Gender-Egalitarian Attitudes and Assortative Mating by Age and Education.

In the last decades, conventional patterns of assortative mating have been challenged by changes in the gender-gap in education. In many countries, educationally hypogamous unions (i.e. the woman is more educated than the man) now outnumber hypergamous unions (i.e. the man is more educated than the woman). The extent to which such structural changes have also been accompanied by gender egalitarian attitudes has not yet been investigated. This paper fills the gap by focusing on both age and educational assortative mating, using data from wave 1 and 2 of the Generations and Gender Surveys for 6 European countries. I investigate the role of gender-role attitudes of single men and women, measured in the first wave, on their age and educational assortative mating outcomes observed in the second wave. To this aim, I applied multinomial logistic regressions, and used as reference outcome category remaining single in the second wave. Compared to non-egalitarian men, I found that men holding gender-egalitarian views are more likely to form hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, in terms of both age and educational assortative mating. Egalitarian women are more likely than non-egalitarian women to form age-hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, but they are less likely to form educationally hypogamous unions. I discuss the implications of these results in relation to the convergence of mating preferences between men and women.

Educational Differences in Cohort Fertility Across Sub-national Regions in Europe.

Educational differences in female cohort fertility vary strongly across high-income countries and over time, but knowledge about how educational fertility differentials play out at the sub-national regional level is limited. Examining these sub-national regional patterns might improve our understanding of national patterns, as regionally varying contextual conditions may affect fertility. This study provides for the first time for a large number of European countries a comprehensive account of educational differences in the cohort fertility rate (CFR) at the sub-national regional level. We harmonise data from population registers, censuses, and large-sample surveys for 15 countries to measure women's completed fertility by educational level and region of residence at the end of the reproductive lifespan. In order to explore associations between educational differences in CFRs and levels of economic development, we link our data to regional GDP per capita. Empirical Bayesian estimation is used to reduce uncertainty in the regional fertility estimates. We document an overall negative gradient between the CFR and level of education, and notable regional variation in the gradient. The steepness of the gradient is inversely related to the economic development level. It is steepest in the least developed regions and close to zero in the most developed regions. This tendency is observed within countries as well as across all regions of all countries. Our findings underline the variability of educational gradients in women's fertility, suggest that higher levels of development may be associated with less negative gradients, and call for more in-depth sub-national-level fertility analyses by education.

Partners' Educational Characteristics and Fertility: Disentangling the Effects of Earning Potential and Unemployment Risk on Second Births.

This study investigates the link between the educational characteristics of partners in heterosexual relationships and their transition to second births, accounting for the selection into parenthood by fitting multi-level event history models. We compare the fertility of Beckerian unions characterized by gender-role specialization with the fertility of dual-earner couples, characterized by the pooling of incomes. Focusing on the economic aspect of the educational degree, in a first step, we estimate the earning potential and unemployment risks by field and level of education, country and sex using European Labour Force Surveys. Next, we link these results with Generation and Gender Survey data from six countries and model couples' transition to second births. We find evidence in support of both the pooling of resources family model (notably in Belgium) and the Beckerian gender-role specialization model. The effects of the earning potential and unemployment risk attached to his and her field of education tends to vary by country context.

Education and the Transition to Fatherhood: The Role of Selection Into Union.

Although advanced education has been found to be consistently associated with a later transition to parenthood for women, findings about education and the transition to parenthood have been much less consistent for men, and no stylized fact has emerged from the literature. We argue that the inconsistency of findings for men is due to the fact that the selection process involved in union formation has been disregarded in earlier studies. We hypothesize that men's educational attainment consistently and positively affects the transition to fatherhood via higher rates of union formation. We apply multiprocess event-history analysis to data from the Generations and Gender Surveys for 10 European countries. Our results show indeed a consistent positive effect of education on the transition to fatherhood, but it operates chiefly through selection into union. Failing to account for this selection process leads to a major underestimation of the salience of education for the transition to fatherhood.