Homogamy in Gender Role Attitudes Among Young Couples: Evidence from Germany

Ansgar Hudde

doi:10.1007/s11577-020-00711-1

Abstract

Romantic partners’ similarity in gender role attitudes affects important outcomes such as sharing of housework, relationship stability, or fertility. However, there is little knowledge about how similar romantic partners are in these attitudes. Using dyadic panel data from German couples (sourced from pairfam), this study puts the degree of homogamy in gender role attitudes among young couples into perspective by comparing real couples with two types of counterfactuals. To create these counterfactuals, I re-mate couples in two ways: (a) randomly and (b) in such a way that similarity in attitudes between partners is maximized. Real couples differ only slightly from randomly mated couples, which suggests rather weak attitudinal similarity. Using longitudinal information, I further test the mechanisms that determine the degree of homogamy: there is strong evidence for alignment over time and for lower rates of separation among homogamous couples, but no evidence for homogamy as a by-product of assortative mating on other variables. This paper offers methodological and substantial contributions to the literature: it presents a method for intuitive assessment of the degree of homogamy with multiple variables simultaneously. It also shows that in Germany, macro-level diversity in attitudes largely translates into dissimilar attitudes between partners—with important implications for relationship dynamics.

Highlights

There are good reasons why people might want to choose a romantic partner who has similar gender role attitudes
Using dyadic panel data from German couples, this study puts the degree of homogamy in gender role attitudes among young couples into perspective by comparing real couples with two types of counterfactuals
These results suggest that studying partner similarity in gender role attitudes is central to understanding variation in important relationship processes such as sharing of housework, fertility or relationship separation; to my knowledge, there is no study that provides an understanding of the degree of partner similarity in gender role attitudes

Summary

Introduction

There are good reasons why people might want to choose a romantic partner who has similar gender role attitudes. Such attitudes have a direct impact on the everyday life of couples and families: if partners have different views on whether housework, paid work, or childcare should be done by women, men, or both it will likely incite conflict (Kalmijn 2005). There are good reasons why people might not choose a partner with similar attitudes. Similarity in gender role attitudes has an effect on the everyday-life of couples and the sharing of paid work and childcare (Nitsche and Grunow 2018)

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Conclusion