Events

Although women often have the same or higher levels of education than their partners today, many continue to experience greater employment and income losses after the birth of a child. This points to the relevance of factors beyond the level of education. Here, we analyze differences in partners’ fields of education, and address how they shape child-related career costs. Education fields remain highly gender-segregated. They shape individuals’ skill sets and differ in their ascribed status. Exploiting Finnish register data covering the years 1987-2023, we use an event study approach to compare men’s and women’s labor market outcomes before and after the birth of their first child (N=6,155,536). Drawing on detailed information on couples, we calculate an index of the proportion of men in each partner’s education field to capture gender polarization. This allows us to differentiate between traditional, typical, and egalitarian couples. Our findings reveal that women experience a stark drop in earnings after the birth of the first child, regardless of couple type. However, over time women’s earnings remain persistently lower in traditional couples – those where he completed a male-dominated education field and she a female-dominated education field.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Jan O Jonsson, Ridhi Kashyap, Colin Mills and Christiaan Monden. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.