st: partner's occupational score when the woman is not married

["solera" <cristina.solera@iue.it>]

Dear all,
I'm running a discrete time duration model on women's risk of exiting paid 
work. In addition to covariates  such as level of education, type of 
contract, sector, age and number of children and so on, I would like to 
include the marital status and, if married, the occupational score of the 
partner.
However, which value should I  give to the occupational score in the months 
where the woman is not married? If I make occupational score missing, then 
the model will drop the observations where the woman is not married, so that 
I can not estimate the effect of marriage. If I give the value 0, STATA 
reads it as a very low occupational score. A solution could be to make 
occupational score a categorical varible, defing a certain number of 
subgroups, with one of the subgroups being "not married". But for different 
reasons I would prefer to keep occupational score as a continuous variable. 
Any suggestion?

Thanks a lot in advance
Cristina 
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