Gender and family stability

The increasing trend of partnership disruption among families with children in recent decades has been accompanied by substantial changes in traditional gender roles in industrialized countries. Yet, relatively little is known about the effects of changing gender relations on family stability in the European context. In this paper, we study such gender influences at the familial and societal level in Sweden and Hungary between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s. We focus on the disruption of the first parental union (i.e. the union in which a couple’s first child was born). Our analysis is based on data extracted from the Swedish and Hungarian Fertility and Family Surveys of 1992/93. We use the method of hazard regression. The results suggest (i) that the establishment of the dual-earner family model influences family stability only if it is accompanied by some changes in traditional gender relations within the family, and (ii) that women’s and men’s labor-market behavior have different effects in spite of the relatively long history of women’s (also mothers’) labor-force participation in both Sweden and Hungary.