Final Report Summary - GENDERBALL (Implications of the Shifting Gender Balance in Education for Reproductive Behaviour in Europe)
While men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed to women’s advantage in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. The GENDERBALL project has investigated how the reversal of the gender gap in education has affected marriage and unmarried cohabitation, assortative mating, the division of paid and unpaid work, fertility, and union stability in Europe.
While husbands tended to be at least as highly educated as their wives in the past, and wives at most equally educated as their husbands, this situation has reversed also on the couple level. First, we found that if there is a difference between his and her level of education, the wife tends to have the higher degree in recent cohorts of cohabiting or married Europeans. Contrary to what has been expected, the reversal of the gender gap in education has not made highly educated women more likely to remain single. Rather, it is low educated women who are more at risk to stay without a partner. Second, again contrary to what has been expected, we have no evidence that couples in which the wife has a higher educational degree than the husband would be more unstable than couples in which the husband has the higher degree. Third, despite the remaining gender pay gap and despite the fact that women, not men, tend to diminish their labour market activity and earnings in case of parenthood, we found that the reversal of the gender gap in education is associated with a growing share of couples in which she in the main earner. The bonus in relative earnings for women compared to their male partners is so large that it partly can compensate the continuing motherhood penalty on women’s relative earnings. Finally, and again contrary to earlier expectations, we do not find evidence that fertility is lower when the wife has more education than the husband, compared to the more traditional situation where the husband obtained the highest degree in education.
All in all, the findings from the GENDERBALL project imply that conventional theories that have informed family demography and sociology need major revisions in order to make better predictions about the future of family life in Europe. We developed and applied agent-based computational models as a tool to help theory building in a precise but flexible way. Next, we have applied multi-process event history modelling as a statistical technique to better test our predictions with empirical data.
While husbands tended to be at least as highly educated as their wives in the past, and wives at most equally educated as their husbands, this situation has reversed also on the couple level. First, we found that if there is a difference between his and her level of education, the wife tends to have the higher degree in recent cohorts of cohabiting or married Europeans. Contrary to what has been expected, the reversal of the gender gap in education has not made highly educated women more likely to remain single. Rather, it is low educated women who are more at risk to stay without a partner. Second, again contrary to what has been expected, we have no evidence that couples in which the wife has a higher educational degree than the husband would be more unstable than couples in which the husband has the higher degree. Third, despite the remaining gender pay gap and despite the fact that women, not men, tend to diminish their labour market activity and earnings in case of parenthood, we found that the reversal of the gender gap in education is associated with a growing share of couples in which she in the main earner. The bonus in relative earnings for women compared to their male partners is so large that it partly can compensate the continuing motherhood penalty on women’s relative earnings. Finally, and again contrary to earlier expectations, we do not find evidence that fertility is lower when the wife has more education than the husband, compared to the more traditional situation where the husband obtained the highest degree in education.
All in all, the findings from the GENDERBALL project imply that conventional theories that have informed family demography and sociology need major revisions in order to make better predictions about the future of family life in Europe. We developed and applied agent-based computational models as a tool to help theory building in a precise but flexible way. Next, we have applied multi-process event history modelling as a statistical technique to better test our predictions with empirical data.