortelmans, Dimitri: Lone Par-
enthood in the Life Course. Cham: Springer 167-189 [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-
319-63295-7_8].

Hübgen, Sabine 2020: Understanding lone mothers’ high poverty in Germany: Disen-
tangling composition effects and effects of lone motherhood. In: Advances in Life 
Course Research 44 [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2020.100327].

Jaehrling, Karen; Kalina, Thorsten; Mesaros, Leila 2015: A Paradox of Activation Strate-
gies: Why Increasing Labour Market Participation among Single Mothers Failed to 
Bring down Poverty Rates. In: Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & 
Society 22,1: 86-110 [https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxu017]. 

Jarvis, Sarah; Jenkins, Stephen P. 1999: Marital Splits and Income Changes: Evidence 
from the British Household Panel Survey. In: Population Studies 53,2: 237-254.

Kalmijn, Matthijs; Loeve, Anneke; Manting, Dorien 2007: Income Dynamics in Couples 
and the Dissolution of Marriage and Cohabitation. In: Demography 44,1: 159-179 [htt-
ps://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2007.0005].

Kaufman, Leonard; Rousseeuw, Peter 2005: Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to 
Cluster Analysis. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Kessler, Dorian; Potarca, Gina; Bernardi, Laura 2018: Clean Breaks at Public Cost? His 
Earnings and Her Social Assistance Take-up After Marital Separation. Annual Meeting 
of the American Population Association, April 26-29. Denver.

Krüger, Helga; Levy, René 2001: Linking Life Courses, Work, and the Family: Theorizing 
a Not So Visible Nexus between Women and Men. In: The Canadian Journal of Sociol-
ogy/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 26,2: 145-166 [https://doi.org/10.2307/3341676].

Kuckartz, Udo 2019: Qualitative Content Analysis: From Kracauer’s Beginnings to To-
day’s Challenges. In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Re-
search 20,3, Art. 12 [http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-20.3.3370].

Langlais, Michael R.; Anderson, Edward R.; Greene, Shannon M. 2016: Consequences 
of dating for post-divorce maternal well-being. In: Journal of Marriage and Family 
78,4: 1032-1046 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12319]. 

Larenza, Ornella 2019: Social Policy Shaping the Life-Course: A Study on Lone Parents’ 
Vulnerability. PhD thesis. Institut des sciences sociales. Lausanne, Suisse.



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 293

Le Goff, Jean-Marie; Levy, René (Eds.) 2016: Devenir Parents, Devenir Inégaux. Transi-
tion à La Parentalité et Inégalités de Genre. Questions de Genre. Geneva, Switzerland: 
Seismo (Éditions).

Long, J. Scott; Freese, Jeremy 2014: Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Vari-
ables Using Stata. Third Edition. Stata Press.

Looze, Jessica 2014: Young Women’s Job Mobility: The Infl uence of Motherhood Sta-
tus and Education. In: Journal of Marriage and Family 76,4: 693-709 [https://doi.
org/10.1111/jomf.12122].

Millar, Jane 2019: Self-Responsibility and Activation for Lone Mothers in the 
United Kingdom. In: American Behavioral Scientist 63,1: 85-99 [https://doi.
org/10.1177/0002764218816804].

Millar, Jane; Ridge, Tess 2009: Relationships of Care: Working Lone Mothers, Their Chil-
dren and Employment Sustainability. In: Journal of Social Policy 38,1: 103-121 [https://
doi.org/10.1017/S0047279408002572].

Nieuwenhuis, Rense; Maldonado, Laurie C. 2018: The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Fami-
lies. Policy Press.

Obinger, Herbert 1999: Minimum Income in Switzerland. In: Journal of European Social 
Policy 9,1: 29-47 [https://doi.org/10.1177/095892879900900102].

OECD 2011: Doing Better for Families. Chapter 1: Families are changing. OECD: Paris.

OECD 2014: Family Database [www.oecd.org/social/family/database, 26.08.2020].

OECD 2015a: Back to Work: Canada: Improving the Re-Employment Prospects of Dis-
placed Workers. Paris: OECD.

OECD 2015b: Employment Outlook 2015. OECD Publishing.

Penrod, Janice et al. 2003: A Discussion of Chain Referral as a Method of Sampling 
Hard-to-Reach Populations. In: Journal of Transcultural Nursing 14,2: 100-107 [https://
doi.org/10.1177/1043659602250614].

