Research Group

Gender Inequalities and Fertility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Research Area

Family Transitions as Mechanisms of Gendered and Socio-economic Inequality

This research area examines how family transitions generate inequality over the life course. Events such as entry into parenthood, partnership dissolution, repartnering, and higher-order childbearing reshape economic interdependence, caregiving responsibilities, and exposure to risk. Rather than treating these processes as consequences of prior disadvantage alone, the research conceptualizes them as mechanisms through which socio-economic and gender inequalities are produced, reinforced, and transmitted across the life course. According to this perspective, demographic change is not merely reflective of social inequality, but actively participates in its reproduction.

Research on social stratification has frequently treated family structure as a correlate or an outcome of disadvantage. Demographic research, in turn, has often analyzed fertility and partnership transitions with respect to their timing and sequencing, without fully integrating their redistributive consequences. By centering family transitions as mechanisms of inequality production, this research area connects family demography to broader theories of cumulative disadvantage and life course stratification. Across projects, the analytical focus is on how individual transitions and their sequencing alter exposure to economic vulnerability, care responsibilities, and partnership instability, thereby shaping divergent life course trajectories and contributing to stratified demographic outcomes at the population level.

The research area develops this argument along three analytical strands.

First, it analyzes how partnership and fertility transitions restructure economic interdependence within couples. By tracing changes in paid and unpaid labor arrangements, earnings trajectories, resource sharing, and poverty risk around parenthood, union dissolution, and repartnering, the research area shows how family demographic events produce durable gendered economic inequalities that, in turn, shape subsequent parity progression and partnership trajectories beyond the initial childbearing union.

Second, it extends the analysis from single transitions to life course sequencing. By tracing pathways to multiple-partner fertility and linking these complex family trajectories to long-term earnings patterns, the research demonstrates how inequality accumulates across repeated partnership and childbearing transitions. Family complexity is conceptualized as a constitutive feature of contemporary fertility regimes, located at the intersection of changing union formation and childbearing trajectories.

Third, it broadens the scope from economic redistribution to inequalities in care and reproduction. By analyzing changes in mental health, relationship quality and stability, and socially stratified reproductive outcomes, the research area demonstrates how family demographic events generate disparities in well-being and reproductive risk alongside economic inequality.

In sum, the research area demonstrates that family transitions are central mechanisms in the production of inequality in low-fertility societies. As union instability, delayed parenthood, and complex partnership trajectories become more prevalent, the sequencing and timing of family transitions increasingly shape aggregate gender gaps, completed fertility patterns, and cohort-level disparities in economic and health outcomes. The family life course thus operates as a demographic engine through which inequality is structured and redistributed across populations.

Projects of this Research Area