Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2024

Von der genannten Lizenzangabe ausgenommen sind folgende Bestandteile dieser Dissertation:

Die Artikel "A Precarious Path to Partnership? The Moderating Effects of Labour Market Regulations on the Relationship Between Unstable Employment and Union Formation in Europe" (S. 62-118) und "How women’s employment instability affects birth transitions: The moderating role of family policies in 27 European countries" (S. 121-169) stehen unter der CC-Lizenz CC BY.
Lizenzvertrag: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Der Artikel "Parity-specific motherhood penalties: Long-term impacts of childbirth on women’s earnings in Japan"
(S. 219-275) steht unter der CC-Lizenz CC BY-NC-ND.
Lizenzvertrag: Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Women’s work and family life courses have experienced remarkable changes since the 1970s. Almost all developed countries across Europe, Northern America, and East Asia have to some extent experienced a delaying and declining trend of marriage and fertility. Meanwhile, with women’s increasing education and labour force participation, a gender revolution against the conventional male-breadwinning family model has placed women’s gainful employment at the center of household economics. Over the past few decades, population and family researchers across disciplines have been dedicated to exploring whether and how these two macro-level trends are coevolving, reinforcing, or inhibiting each other. In the centrality of this issue is to understand the micro-level relationship between women’s work and family behaviours. Specifically, it is crucial to examine how women’s working careers are affecting and being affected by family formation, including marriage or cohabiting union formation and childbirth. In this dissertation, I consider women’s family formation as a stepwise process consisting of three parts: (1) forming a partnership union (marriage or cohabitation), (2) the transition to motherhood, and (3) the post-motherhood life course. With a particular focus on the work-related causes and consequences of family formation, this dissertation covers the following three general questions. First, how women’s employment situations affect their transition to partnership union, including cohabitation and marriage? Second, how women’s employment situations affect their birth transitions? Third, how motherhood transitions affect women’s post-motherhood career outcomes? Building on these three general questions, I further investigate advanced topics regarding the institutional embeddedness of work-family relationship and their life course dynamics. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to systematically study the relationship between women’s work and family formation. Taking a holistic perspective, I study the employment-related causes and consequences of women’s family formation process including union formation, childbirth transitions, and post-motherhood life courses. Rather than conceptualizing the linkage between women’s work and family behaviours as a static, homogeneous relationship, I added an institutional and a longitudinal dimension to emphasize the contextual embeddedness and time dynamics of individual life courses. For women, work and family situations are both important factors triggering social stratification. Moreover, short-term disadvantages in these two dimensions could reinforce each other under certain conditions, which might result in cumulative disadvantages throughout individual life courses. Therefore, it is crucial for scholars and policymakers alike to better understand what are the contextual factors that could alleviate or intensify social inequalities emerging from the work-family relationship, and how these inequalities are cumulated over the life course.