Gender, Social Inequality, and Family Formation in West Germany

Abstract

Abstract Union formation, marriage, and childbearing have been treated in the demographic literature mostly as events in their own right and approached from the perspective of the woman (Hogan 1985). This strategy was prompted initially by the kind of census data available and the corresponding methods of quantitative demography. Recent research has broadened the contexts within which family events take place and has thus re-linked demography with economics and sociology. On the one hand, causal models inspired by microeconomics have brought the situation of the household and a variety of other situational factors into play. On the other hand, the proliferating surveys on family formation (for an overview, see Huinink 1990) have added a great number of explanatory variables, often without explicit theoretical rationale. In this chapter we make a conceptual and empirical attempt to place union formation and childbearing within a framework that combines the perspective of life course dynamics (Mayer and Huinink 1990) and social stratification, giving specific emphasis to differences between men and women. Comparing various birth cohorts, we focus on historical rearrangements of these dynam¬ ics. In particular, we examine how the socio-economic background of the parental family and the influences of participation in education and in the labour force have changed the process of family formation for men and women. The social and historical setting we have chosen for both our theory building and the empirical analysis is that of West Germany.

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