Education, Work, and Family Events in Women's Lives

Long-Term Developments and Recent Trends in East and West Germany

Gwendolin Josephine Blossfeld

• Publisher: Budrich Academic Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783966650472
• eBook ISBN: 9783966659383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

This book investigates how educational expansion, the trend towards theservice society and the German unification affect East and West Germanwomen's life courses and family lives. It focuses on educational enrolment, educational attainment level, labour force participation, career resources, social origin, the educational match among partners as well as historicalperiods and examines their consequences on women's entry into first motherhoodas well as partnership formation and dissolution processes. Usinglongitudinal data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), multivariatemethods such as event history analysis were applied. The findingssuggest that women's entry into motherhood during full-time educationis highly dependent on women's age, social origin and the policy measuresin a country.

[15] 1 Introduction

Today, an individual’s life course consists of several domains such as education, family, and work. These domains are interlinked dynamically and embedded in a nationally specific institutional and historical context. Important life course decisions are often not taken in isolation, but are part of a more complex interdependence of developments in several life domains (Mayer 1990; Willekens 1999). Status changes in one of these life domains and changes in historical macroprocesses may initiate, delay, enable, accelerate, or even prevent status changes in a life domain of interest. In life course research, these status changes are called events (Mayer/Tuma 1990). Family life events are central to the lives of individuals and, in particular, to the life cycle of women. For example, a family event can be becoming a parent, getting married, or having a divorce. In this study, I focus on East and West German women’s family events over the life course depending on their educational participation and labor force experience over longer historical periods before and after German unification.

In recent decades, the dynamics of family life have undergone remarkable changes in modern societies. These changes can be described by demographic transformations such as declining fertility, rising ages at first birth and first marriage, as well as changing divorce rates (Calot 1998; Frejka/Calot 2001a, 2001b). They are closely connected with structural macro-developments such as educational expansion (Blossfeld/Blossfeld/Blossfeld 2016) and the trend toward a service economy (Becker/Blossfeld 2021). Moreover, they are associated with unprecedented shifts in the social norms and values defining the employment and family roles of men and women in advanced industrial societies (Beck/Beck-Gernsheim 1994; Giddens 1997; Grunow/Aisenbrey /Evertsson 2011; Lesthaeghe/Surkyn 1988; Mayer/Huinink 1990). In addition to these more general trends, Germany has experienced a unique development through its separation into a socialist and a capitalist state after World War II and the long-term process of German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These specific historical events have resulted in unusual turbulences and unexpected continuities in the transformation of life courses, particularly in East Germany (Diewald/Goedicke/Mayer 2006a; Mayer 1990).

An important change for family events has been the educational expansion and the attendant lengthening of the time spent in education (Mayer, 1990). Over successive generations, the educational attainment level, particularly of women, has risen significantly (Blossfeld/Blossfeld/Blossfeld 2015; Breen et al. 2009; Breen et al. 2010; Shavit/Blossfeld 1993). In Germany, young women have now even surpassed young men among upper secondary school graduates (Abitur) and university freshmen (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018). In addition to women’s higher educational [16] investments, there has been a marked trend toward upskilling and tertiarization of the occupational structure (Gallie 1998; Solga/Mayer 2008; Becker/Blossfeld 2021). Taken together, these changes have not only increased female labor force participation but also provided better career opportunities for women across birth cohorts. Thus, younger women have not only higher educational attainment levels and increasing rates of participation in paid work but also higher quality jobs than their mothers and grandmothers (Mayer 1990; Mayer/Huinink 1990).

From a life course perspective, increasing educational attainment across birth cohorts is connected not only with a gradual extension of educational participation for young qualified adults but also with a growing conflict between full-time educational activities and women’s family roles. Thus, increasing educational participation is expected to delay women’s entry into first marriage and first birth, particularly for highly qualified women. In addition, women’s increasing educational investments are assumed to be associated with a higher female labor force participation and, in the German normative and institutional context, with severe problems in balancing family and professional responsibilities (Grunow 2013). Of course, there have been great differences between the lives of East and West German women, because the socialist state in East Germany supported women’s full-time employment and provided extensive child care, whereas the West German welfare state privileged the more traditional “male breadwinner marriage” and the marriage of a “male breadwinner with a female secondary earner” through tax incentives and only moderate child care provision (Obertreis 1986; Trappe 1995; Trappe/Rosenfeld 2000). After German unification, the West German institutional structure was introduced in East Germany, but these different female life course models seem to be converging only very slowly (Diewald/Goedicke/Mayer 2006a).

