Germany’s High Childlessness in an International Context: Studies on Gender Role Attitudes and the Transition to Parenthood

Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2019

This dissertation builds upon the work by Esping-Andersen and Billari (2015) to specify and test a mechanism that links gender relations with fertility outcomes. I argue that childlessness is more common in societies where people with very different gender role attitudes live side by side. The more heterogeneous the attitudes in a society, the greater number of couples with partners holding dissimilar views. Couples with dissimilar views are less likely to start families and have children, because they experience or anticipate role conflicts. Gender role attitudes are “beliefs about the appropriate role activities for women and men” (McHugh and Frieze, 1997, p. 4) in various life spheres, such as work and family. The three chapters of this dissertation test three parts of the framework: (1) whether macro-level heterogeneity in gender role attitudes is associated with individual final childless- ness, (2) whether macro-level heterogeneity in attitudes translates to the couple level and produces many couples with dissimilar attitudes, and (3) whether partners with dissimilar attitudes are less likely to have a first child together, compared to partners with similar views.
The first paper analyses cross-sectional individual data from 38 countries; the second and third paper analyse dyadic panel-data from German couples. Germany is a very relevant case for the study of fertility and childlessness for several reasons.