In this article we estimate the effect of spousal labour force participation on the participation of older men in Australia. We find that the decision of a wife to work or not influences positively, and in a causal fashion, the decision of her husband to work or not. We use counterfactual analysis to estimate the impact of the increasing labour force participation of a wife on her husband�s participation. We
find that the increased labour force participation of married women observed between 2002 and 2011 has been responsible for a 4 percentage point increase in the participation rate of their husbands.