Life-course trajectories of childless women: Country-specific or universal?

Valentina Tocchioni (valentina.tocchioni@unifi.it), Anna Rybińska, Monika Mynarska, Anna Matysiak and Daniele Vignoli (daniele.vignoli@unifi.it)
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Daniele Vignoli: Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni "G. Parenti", Università di Firenze, https://www.disia.unifi.it

No 2021_01, Econometrics Working Papers Archive from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni "G. Parenti"

Abstract: While existing research has documented complexities in the life-courses of childless women, few studies to date have systematically examined the life-course pathways of the childless from a comparative, cross-country perspective. In this paper, we analyse biographies of childless women in four countries – Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States – in order to investigate whether pathways into childlessness are country-specific or commonly shared across institutional, cultural, and geographical settings. Partnership, education, and employment histories are examined using sequence analysis with dynamic Hamming distance to reveal distinct clusters of life-course trajectories in each country. The results highlight a marked variation in the life-courses of childless women both within and between the analysed countries. Although a few typical clusters can be identified in all of the examined settings, the size of the clusters, as well as the socio-demographic characteristics of women within them, differ across countries.

Keywords: childless women; life-course; sequence analysis; discrepancy analysis; cluster analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
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https://labdisia.disia.unifi.it/wp_disia/2021/wp_disia_2021_01.pdf First version, 2021-01 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Life-Course Trajectories of Childless Women: Country-Specific or Universal? (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fir:econom:wp2021_01

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