FORMAZIONE DELLA FAMIGLIA, FECONDITA' E STRATIFICAZIONE SOCIALE NELL'ITALIA DAL DOPOGUERRA A OGGI

This work focuses on three issues: a) the impact of social position on family formation and fertility; b) the effect of marriage and parenthood on occupational career; c) the differences by social position in the impact of family behaviors on occupational career. By adopting a life-course perspective and studying individuals and couples, it combines two topics kept separated by previous research, connecting them with the traditional approaches of social stratification. The main aim is to study if and how family formation and fertility can explain social inequalities over the life course in Italy after the Second World War. After a historical reconstruction of demographic events in Italy and their connections with socio-economic characteristics, the main results from the first part show that high-educated people postpone family formation and only men are able to catch up with low educated in the long run, while high-educated women maintain lower probabilities of creating a family because of the persistence of opportunity costs all over the life course. Gender differences appear in the association between social position and higher order births too: having a tertiary degree decreases transition to third birth only among women. Moreover, by studying the couple it has been shown that while in the transition to the first child it is primarily the mother’s socio-economic characteristics that matter, the transitions to higher-order births are largely driven by men’s education. The second part of the work has confirmed that family formation is a crucial event to explain gender differences in labour supply, since it implies an immediate and temporary increase in the probability of being employed for men, whereas it strongly decreases employment opportunities for women, that remain permanently lower over the life course. Small effects of family behaviors have been found concerning what career opportunities, because of a low degree of intragenerational mobility and a high selection of women into employment. However, it has been shown that some disadvantages for mothers in occupational prestige appear around ten years after the birth of the first child, as a result of a block in their career. The last part of the research has shown that employment trajectories after motherhood are significantly different according to social position and the penalization over the life-course applies only to low-educated women. In a context of low career mobility and high selection of women into employment, finally, family formation slightly reduces social inequalities in occupational careers over the life course for women and slightly increase them for men. The work concludes with some policy suggestions to reduce gender and social inequalities in Italy.