Piccarreta, Raffaella; Studer, Matthias 2019: Holistic Analysis of the Life Course: Meth-
odological Challenges and New Perspectives. In: Advances in Life Course Research 41 
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2018.10.004]. 

R Core Team 2020: R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R 
Foundation for Statistical Computing. 

Recksiedler, Claudia; Bernardi, Laura 2019. Lone Mothers’ Repartnering Trajectories and 
Health: Does the Welfare Context Matter? In: Journal of Family Issues 40,17: 2582-
2604 [https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X19860175]. 

Ritschard, Gilbert et al. 2013: TraMineRextras: Extras for use with the TraMineR pack-
age. Geneva: CRAN [https://cran.r-project.org/, 26.08.2020].

Rossier, Clémentine; Sauvain-Dugerdil, Claudine; Bernardi, Laura 2018: Bien-Être Des 
Individus Dans Des Familles Non-Standards En Suisse. Cadre Introductif à Une Série 
d’analyses de l’enquête Sur Les Familles et Les Générations (EFG-2013). LIVES WORK-
ING PAPER 68: 1-20 [http://dx.doi.org/10.12682/lives.2296-1658.2018.68].

Schlanser, Regula 2011: Qui Utilise Les Crèches En Suisse ? Logiques Sociales Du 
Recours Pour La Petite Enfance. In: Cahier de l’IDHEAP. Chaire Politiques Sociales. 
Chavannes-Lausanne: IDHEAP 264.

SFSO (Swiss Federal Statistical Offi ce) 2017a: Indicateurs de Nuptialité et de Divortialité 
En Suisse. Neuchâtel: Offi ce fédéral de la statistique. 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza294

SFSO (Swiss Federal Statistical Offi ce) 2017b: Les Familles En Suisse. Rapport Statis-
tique 2017. Neuchâtel: Offi ce fédéral de la statistique.

Schenk, Sabine 2000: Petits enfants – petits soucis? Vie quotidienne des jeunes mamans. 
In: Institut Marie Meierhofer pour l’enfant (Ed.): Quand le couple devient famille. Laus-
anne: EESP: 15-37.

Stewart, Kitty 2009: Employment and Wage Trajectories for Mothers Entering Low-
Skilled Work: Evidence from the British Lone Parent Cohort. In: Social Policy & Admin-
istration 43,5: 483-507.

Struffolino, Emanuela; Bernardi, Laura 2016: Lone Parents in Switzerland: Characteris-
tics over Time. In: Démos. Informations Démographiques. Neuchâtel: Offi ce fédéral 
de la statistique.

Struffolino, Emanuela; Bernardi, Laura; Voorpostel, Marieke 2016: Self-Reported Health 
among Lone Mothers in Switzerland: Do Employment and Education Matter? In: Popu-
lation 71,2: 187-213.  

Struffolino, Emanuela; Mortelmans, Dimitri 2018: Lone Mothers in Belgium: Labour 
Force Attachment and Risk Factors. In: Bernardi, Laura; Mortelmans, Dimitri: Lone 
Parenthood in the Life Course. Cham: Springer 257-282 [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-
3-319-63295-7_12].

Studer, Matthias 2013: WeightedCluster Library Manual: A practical guide to creating 
typologies of trajectories in the social sciences with R. In: LIVES Working Papers 24 
[https://doi.org/10.12682/lives.2296-1658.2013.24].

Studer, Matthias; Ritschard, Gilbert 2016: What Matters in Differences between Life 
Trajectories: A Comparative Review of Sequence Dissimilarity Measures. In: Journal 
of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 179,2: 481-511 [https://
doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12125].

Valarino, Isabel 2014: The Emergence of Parental and Paternity Leaves in Switzerland : 
A Challenge to Gendered Representations and Practices of Parenthood ? PhD thesis. 
Institut des sciences sociales. Lausanne: Suisse.

Western, Bruce; Bloome, Deirdre; Percheski, Christine 2008: Inequality among Ameri-
can Families with Children, 1975 to 2005. In: American Sociological Review 73,6: 903-
920 [https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240807300602].

