Available online 29 December 2015
Abstract
How
do men and women's family life courses differ? Are gender differences
in family life courses greater at higher or lower educational levels?
And how does the intersection of gender, education and family life
courses vary across different macro-structural contexts? This paper
addresses these questions comparing East and West Germany during the
German division (1961–1990). We thereby compare a strong male
breadwinner model in a social market economy in West Germany and a
universal breadwinner model in a state socialist system in the East. The
analysis uses data from the German National Education Panel (NEPS) and
employs two new sequence analysis tools: sequence discrepancy analysis
and the implicative statistic for analyzing sequences of typical states.
These tools enable us to scrutinize the degree, content, and timing of
differences in family trajectories between men and women of different
educational levels in the two sub-societies. In line with our
expectations, family life courses were more de-standardized in the West
compared to the East, and this occurred to the same extent for men and
women in both contexts. While we find moderate gender differences in
family life courses across all educational groups in the strong male
breadwinner context in West Germany, for East Germany gender differences
were significant among the medium and lower educated, but not among the
highly educated. These findings underline the fact that the
intersection of gender and education for family life courses is highly
context-specific. They further suggest that different patterns of
assortative mating play a key role for gender differences in family life
courses. We demonstrate the added value of sequence discrepancy
analysis and the implicative statistic to illuminate differences in
longitudinal life courses between men and women or other social groups.
Keywords
- Family life course;
- Gender;
- Education;
- East/West Germany;
- Sequence discrepancy analysis;
- Implicative statistic for sequences of typical states analysis
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
