Suchergebnisse

Cohabitation is sometimes thought of as being inversely associated with education, but in Britain a more complex picture emerges. Educational group differences in cohabitation vary by age, time period, cohort, and indicator used. Well‐educated women pioneered cohabitation in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. In the most recent cohorts, however, the less educated have exceeded the best educated in the proportions ever having cohabited at young ages. But the main difference by education currently seems largely a matter of timing—that is, the less educated start cohabiting earlier than the best educated. In Britain, educational differentials in cohabitation appear to be reinstating longstanding social patterns in the level and timing of marriage. Taking partnerships as a whole, social differentials have been fairly stable. Following a period of innovation and diffusion, there is much continuity with the past.

Les femmes ont leur premier enfant de plus en plus tard dans les pays développés. L'âge moyen à la première maternité a ainsi reculé d'environ 4 ans en Angleterre-Galles et en France depuis le milieu des années 1970. La diffusion de la scolarisation et l'allongement des études sont parmi les premiers facteurs évoqués pour expliquer ce retard. Dans les deux pays, l'âge de fin d'études et la première naissance ont de fait subi presque le même recul. L'intervalle qui sépare la fin des études de la première naissance s'est accru seulement d'une demi-année en 15 ans entre 1980-1984 et 1995-1999. Le lien entre les deux tendances apparaît bien quand on mesure la fécondité non plus selon l'âge des femmes mais selon la durée écoulée depuis la fin des études. Si le retard de la première naissance tient d'abord au prolongement des études, ce sont aussi les femmes les plus diplômées qui ont le plus retardé la première naissance après la fin des études.

How far can the shift to later childbearing in developed countries be accounted for by the growth in educational participation? A move to later childbearing has been a conspicuous feature of fertility trends in developed countries for many decades, and over that same period educational participation rates have risen substantially (OECD 2014, 2016a). The rising age at birth is often described as fertility postponement and is primarily due to a progressively later start to childbearing. Fewer women have been starting a family in their teens and early 20s and more have been delaying the start of parenthood to their late 20s and 30s (d'Addio and Mira d'Ercole 2005; OECD 2016b). The consequence is a decline in the first birth rates of childless women at younger ages, followed, in most cases, by a rise in parity-specific rates at older ages, resulting in a general shift up the age scale in the timetable of parenthood. In the West, the mean age at first birth began rising in the 1970s; in Eastern Europe, the trend began in the 1990s, following political and societal transformation (see Figures 1a and 1b). Later childbearing is emerging more recently as a feature of population trends in Southeast Asia and Latin America (Rosero-Bixby et al. 2009; Frejka et al. 2010).