Educational Disparities in Couples and the Transition to Parenthood during the Fertility Decline of the 2010s

Glenn Sandstrom, Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR), Umeå University
Gunnar Andersson , Stockholm University Demography Unit

This study examines how the educational composition of co-residential unions in Sweden relates to first birth transitions during 2011-2022, with a focus on the role of educational heterogamy in transitions to parenthood. This focus is motivated by parallel developments in both Sweden and many other Western countries since 2010 where fertility has dropped sharply at the same time as women’s education has continued to outpace men’s. We first assess changes in the prevalence of heterogamous unions during the 2010s, then analyze how different educational pairings are related to first birth risks. Our findings show a decline in the prevalence of new unions where the man have higher educational attainment than the woman and a rise in homogamous unions with two highly educated partners. Unions involving highly educated women—whether homogamous or heterogamous—consistently exhibit higher first birth rates than unions with other educational pairings. Notably, unions where the woman is more educated than her partner have retained higher fertility more so than other parings, a trend that strengthened over time. Our results suggest that higher educational attainment of women is increasingly associated with higher fertility, a trend that has attenuated the trend of a general decline in first-birth risks during the 2010s. Rather than contributing to falling fertility, the shifts in educational pairings have helped mitigate the fertility decline.

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 Presented in Session 83. Fertility, Education and Employment