Gender differences in union formation in France: is there convergence over the recent period?

Maria E. Winkler-Dworak, Vienna Institute of Demography

Numerous studies have shown that educational attainment and labour force status have a strong impact on the timing of union formation for men and women. The effects of educational level and enrolment as well as employment appear to be different for men and women. The aim of this paper is to investigate how these gender differences of the effects of education and employment on union formation changed over time, particularly, whether these differences are vanishing in the recent years. We use a large-scale survey (more than 250,000 men and women born after 1940) conducted within the French 1999 census. The first analyses show expected results, and we will test specific hypotheses through more sophisticated models including several interactions, that could not be tested with a smaller sample size.