Gender Differences and the Role of Parental Socioeconomic Status in the Transition to Adulthood

Valeria Ferraretto , University of Trento
Agnese Vitali , University of Trento

Young people’s transition to adulthood has become increasingly de-standardized during the last decades, though with considerable heterogeneity in the timing of events. Surprisingly, we know little about the role of parental social class in a comparative perspective, and even less about gender differences in different social strata. This paper aims to fill this gap using retrospective data from two rounds (2006, 2018) of the European Social Survey for in 31 European countries. Discrete-time event history models allow to reconstruct the age at experiencing various transitions towards the adult status (i.e., age at first job, at parental-home leaving, at first coresidential union, and at first child) for birth cohorts spanning between 1930s-1990s, by parental socioeconomic status and gender. Preliminary results from analyses on the event of parental home leaving indicate that having highly-educated parents increases the likelihood of leaving home, but this effect is highly heterogeneous across the sampled countries. Among individuals with low-educated parents, women show a higher likelihood to leave home than men; gender differences are lowest among individuals with highly-educated parents.

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 Presented in Session 22. Transition to Adulthood