There are many life course studies analyzing these changing relationships between education, labor force participation, and family events from the 1980s to the early 2000s. However, what is clearly missing is an analysis of the most recent developments. Data from the German “National Educational Panel Study” (NEPS) make it possible to analyze not only longer time spans before and after unification in East and West Germany but also the most recent developments in unified Germany.

To introduce the topic and research questions of this book, I have structured this chapter as follows. Section 1.1 introduces the aims of the book and section 1.2 gives an outline of its structure. Section 1.3 provides an overview of the life course perspective and its five general principles. Section 1.4 relates longterm historical developments in the roles of women in Germany, their particular changes in the socialist East and the capitalist West, as well as the developments after German unification to the following three family outcomes: first motherhood, first cohabitation and marriage, as well as first divorce. Sections 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 give an overview of the advantages of the longitudinal [17] approach that this book adopts, and describe the properties of the data from the NEPS sample in this analysis along with the longitudinal methods applied.

1.1 Contributions of the Book

The overall aim of this book is to make significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the growing literature on the field of family sociology more generally and on the interdependence of education, work, and family events in women’s life courses in Germany in particular. It makes seven innovative descriptive and analytical contributions.

First, the literature on Germany today reveals no comprehensive long-term historical description of the specificities of family development in Germany over the last two centuries that also embraces the most recent changes after German unification while comparing different family events such as union formation processes, fertility behavior, and divorce in East and West Germany. I therefore describe in detail the long-term developments and the most recent trends in family formation and dissolution processes in East and West Germany.

Second, there is also no long-term descriptive analysis of the sequences of partnership states and their relationship to fertility events over the early life course of women in successive birth cohorts in East and West Germany. Using novel longitudinal data from the NEPS, I therefore follow up women’s sequences of different partnership states over the early life course across birth cohorts in not only East and West Germany but also Germany as a whole. I also describe the change in the timing of entry into marriage over the life course for different birth cohorts in both parts of the country. Finally, I focus on women’s partnership status at first birth and the proportion of childless women across successive birth cohorts in East and West Germany.

Third, previous research on Germany has focused on women’s entry into marriage (Strohmeier 1993; Wagner/Franzmann 2000), and there have been only very few attempts using longitudinal data to analyze competing forms of living arrangements such as first cohabitation and first marriage in East and West Germany (Brüderl 2004; Nazio 2008). As I shall show in section 1.4, both Germanys experienced an increase in the age at first marriage along with a decline in marriage rates. Despite this delay in entry into marriage, young adults have continued to set up households with partners (Konietzka/Kreyenfeld 2005; Nazio 2008). In fact, there has been a rapid rise in cohabitation, especially for young couples. Therefore, I study the impact of place and time, macrostructural insecurity, education, and the birth of children on single women’s entry into first cohabitation or first marriage as competing events in East and West Germany.

[18] Fourth, very little is known about the extent to which cohabitations are transformed into marriages in the later life course in East and West Germany. Therefore, I examine differences in the duration of cohabitation and study the effects of various life course constellations on the transition from cohabitation to marriage in East and West Germany. Usually, the literature distinguishes two different meanings of cohabitation (Manting 1996; Mills 2000; Kiernan 2000; Wu 2000): (1) cohabitation as a trial arrangement or a stage in the marriage process, and (2) cohabitation as a more or less permanent alternative to marriage. In East and West Germany, the diffusion of cohabitation has been very similar. Nevertheless, in the literature, the socialist and capitalist German regimes are often supposed to have a different impact on the meaning of cohabitation (Höhn/Memmey/Wendt 1990). In the FRG, cohabitation has always merely been a stage in the marriage process until children are expected, so that the great majority of children are born within a marriage (Nave-Herz 2006; Simm 1991; Tölke 1993; Vaskovics/Rupp 1995). As a result, West Germany is characterized by a high proportion of couples who decide to enter into a marriage during pregnancy (Blossfeld/Mills 2001). In contrast, the GDR offered generous financial and institutional support to single and cohabiting mothers, so that more and more young couples decided to opt for cohabitation rather than marriage (Gysi 1989; Höhn/Memmey/Wendt 1990). As a result, parenting depended less on marriage in the former GDR. Therefore, this book studies how far the meaning of cohabitation did indeed differ in East and West Germany before German unification and how this meaning has changed in both parts of Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall—particularly in relation to the birth of children.

