Have it all? Couples’ Gender Ideological Pairings and Their Fertility

Daniele Florean, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
Natalie Nitsche, Australian National University
Daniela Grunow, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Linkages between gender norms and fertility levels have been much discussed in demography. It’s been argued that when women’s growing participation in the public sphere is accompanied by sticky gender rigidity in the private sphere, women are double-burdened, and fertility declines until gender norms flexibilize, too. Extended to the couple-level, this argument implies higher (first) birth rates among couples with two egalitarian partners, at least compared with attitudinal mismatched couples (e.g. egalitarian woman and traditional man), especially in rigid or transforming gender normative societies. However, this hypothesis has rarely been tested with couple-level data, despite its potential for testing the ‘gender revolution’ argument more directly. Our study fills this gap. We examine whether partners’ gender ideological pairings predict couples’ time to first birth in Germany, with data from the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam), using several attitudinal measures. We find evidence of postponement among egalitarian couples, with however higher childlessness among non-egalitarian couples, with a negative cohort gradient, the differences decreasing among youngest respondents. Implications for extending the gender revolution argument toward considerations on first birth postponement and couple-level dynamics are discussed.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Families, Unions and Households

See extended abstract.