On the Link Between Gender-Roles Attitudes and Less Common Union Types

Typically, couples tend to be mostly formed by partners where the man is older than the woman, and where the man is at least as educated as the woman. These partnerships are conventionally considered more stable and more fertile. Recent theoretical approaches have emphasized the role of gender-egalitarian attitudes in decreasing union instability and increasing couples’ fertility rates. Such attitudes may already play a role when people choose their mates, but there is hardly research about this so far. Existing studies that address gender attitudes focus mainly on their role in explaining union stability and fertility after unions have been formed. In this paper, we investigate how gender-roles attitudes are linked to mate choice. We apply multinomial logistic regression to Generations and Gender Survey data of Austria, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Hungary and Poland. We select single men and women in wave 1 and we analyze their union formation patterns in wave 2. Results suggest that egalitarian men are more likely to form less conventional unions rather than remaining single. Findings for women are a bit different. Egalitarian women are less likely than other women to be in a union where the woman is more educated than the man. Additionally, the former are also more likely to enter in unions where partners have a similar age.