Living Arrangements of Mexican Women up to Age 30: Stability and Social Stratification across Cohorts

Rita Trias-Prats, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Ginevra Floridi, The University of Edinburgh
Albert Esteve, Center for Demographic Studies (Barcelona)

Women's living arrangements at young ages have implications for their economic prospects, and are in turn socio-economically stratified. However, we know little about young women's living arrangement trajectories and their stratification, especially in the Latin American context. In recent decades, Mexico has undergone significant demographic and socio-economic change, potentially impacting young women’s life course transitions. Using data from the 2017 Encuesta Demográfica Retrospectiva (EDER), we employ sequence analysis to investigate and classify living arrangement trajectories from age 18 to 30 across five cohorts of Mexican women born between the 1960s and 1990s. It also examines the influence of parental socio-economic status on these trajectories. Women's sorting into living arrangement trajectories remains stable across cohorts and is largely influenced by parental socio-economic status. Living arrangements are primarily shaped by three factors: early and late transitions into union formation and childbearing, co-residence with extended family, and union dissolution. The influence of parental socio-economic status remains stable across cohorts and is consistent with patterns of early union formation and childbearing that have characterized Mexican generations and most Latin American countries in recent decades, despite the expansion of education and declines in fertility.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Longitudinal studies , Data visualisation

See extended abstract.