Fifth, previous research has analyzed women’s educational assortative mating mainly with regard to entry into marriage (Blossfeld 2009; Blossfeld/Timm 2003; Schwartz/Mare 2005; Wirth 2000; Teckenberg 2000; Klein 1996; Teckenberg 1991; Wirth 1996). An analysis of women’s educational assortative mating with regard to entry into cohabitation is lacking. Furthermore, there has been no research on the effects of mothers’ role models on daughters’ union formation processes. Because mothers might act as role models for their daughters, this will increase the likelihood that their daughters will also adopt a similar role as their mothers within their own partnership (Rosenthal 1985; Beaman et al. 2012). Farré and Vella (2013) have found that mothers with less traditional views on the role of women in society are more likely to have daughters without these traditional views. In other words, if mothers live less traditionally, their daughters are also very likely to do the same. In this book, I therefore examine the impact of the mother’s role model on the daughter’s educational assortative mating. I distinguish three educational matches for the partnerships of the two generations: (1) the female has a higher education than the male partner, (2) the female has the same education as the male partner, and (3) the female has a lower education than the male partner.

[19] Sixth, through the process of educational expansion, a rising number of young women are participating increasingly longer in the educational system across cohorts (Huinink/Wagner 1995; Blossfeld/Blossfeld/Blossfeld 2020). Life course studies indicate that normative sequences exist with regard to various life course transitions such as women should first finish school before starting their own family. In order to satisfy this sequencing norm, young women will therefore postpone their entry into motherhood until they have completed their education (Hogan 1978; Marini 1984; Settersten Jr./Mayer 1997). However, if young women postpone motherhood because they are still enrolled in education, they might come under pressure, because there also exist normative expectations regarding the timing of motherhood (Hogan 1978; Yamaguchi 1991). Some female students may consider the violation of the sequencing norm as less undesirable than the violation of the age norm, and therefore have their first child while still participating in full-time education. The decision to have a first child while in education depends primarily on the degree to which motherhood disrupts educational success. In the mid-1970s, the GDR introduced significant pronatalist family measures to reduce the conflict between full-time education and motherhood and increase the fertility level. For example, mothers in education had privileged housing access, were offered daylong free child care, and received additional financial benefits. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these kinds of pronatalist policies were abolished abruptly. In the Eastern part of Germany, this suddenly increased the conflict between educational participation and motherhood for young women. In this book, I conduct a difference-in-differences analysis of the effects of changing state support for mothers in education before and after unification in East Germany and compare these changes with developments in West Germany. The aim of this analysis is to study whether pronatalist policies can indeed increase the fertility of women who are in full-time education. I also conduct a more specific longitudinal analysis to determine whether the outcome of the difference-in-differences analysis represents the consequence of a specific policy change in the transition from the GDR to the united Germany for woman enrolled in education and not the more general changes in society as a whole connected with German unification.

Seventh, with increasing educational investments in the course of the educational expansion, women’s labor force participation over the life course has risen strongly, and women in East and West Germany are also increasingly able to turn their educational investments into career gains. Because women in Germany, and particularly in West Germany, are n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Living Arrangements and the Birth of a First Child in the Early Life Course: A Description Based on NEPS
• 3 Entry Into First Cohabitation or First Marriage: A Longitudinal Analysis
• 4 Transition From Cohabitation to Marriage: Does the Meaning of Cohabitation Differ in East and West Germany?
• 5 Educational Homophily, Educational Homogamy, and the Impact of Mothers’ Role Models on Daughters’ Cohabitation and Marriage
• 6 What Influences the Rate of Entry Into First Motherhood for Women Enrolled in Full-Time Education?
• 7 How Do Women’s Educational Enrolment, Educational Attainment Level, Labor Force Participation, and Career Advancement Affect the Rate of Entry Into First Motherhood?
• 8 Educational Assortative Mating and Divorce
• 9 Conclusion
• 10 References
• Annotations
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