Gendered Family Formation Trajectories in East and West Germany: Insights From New Sequence Analysis Techniques

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Gendered Marriage and Relationship Formation

Abstract

The de-standardization of family formation over time and across countries recently received much attention. In contrast, differences in the similarity of family formation for different social groups, such as men and women have been largely neglected. We use the historically unique case of the German division to scrutinize the relative impact of gender and macro-structural settings on shaping family formation in East and West Germany. Using the German National Education Panel (NEPS), we examine family formation trajectories from age 15 to 40 with the recently developed tools of sequence discrepancy analysis and the implicative statistic for analysing sequences of typical states to study demographic processes. Strong pro-natalist incentives in the regulative communist East are associated with a temporal concentration of family formation in the life course for both men and women. This increased the degree of gender differences in family formation in East Germany without altering its substantive content compared with West Germany. Sequence discrepancy analysis and the analysis of sequences of typical states are promising new methods for generating insights on demographic processes. In the next steps of the project we will compare how gender differences in family life courses vary by social status and education in the communist East compared to the social market economy in the West. Preliminary results show strong gender differences across all educational groups in West Germany, whereas there are no gender differences in family life courses for highly educated men and women in the East.

Authors

• Emanuela Struffolino, University of Lausanne

• Matthias Studer, Free University Amsterdam and University of Geneva