Lecture: The transition to parenthood in different-sex and female same-sex couples in Sweden. Identity formation, gender and the division of paid and unpaid work

Lecture by Professor Marie Evertsson (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Same-sex couples are, so far, largely missing in research on the transition to parenthood.

In this talk, I discuss and analyse identity formation and the relative importance of gender for the division of care and career outcomes among birth mothers, social mothers and fathers. Based on large-scale, population register data, income trajectories after the birth of a child are compared for different-sex and female same-sex couples, controlling for pre-birth income, education and age. Findings show that female same-sex couples share the parental leave more equally, are less likely to specialize and experience a much smaller within-couple income gap before as well as after the birth than different-sex couples do. Next steps include expanding the scope to an international context (i.e. the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and the US) and complement the quantitative studies with in-depth interviews with couples transitioning to parenthood in Sweden and the Netherlands.