Zagel, Hannah 2014: Are All Single Mothers the Same? Evidence from British and West 
German Women’s Employment Trajectories. In: European Sociological Review 30,1: 
49-63 [https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jct021]. 

Date of submission: 05.11.2019  Date of acceptance: 19.05.2020

Prof. Dr. Emanuela Struffolino (). Freie Universität Berlin and WZB Berlin Social 
Science Center. Berlin, Germany. E-mail: e.struffolino@fu-berlin.de 
URL: https://emanuela-struffolino.com/

Prof. Dr. Laura Bernardi. University of Lausanne and NCCR LIVES. Lausanne, Switzerland.
E-mail: laura.bernardi@unil.ch
URL: https://lives-nccr.ch/en/personne/laura-bernardi-n148

Ornella Larenza. SUPSI – Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana. 
Manno, Switzerland. E-mail: ornella.larenza@supsi.ch
URL: https://www.supsi.ch/deass/strumenti/rubrica/dettaglio.27289.backLink.
f69827e6-fd97-4aaf-b8fb-a5ca55783a36.html



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 295

Appendix

Tab. A1: Multinomial logistic regression models predicting the assigment to the 
fi ve clusters. Exponentiated coeffi cients and Z-scores in parentheses

Full-timers vs.:
Out of Returners Part-timers Strengtheners

employment

Age upon becoming lone parent (ref. 18-24)
25-30 1.584 2.383 1.732 1.657

(0.98) (1.12) (0.81) (0.69)
31-40 0.569 1.429 1.552 0.745

(-1.01) (0.45) (0.62) (-0.38)
41-54 0.860 1.855 0.863 0.361

(-0.21) (0.64) (-0.18) (-1.08)
Education (ref. Lower secondary)

Upper secondary 0.817 2.438* 0.763 1.542
(-0.51) (2.32) (-0.74) (0.98)

Tertiary 0.662 0.969 1.765 1.065
 (-0.77) (-0.04) (1.13) (0.10)

Age of the younger child upon becoming lone parent (ref 0-2)
3-5 0.323* 1.517 0.567 0.463

(-2.19) (0.85) (-1.32) (-1.22)
6-10 1.355 1.872 2.197 6.634** 

(0.56) (1.12) (1.66) (2.97)
11+ 0.443 0.599 1.639 2.312

(-1.25) (-0.70) (0.85) (1.10)
Number of children upon becoming lone parent (ref. 1)

2 1.688 3.081* 1.19 0.947
(1.05) (2.28) (0.45) (-0.11)

3+ 3.172* 4.291* 0.867 1.465
(2.17) (2.36) (0.29) (0.61)

Mode of entry into lone parenthood (ref. lone parent at fi rst birth)
Separation 0.614 0.463 0.339** 0.460

(-1.14) (-1.57) (-2.58) (-1.29)
Widowhood 3.829 1.699 1.584 1.019

(1.79) (0.66) (0.64) (0.02)
Nationality at birth (ref. Swiss)

Other 1.056 0.223* 0.432 0.662
(0.13) (-2.12) (-1.73) (-0.76)

Year upon becoming lone parent (ref. up to 1979)
1980-1989 0.582 1.248 1.501 1.247

(-1.34) (0.43) (0.91) (0.41)
1990-1995 1.024 1.285 1.793 3.080

(0.05) (0.39) (1.18) (1.93)
1996-2005 0.817 2.451 7.980*** 5.435**

(-0.38) (1.60) (4.47) (3.11)
Wave (ref. 2001)

2013 0.477 0.628 1.923 1.158
(-1.73) (-0.96) (1.45) (0.26)

N 478 478 478 478

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001
Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, biographical calendar 2001 and 2013 (weighted). 



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza296

Fig. A1: Average silhouette width (weighted and not – ASWw and ASW 
respectively), Hubert's C coeffi cient (HC) and point biserial correlation 
(PBC) by cluster solution: Standardized scores (Z-scores) and original 
values

Note: The silhouette coeffi cient compares the average distance of a case to the cases in 
its cluster with the average distance to the cases in the closest cluster. Therefore, such 
an index allows the identifi cation of sequences that lie between clusters. The ASW aver-
ages the distances of all sequences in a cluster. The higher the ASW value, the higher the 
within-cluster “closeness” between the sequences (the ASWw is the same as the ASW, 
but using sampling weights). The other two criteria assess the dissimilarity between the 
sequences allocated to the same cluster using different methods: the PBC behaves like the 
ASW, while the lower the HC, the greater the closeness between sequences in a cluster. All 
four criteria indicate 3 clusters as the best solution, and 5 as the second best. We opted for 
the latter as it allowed us to extract clusters 2 and 4, which are substantively relevant as 
they identify long term transitions between states around lone parenthood that resonate 
with the experiences of mothers in the qualitative sample.

Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, biographical calendar 2001 and 2013. N=478. 



Lone Mothers' Employment Trajectories    • 297

Fig. A2: Silhouette values for each sequence by cluster for the 5-clusters 
solution

 

Note: The silhouette value for each sequence is commonly used to assess how distant in 
a Euclidian space sequences are from other sequences in the cluster. The PAM algorithm 
we used allocate the sequence to their closest medoid (the most central sequence to the 
most populated areas of the sequences distribution): therefore, even if a sequence seems 
very different to those in its cluster, it is nevertheless more similar to them compared to 
the others in other clusters. Although the ASW for cluster 4 seems suboptimal, as more 
than 50 percent of the sequences are located on the left-hand side of the 0, this does not 
mean that they would have been better allocated to other clusters, but that the within clus-
ter heterogeneity is higher for that cluster compared to the others. From a visual inspec-
tion of Figure 1 in fact, the sequences in cluster 4 that diverge from the general pattern of 
“strengthen the labor market attachment” and are actually “reducers”: 6 women moved 
from full-time to part-time work and 7 from part-time to out of the labor force. The time 
spent in these states lead to the allocation of these sequences to this cluster, although how 
they unfold over time has a different substantive meaning. The other sequences share 
long periods in part-time work followed by full-time, in some cases followed by time out 
of the labor force. We now include a word of caution, where relevant, in the presentation 
of the results. 

Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, biographical calendar 2001 and 2013.



•    Emanuela Struffolino, Laura Bernardi, Ornella Larenza298

Fig. A3: Dissimilarities to the medoid within each frequency group as a box-and-
whisker plot by cluster

Note: Y-axis reports the box-and-whisker plot for dissimilarities to the medoid within each 
frequency group; X-axis displays distance from the medoid selected as the most suitable 
representative sequence of each frequency group. R2 and F statistics for the goodness of 
fi t are displayed below each plot (Fasang/Liao 2014).

Source: Authors’ calculations. SHP data, biographical calendar 2001 and 2013. 



Published by
Prof. Dr. Norbert F. Schneider

Federal Institute for Population Research 
D-65180 Wiesbaden / Germany

 2020

Managing Editor 
Prof. Dr. Johannes Huinink
Dr. Katrin Schiefer

Editorial Assistant
Beatriz Feiler-Fuchs
Wiebke Hamann

Layout
Beatriz Feiler-Fuchs

E-mail: cpos@bib.bund.de

Scientifi c Advisory Board
Karsten Hank (Cologne)
Michaela Kreyenfeld (Berlin)
Marc Luy (Vienna) 
Natalie Nitsche (Rostock)
Zsolt Spéder (Budapest)
Rainer Wehrhahn (Kiel)

Comparative Population Studies

www.comparativepopulationstudies.de

ISSN: 1869-8980 (Print) – 1869-8999 (Internet)

Board of Reviewers
Bruno Arpino (Barcelona)
Kieron Barclay (Rostock)
Laura Bernardi (Lausanne)
Gabriele Doblhammer (Rostock)
Anette Eva Fasang (Berlin)
Michael Feldhaus (Oldenburg)
Tomas Frejka (Sanibel)
Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz (Vienna)
Birgit Glorius (Chemnitz)
Fanny Janssen (Groningen)
Frank Kalter (Mannheim)
Stefanie Kley (Hamburg)
Bernhard Köppen (Koblenz)
Anne-Kristin Kuhnt (Duisburg)
Hill Kulu (St Andrews)
Nadja Milewski (Rostock)
Roland Rau (Rostock)
Thorsten Schneider (Leipzig)
Tomas Sobotka (Vienna)
Jeroen J. A. Spijker (Barcelona)
Heike Trappe (Rostock)
Helga de Valk (The Hague)
Sergi Vidal (Barcelona)
Michael Wagner (Cologne)