Research Group

Gender Inequalities and Fertility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Detailed Description

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Sustained low fertility, postponed parenthood, rising partnership instability, and increasing family complexity are defining features of contemporary demographic change in high-income societies. These developments reshape population age structures, reconfigure intergenerational relations, and organize the distribution of economic and social risks across cohorts. However, dominant models of fertility and family change do not systematically incorporate how gender inequalities shape these dynamics.

Research on partnership dynamics and intra-household arrangements has largely developed alongside, rather than within, fertility research. Consequently, demographic models often treat gendered interdependence as peripheral to fertility behavior. The Research Group Gender Inequalities and Fertility responds to this fragmentation by advancing a relational life course perspective that integrates partnership processes, labor division, and fertility behavior within a unified demographic framework.

The group examines fertility and partnership as interdependent processes unfolding through successive transitions across the life course. Union formation, entry into parenthood, union dissolution, repartnering, and multiple-partner fertility reorganize employment trajectories, caregiving responsibilities, and economic interdependence within families. These transitions redistribute resources and risks between women and men and across socioeconomic groups. In doing so, family transitions function as mechanisms through which gender and socioeconomic inequalities are structured and sustained over the life course and across cohorts.

To capture both access to family formation and the consequences of subsequent family transitions, the research program is organized around two complementary research areas.

Research Area 1 examines how social inequalities shape pathways into partnership and parenthood. It investigates how educational expansion, gendered partner markets, economic asymmetries, and heterogeneous gender role attitudes structure union formation and progression into childbearing-relevant contexts. Through these processes, differential access to stable unions translates into stratified fertility timing and completed fertility at the population level. Fertility delay and childlessness thus emerge from socially differentiated partnership trajectories, rather than from preferences alone.

Research Area 2 investigates how family transitions themselves generate inequality after entry into parenthood. It studies how successive transitions, such as entry into parenthood, parity progression, union dissolution, and repartnering, reshape earnings trajectories, caregiving burdens, and economic vulnerability. By examining the sequencing of these transitions, the research demonstrates how demographic processes contribute to cumulative gender gaps and widening disparities between family types across cohorts. Family complexity is conceptualized as a structural component of contemporary fertility regimes, emerging at the intersection of shifting union formation patterns and childbearing trajectories.

Across both research areas, the group connects partnership and fertility processes to population-level demographic outcomes. By modeling transitions longitudinally and in institutional contexts, the research identifies how partnership dynamics and family sequencing aggregate into patterns of fertility postponement, union stability, family complexity, and socioeconomic differentiation across cohorts.

Methodologically, the group combines dyadic and individual-level longitudinal survey data, cross-national comparative datasets, and, where available, population-wide register data. Multistate and life course models, sequence analysis, and decomposition techniques are used to estimate transition-specific mechanisms and their cumulative effects over time. This methodological integration allows family processes to be analyzed as both couple-level interactions and population-level demographic patterns.

Taken together, the research demonstrates that family demography is essential for understanding how contemporary low-fertility societies reproduce and transform gender and socioeconomic inequalities. By embedding gendered interdependence within demographic models of fertility, union dynamics, and life course sequencing, the group repositions family demography as central to explanations of population-level stratification.