Rising Rates of Cohabitation and the Odds of Repartnering: Does the Gap Between Men and Women Disappear?

ABSTRACT

Men are more likely to repartner than women. This pattern might reflect gender disparities in barriers to repartnering. When rates of cohabitation increase, the gender disparity might shrink, as cohabitation is a less institutionalized form of coresidential partnership and therefore has lower entry barriers in comparison to marriage. Using event-history models applied to Czech data from the Generations and Gender Survey, we show that the odds of repartnering were indeed higher among men than among women in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No significant change in the gender effect, however, was found. Similarly, the analysis revealed no change in the effect of gender on the odds of entering cohabitation rather than marriage.

KEYWORDS:

• Cohabitation
• divorce
• gender gap
• remarriage
• repartnering

Funding

This research received financial support from the Czech Science Foundation (Grant Number GB14-36154G, project “Dynamics of Change in Czech Society”).

Notes

¹ Hoem and Kostova (2008) reasoned as follows: “There is general inaccuracy in the reporting of starting dates of non-marital unions in Europe (like elsewhere). So we count a union as a direct marriage even if the respondent reported the start of a non-marital union in the same month as the marriage, or 1 month earlier” (p. 4). Šťastná and Paloncyová (2011) defined direct marriage as marriage preceding cohabitation or as marriage within 3 months of cohabiting; they, however, did not offer any explanation for their choice (see p. 19).

² This indicates either some deviation from the representativity of the sample, or rather the systematic misreporting of retrospective partnership histories. Although similar issues have been identified in other countries as well (see, e.g., Kreyenfeld, Hornung, & Kubisch, 2013), it is unclear if associations between variables are biased as a result.

³ Logistic regression models are rather robust analytical techniques and do not have any particular prerequisites that should be tested prior to using them (Allison, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This research received financial support from the Czech Science Foundation (Grant Number GB14-36154G, project “Dynamics of Change in Czech Society”).