Social Diversity in Non-Marital Childbearing in Various Gender Contexts

Trude Lappegård, Statistics Norway
Nicole Hiekel, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)

The increase in non-marital childbearing over the last decades is one of the major changes in family behavior in developed societies. But as a non-marital birth could both be an expression of the freedom of choice not to marry as well as of the constraint not being able to marry, the degree to which non-marital born children are at a social disadvantage might differ across countries and social-background groups. Our study aims to improve our understanding how variation in gender equality across countries may be related to the likeliness of non-marital childbearing in different social strata. For this we apply multi-level models on survey data from the Generation and Gender Programme covering 16 European countries over the last decades. We investigate how national-level spatiotemporal variation in gender aspects are related to the likeliness of first and higher-order births in different relationship types (singlehood, cohabitation and marriage) across social strata.