Objectives. In our paper, we analyze the association between couples’ relative education and their respective working arrangements in Germany. Theoretically, we draw on two competing perspectives of the effects of education.

On the one hand, education indicates one’s level of resources on the labor market. Thus, the partner with the higher earnings potential is expected to spend more time on the labor market than his partner. Couples with equal educational achievements are expected to share their weekly working hours equally.

On the other hand, education represents the extent of approval to gender egalitarianism. Hence, we hypothesize that higher educated couples show a higher propensity and potential of equality.

Recent research has provided clues for the latter model in other spheres of daily life, questioning the symmetrical approach of the resource perspective.

Method. We use data from the German Microcensus of 2013 to test both models for the case of couples’ employment patterns. Our population of interest contains approximately 70,000 heterosexual German couples (unweighted). We map women's and men's total working hours for each educational constellation.

Results. First regression analyses yield evidence for both theoretical perspectives. The analyses indicate that homogamous couples on a high educational level are more likely to tend to an egalitarian division of paid work than homogamous couples with lower educational attainments (preliminary results).

Conclusions. The paper concludes with discussing the results in the light of changing inequalities in society and sheds a light on possible policy conclusions.

When analyzing the evolution of gender inequalities in household labor division two conflicting approaches are often evidenced: on the one hand, the reduction of the gender gap ("gender convergence" view); on the other, the persistence of inequality ("stalled revolution" view). Currently, most analyses accept the progression towards equality but highlight its limits. In what sense and why gender inequalities in household labor division are decreasing? In order to answer this question, we will present a regression analysis of data on time-distribution of daily activities. This data has been produced through Time-Use Surveys carried out by the Basque Statistics Institute-Eustat every five years (1993-2013) in the region of the Basque Country (Spain) to a sample of 5,000 individuals. The main results show the following trends: 1) it is greater the decrease on time spent by women than the increase of time devoted by men; 2) women are still responsible for most of the core housework; 3) inequalities on care work persist since women and men dedicate more time to these activities nowadays than twenty years ago; and 4) the variables that better explain the dedication to unpaid work are participation in the labor market, educational level and marital status, although their influences are not equivalent on domestic work and care, either for men or women. The results are interpreted under the aegis of three theories that explain the dedication to household labor: time availability, relative resources and gender effect (doing gender).

The engineering profession in Germany is suspected to be traditional, especially with regards to the attribution of gender roles and constructions of career, family and parenthood. Hence the author asks about the processes of construction of parenthood using the example of engineers and explains the effects of their traditional bourgeois professional culture and habitus on the roles and ideas of family and their expectations concerning parenting.

These research questions were investigated by a method mix of qualitative content analysis, biographical method and discourse in a Grounded Theory framework with narrative interviews conducted with engineers in Germany. Main findings are how the professional culture and habitus of engineering structure models of family and parenthood. The results show the choice of career and study subject can be considered a key-factor in biographies to the construction of their professional identity. Based on these decision processes they construct parenting in the context of their employment history, which they maintained the separation of work and family life in a private and public sphere because of their professional habitus and therefore perpetuated the bourgeois gender order. Going on from these findings, the question of generalisation has to be proposed and how these particular experiences can be seen in a wider social context. Furthermore, the repelling or moderating function of families (among German engineers) in regards of societal change processes is in the focus of the presentation.

For Germany, more than 40 percent of all first-time employees enter the labor market based on a fixed-term contract. Although chances for transition into an open end contract during later career-stages are good it is reasonable to assume that working under a fixed-term contract during these formative years severely affects young adults’ life-plans and may delay the consolidation of intimate relationships.

Previous research on the impact of fixed-term employment on intimate relationships is largely limited to family formation. This presentation addresses the question to what extent different degrees of labor market inclusion – being still in education, working under fixed-term contract, working with permanent contract or being unemployed – during young adults’ life courses affect consolidation of intimate relationships. We are looking at four transitions: into cohabitation, into marriage, into parenthood and into home ownership. In contrast to previous research on family formation, we take into account that individuals may perceive fixed-term employment in different ways.

Our results are based on a representative sample of 1,083 German adults aged between 20 and 35 years. As a key-result, our analyses showed that working under a fixed-term contract prolonged time till purchasing a real estate when compared to working under a permanent contract. Furthermore, we found significant interaction effects for time till marriage and time till transitioning into parenthood: the more precarious the perceptions of fixed-term employment, the more the transitions into marriage and into parenthood were delayed.

This paper addresses the shift in practices as well as attitudes, towards a dual earner model in most OECD countries. We study families’ everyday practices and parents’ negotiations and scope of action within a particular welfare state regime, using Norway as a case, Norway has undergone a particularly rapid change in terms of entitlements for working parents. We study how two groups of parents, parents of Norwegian origin and immigrant parents of Polish origin, make use of and make sense of the structures available to working parents in Norway. The study draws on qualitative interviews with Norwegian and Polish parents of children below school age.

We find that both groups embrace and make use of the available entitlements, but their scope of action seems to differ. For the Norwegian parents, the dual earne – dual carer model has become internalized as a moral obligation and part of identity, which is related to a particular work–family arrangement. Even minor deviations from the ideal of sharing equally led to ambivalence and feelings of (mild) shame. For the Polish parents, the Norwegian entitlements for working parents is basically seen as an enabling structure, which can be actively used to shape their new lives in Norway, including renegotiating gender relations in the family. They take a more pragmatic view on which kind of work–family arrangement is suitable in a given situation, and they do not seem to share the moral obligation to live up to a particular model of the gender equal couple.