Individual and couple level perspectives on male education and fertility in Europe at the start of the 21st century

The link between education and fertility has been a long-standing research interest in family demography, since education is considered an important indirect determinant of fertility behavior. Empirical evidence on the relationship between education and fertility, however, is mostly based on findings concerning women’s life courses. Fertility studies have disregarded the role of male partners and how the process of selecting a mate with given education-specific characteristics may affect fertility. This is a major drawback for at least two reasons. First, the majority of births occurs within unions. Second, women, and highly educated women in particular, tend to increasingly require men’s active involvement in household activities to engage in motherhood. As a result, the timing and number of children is not confined to the decision of one of the partners, but it depends on both partners, who increasingly become more equally involved in the process of parenthood. Using a multi-country design, this dissertation aims to fill these gaps by looking at two under-researched topics in the field of family demography: men’s and couple’s fertility. The dyadic articulation of the project is based on two fundamental research objectives: the first one is to uncover the role of men’s education in the transition to fatherhood and higher order births (Chapters 1 and 2), whereas the second one is to examine the role of the interaction between partners’ educational characteristics on fertility (Chapters 3 and 4). We argue that partnership formation in general, and educational assortative mating in particular, play a role in shaping fertility, both for women and men. The first part of the thesis shows that there is a consistent positive effect of men’s education on the transition to fatherhood, but it operates chiefly through selection into union. Failing to account for this selection process leads to a major underestimation of the salience of education for the transition to fatherhood. Moreover, we find that gender differences in the effect of education on fertility mainly show up with regard to the transition to parenthood. In contrast with predictions from micro-economic theories of the family, effects on higher order births appear to be more similar between genders: we find a positive effect of educational attainment on the transition to second birth but a negative effect of the earning potential indicated by the degree obtained, both for women and men. Overall, in line with the argument put forward in this thesis, a key variable to understand the results is partnership status along with partner’s education, which gives the motivation for the couple-level analyses that follow in the second part of the dissertation. Findings from the couple-level analyses suggest that traditional pairings, characterized by an imbalance of education and earning potential in favor of the man, are more conducive to fertility than non-traditional pairings, i.e., characterized by an imbalance of education and earning potential in favor of the woman. However, highly educated women partnered with highly educated men tend to have a higher second birth rate compared to highly educated women who partnered with a man lower educated than themselves. Next, we found that the presence of at least one highly educated partner lowers the rate of non-marital first births, relative to first childbearing within marriage. Strikingly, it does not matter whether it is he or she who has the highest level of education. Overall, these results highlight that the effect of men’s and women’s own education on fertility also depend on their partners’ education. This, eventually, will have consequences for the reproduction of societal inequalities given that fertility outcomes differ by patterns of educational assortative mating and across contexts. Future research should focus on the role of contextual factors in shaping the intersection between gender roles, education and fertility.status: publishe