Family background and women's changing life courses: a study on the roles of social reproduction, female role models and gender-neutrality in socialization

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Against the secular changes in women's life styles and life courses this project addresses the role of familial socialization for women's gender role attitudes, life course preferences, educational attainment as well as labour market and demographic behaviour. In line with standard models of social reproduction, the project intends to document the transmission of parental class and education via parental investment in daughters' human capital. Extending traditional analyses of intergenerational mobility, however, the project will have a particular focus on the role of mothers as both behavioural and normative role models. With respect to the former, the project will evaluate the impact of maternal education, but expands on more conventional analyses by also incorporating indicators of mothers' labour market and demographic behaviour, notably the intensity and persistence of mothers' labour supply, the timing of marriage and family formation as well as the number of children. In addition, the empirical analysis will seek to determine mothers' role as normative role models by addressing the extent of the intergenerational transmission of gender role attitudes, work-life preferences and related orientations; importantly, since there will typically be a larger discrepancy between preferences and behaviour in the maternal generation, this normative transmission channel might contribute significantly to our understanding of the socially stratified change in women's life styles and life courses. Naturally, the project will also address processes of true change towards more gender-neutral socialization and life course patterns, i.e. changes in transmission processes unaccounted for by compositional effects of either educational expansion or mothers' latent attitudes, which may have come to increasingly reach into the middle classes. Overall, the project will mostly rely on secondary data from the German Socio-Economic Panel in its empirical work, complemented by data from the ALLBUS and the German Life History Study. The statistical analyses will utilize state-of-the-art regression modelling for cross-sectional and panel data, including the use of family fixed-effects specifications in the analysis of gender neutrality of family socialization and life courses.