Family formation and social inequalities : A life course perspective

This chapter studies the processes of family formation and its contribution to increasing social inequalities, adopting a life course perspective. It asks (a) if the birth of the first child has different consequences on occupational careers of individuals from different social origins, net of their own education, and (b) if it can increase those advantages or disadvantages already shaped by social origins. The chapter aims at integrating a dimension related to family formation (i.e. first parenthood), usually investigated by demographers and family sociologists, into the so-called O-E-D triangle, traditionally used in the social stratification and mobility literature to study the reproduction of social inequalities. Our findings – based on fixed-effects panel models estimated on Italian data (Multipurpose Survey, 2009) – show that family formation does not affect social inequalities among men, whereas it contributes to (re)produce inequalities among women. Women from low socio-economic background are placed in worse occupational positions already at labour market entry and their long-term careers are negatively affected by the birth of a child, making occupational differences with respect to women from high social origins get larger over the life course, especially because the latter are less penalised by parenthood. Therefore, the birth of the first child – and, to a greater extent, of further children – contributes to a sort of accumulation of disadvantages for women from low socio-economic background over the life course, who are not only penalised in occupational attainment at the beginning of careers, but are further penalised by their family behaviours.