Couples’ Education Fields and Child-Related Career Costs

Abstract

Although women today often have the same or higher levels of education than their partners, 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 couples’ child-related career costs. Education fields remain highly gender-segregated. They shape individuals’ skill sets and differ in their ascribed social status. Exploiting Finnish register data covering the years 1987-2023, we use an event study approach to compare couples’ labor market outcomes before and after the birth of their first child (N=244,745). Drawing on detailed information on couples, we calculate an index of the proportion of men in each partner’s education field, which allows us to differentiate between conventional and gender atypical couples. Our findings reveal that conventional couples – where he is in an education field with a considerably greater share of men than she is – experience a starker drop in earnings after the birth of the first child than gender atypical couples – where he is in an education field with a lower share of men than she is. However, all couples experience an earnings decrease related to entry into parenthood qualifying ideas that couples effectively specialize. This drop is driven by women experiencing a greater earnings drop in conventional couples as men’s earnings do not change around entry into parenthood, even in gender atypical couples.

Speaker

Rosa Weber is a researcher and Principal Investigator of the Segregation Across Domains project at Stockholm University (awarded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare or FORTE), which assesses workplace and neighbourhood segregation using Swedish register data. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies within the 3GEN project and conducted an international postdoc project (awarded by FORTE). Her research interests lie in social stratification, ethnic inequalities, and international migration.