Research Group

Gender Inequalities and Fertility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Research Area

Inequality in Union Formation and Early Family Trajectories

Fertility decline and postponement are typically analyzed at the level of birth behavior itself. Previous research has focused on fertility intentions, parity progression, and the consequences of parenthood, while treating partnership formation and union progression largely as background conditions. As a result, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how social and gender inequalities in access to stable partnerships and parenthood emerge earlier in the life course, before childbearing occurs.

This research area addresses this gap by shifting the analytical focus upstream in the life course, before childbearing transitions occur. It examines how unequal access to partnerships, stratified partner matching, and differential progression to stable, childbearing-relevant unions generate socially differentiated pathways to parenthood. Fertility delay often emerges not only from changing preferences or economic constraints, but also from partnerships that do not progress into shared households or institutionalized unions even when individuals express a desire to have children.

A central structural driver of these processes is educational expansion and the resulting gender imbalances in higher education. As women have surpassed men in educational attainment in many contexts, partner markets have been restructured, altering who forms unions with whom. By disentangling structural opportunity constraints from assortative mating processes, this research area examines patterns of educational homogamy and heterogamy, and clarifies how educational inequalities in union formation structure have stratified fertility timing, childlessness, and completed fertility at the population level.

In addition to structural factors, the research area investigates how gender role attitudes and fertility intentions play out within relationships. Gender role attitudes refer to beliefs about the appropriate roles of women and men in employment, caregiving, and family life. Rather than reducing these attitudes to a single ideological continuum, this research examines their multidimensional structure and heterogeneity across individuals and couples. It analyzes how specific constellations of beliefs interact with structural opportunity constraints and couple negotiation processes to shape early family trajectories.

Fertility intentions, by contrast, concern plans and desires regarding childbearing. Fertility research has long been divided between approaches that questioned their analytical value and those that treated intentions as relatively stable individual preferences directly linked to births. This research area moves beyond that divide by conceptualizing fertility intentions as relational and temporally dynamic orientations. Using dyadic longitudinal data, this research area demonstrates that alignment and misalignment in fertility intentions shape union progression and fertility timing, thus pointing to the need for a more systematic analysis of how early partnership processes structure exposure to parenthood.

Across the projects, union formation and early family trajectories are understood as the outcome of interacting layers: Structural partner markets shape who meets whom; ideational heterogeneity shapes expectations and perceived compatibility; and dyadic alignment determines how relationships progress. Inequality emerges from the interaction of these layers, as differential access to compatible partnerships conditions exposure to parenthood, and ultimately results in stratified fertility outcomes at the population level. From this perspective, fertility postponement and childlessness are not only matters of individual timing, but also reflect structured inequalities in access to stable childbearing-relevant partnerships, thereby reshaping demographic patterns across cohorts.

Projects of this Research Area