The variability of age at first marriage across birth cohort and education level: the case of Taiwan

ABSTRACT

The variability of age at first marriage has implications for the destandardisation of life course and the deinstitutionalisation of the marriage institution. Previous studies, based on Western societies, suggest a more dispersed variability in recent cohorts. However, despite the rise in women’s education, the universal ideology of formal marriage, the powerful link between formal marriage and childbearing, and collectivism in East Asian societies may constrain variability in marriage timing. Also, women with different levels of education experience different life course sequences and interactions with marriage, leading to heterogeneous changes in the variability of age at first marriage. Using the Women’s Marriage, Fertility, and Employment Survey in Taiwan, this article presents a representative case of changing marriage and childbearing behaviours in East Asia. Our results show that the variability among women without a high school degree has become more dispersed in more recent birth cohorts. In contrast, variability of age at first marriage among highly educated women has remained consistent. The educational differences became more salient in recent cohorts, especially in women born after 1960. Our findings contribute to the literature on how the life course and the institution of marriage have diverged across education levels over birth cohorts in East Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Variability of age
• first marriage
• life course
• Taiwan
• East Asia

Acknowledgements

This study was presented at the 2021 Population Association of America (PAA) annual meeting. We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments and support from the attendees at the meeting and the faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. We also appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The information of the percentage of agricultural population and the population in service industries in 1953 is derived from Yu and Wang (2009); The information in 2017 is derived from the Council of Agriculture and the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics, Taiwan; see: https://agrstat.coa.gov.tw/sdweb/public/book/Book.aspx and https://www.dgbas.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=42616&ctNode=3102.

2 Derived from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan; for more detailed information, please see the website: https://english.moe.gov.tw/cp-28-14508-95005-1.html.

3 The figures from the Taiwan Social Change Survey and International Social Survey Programme data are estimated by the authors.

4 Derived from the Minister of Interior, Taiwan (source: https://www.moi.gov.tw/stat/node.aspx?sn=6826&Page=1).

5 According to the Minister of Interior, the percentage of out-of-wedlock birth is only about 4.8 per cent in 2017, whereas the figure in the United States is 39.8 per cent in 2016 (the U.S. data is derived from the World Bank).

6 The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics is charged with the national census, nationally representative surveys, and the budgeting affairs of the government. See: https://eng.dgbas.gov.tw/np.asp?ctNode=1483&mp=2.

7 In the sample without information about age at first marriage, 8,269 (99.63 per cent) are never married.

8 Code to perform the statistical analysis in this paper is available at: https://osf.io/5fytc/

9 Given that the data was adjusted by the weight generated froma complex sampling design,we adopted the Wald test to conduct bivariate analysis, instead of adopting conventional ANOVA (Heeringa et al., 2010).

10 We estimated from the data from Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) that 90.74 per cent of wives did not change their education level after the timing of marriage.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academia Sinica.