Abstract
This study addresses the question of de-standardized life courses from a gender perspective. Multi-channel sequence analysis is used to characterise the domains of work, partnership and parenthood in combination across the adult life courses of three birth cohorts of British men and women between the ages of 16 and 42. Three research questions are addressed. First, we examine whether there is evidence of increasing between-person de-standardization (diversity) and within-person differentiation (complexity) in work and family life courses across cohorts during the main childrearing years. Second, we investigate whether men's and women's work–family life courses are converging over time. Finally, we assess the link between educational attainment and work–family life courses across cohorts. Data are from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development 1946 birth cohort (n = 3012), the National Child Development Study 1958 birth cohort (n = 9616), and the British Cohort Study 1970 birth cohort (n = 8158). We apply multi-channel sequence analysis to group individuals into twelve conceptually-based work–family life course types. We find evidence of growing between-person diversity, across cohorts, for both women and men. In addition, partnership trajectories are growing more complex for both genders, while parental biographies and women's work histories are becoming less so. Women's and men's work–family life courses are becoming increasingly similar as more women engage in continuous full-time employment; however, life courses involving part-time employment or a career break remain common for women in the most recent cohort. Continuous, full-time employment combined with minimal family ties up to age 42 emerged as the most common pattern for women and the second most common for men in the 1970 cohort.
Highlights
Like many countries, Great Britain has seen dramatic changes in the nature of work, family and the normative gender divisions between them over the past forty years
We investigate whether educational attainment is linked with work–family life courses characterised by stronger ties to employment and partnership alongside later transitions to parenthood, and whether this relationship is robust across cohorts
We investigated whether individual life courses became more complex within work and family domains using mean complexity indices for each gender–cohort group (Table 2)
Summary
This study uses three British birth cohorts, each born 12 years apart. The MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD, or 1946 birth cohort) is based on a sample of 5362 participants comprising all singleton births to married women with husbands in non-manual and agricultural employment, along with one in four (randomly selected) singleton births to women with husbands in manual employment births during a single week in 1946 in England, Scotland and Wales (Wadsworth, Kuh, Richards, & Hardy, 2006). Weights were used in analysis of the 1946 cohort data to account for this under-sampling of births to manual workers. These participants have been surveyed 23 times from birth to age 64 years. The second cohort used is the National Child Development Study (NCDS, or 1958 birth cohort), which aimed to recruit all babies born during a single week in England, Wales and Scotland in 1958 (n = 17,416, 98.8% of target) (Power & Elliott, 2006). The British Cohort Study (BCS, or 1970 cohort) comprises a sample of 16,571 (95.9% of target) babies born during a single week of 1970 in England, Wales and Scotland (Elliott & Shepherd, 2006). Participants were surveyed nine times from birth through 42 years
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