Education, employment, and care work over adulthood: gendered life course trajectories in Canada and Germany

ABSTRACT

This article compares the education, employment, and care work biographical sequences of Canadian and German women and men from late adolescence into mid-adulthood. Through the lenses of comparative gendered life course theory and welfare regime theory, sequence and cluster analyses are used to determine the adult life course sequences of women and men in each country and to assess the extent to which they differ across contexts. The analyses reveal clear gender differences in work–family balance in labour market participation and unpaid care work. Groups also differ strongly on educational attainment, income, and family composition. Comparatively, gender differences are less marked in the Canadian context. These results suggest that differing gendered trajectories result in diverse outcomes depending on the national context, shaping different outcomes for women cross-nationally. Our findings highlight how historical and contemporary country-specific welfare state policies support or hinder women as active and productive members of society.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-secondary education
• gender
• life course
• welfare regimes
• Canada/Germany

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

This research was approved by the UBC Behavioural Review of Ethics Board under Certificate number H15–02182.

Notes

1. The terms ‘tertiary’ and ‘post-secondary’ are used interchangeably in this article.

2. In Canada, self-reported median salary is before taxes and deductions. In Germany, self-reported median salary is after taxes and deductions.

3. In Canada, self-reported estimations of total household income before taxes and deductions are adjusted by the square root of household size. In Germany, total household income after taxes and deductions are adjusted by the square root of household size.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant number [435-2018-0097].

Notes on contributors

Janine Jongbloed

Janine Jongbloed is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada and a Researcher with the Institute for Research in the Sociology and Economics of Education (IREDU) in France. She holds a PhD from the University of Burgundy. Her research interests include the nonmarket effects of tertiary education; educational participation and patterns over the life course; and comparative studies of educational and welfare production regimes. She works with longitudinal projects in both France and Canada, including the 33-year Paths on Life’s Way mixed-methods survey research study in British Columbia.

Johanna Turgetto

Johanna Turgetto is a doctoral fellow and research assistant at the University of Potsdam. Her main field of interest is social inequality and its effects on health outcomes over the life course. Specifically, she is interested in the relationship between unequal social embeddedness, support systems, social cohesion and self-rated health, depression or overall wellbeing across time.

Lesley Andres

Lesley Andres is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the principal investigator of the Paths on Life’s Way Project, a unique Canadian longitudinal study that has combined extensive qualitative and quantitative data over a 33-year time frame to examine the lives, actions, experiences, and perspectives of individuals within a life course framework. This research focuses on educational, occupational, and other life course outcomes in relation to various forms of inequality. Her most recent books are Designing and Doing Survey Research (2012) and The Making of a Generation: Children of the 1970s in Adulthood (2010, co-authored with Johanna Wyn).

Wolfgang Lauterbach

Wolfgang Lauterbach is a Professor of Sociology specialising in life course research, sociology of education, and social inequality in the Faculty of Human Science, Department for Education at the University of Potsdam. He is the principal investigator of the LifE study (Pathways from Late Childhood to Adulthood), a unique German longitudinal study that examines the life courses of adolescents and adults over a period of 33 years to the age of 45 (1979–2012). His recent publications focus on gender- and SES-specific disparities in shadow education (Entrich and Lauterbach, 2021) and educational mobility and equal opportunity in different German tracking systems (Lauterbach and Fend, 2016).