Educational heterogamy and the division of paid labour in the family: a comparison of present-day Belgium and Sweden

Building on the growing importance of partner effects in stratification research, this study adopts a couple perspective on the division of paid labour in the family. It considers the role of educational heterogamy, and takes account of the family life cycle by means of the presence of (young) children. The importance of these two factors for women’s relative labour market participation is compared between Belgium and Sweden – two European countries that share socio-economic features but differ regarding labour market and social policies. Multinomial logistic Diagonal Reference Models are used to analyse the pooled cross-sectional data of the EU-SILC 2004-2008. Our results show that women’s relative labour market participation is less education-driven in Sweden than in Belgium, and it is more related to the couple effect of educational heterogamy and the life cycle effect of the presence of (young) children, confirming more egalitarianism and family friendliness in Scandinavia than in continental Europe

Marrying out of the lower classes in nineteenth-century Belgium

In this article we address one of the most prominent questions in historical sociology: did economic modernization in the nineteenth century lead to societal openness? In an attempt to answer the question we examine the chances for lower-class grooms of marrying upwardly in five Belgian cities (Aalst, Leuven, Ghent, Verviers, and Liège). Our findings show that there is no support for a meritocracy hypothesis. The chances of marrying out of the lower classes did not increase, in either absolute or relative terms. Social closure strategies were efficient in that they apparently prevented upward marital mobility for lower-class grooms. As these findings were measured in a highly advanced economic context, this study casts strong doubts on the relationship between economic modernization, meritocracy, and marital mobility, at least for the nineteenth century

Who flees? An integration of household characteristics in the white flight hypothesis

Although there is an extensive field dedicated to the study of ethnic residential segregation, few scholars investigate the importance of household characteristics for understanding this segregation. Considering the White Flight hypothesis as a special case of the Residential Stress theory, we investigate whether there is a link between the presence of four different house hold types ethnic concentration and segregation. We therefore perform two analyses using the 2001 Census of Belgium: a binary logistic multilevel analysis investigating the chance that a neighbourhood is ethnically concentrated (i.e. has a location quotient higher than 1) and a single level linear regression analysis investigating the dissimilarity score of a city. We find that neighbourhoods with a large share ethnic majority single households and lone parents have a higher chance to be concentrated than neighbourhoods with a lower share of either household type. The same can be said for the percentage cohabitating, childless couples before adding control variables. The percentage families with young children has an inverse relation with neighbourhood concentration before adding control variables. Cities with a higher share families with young children are more segregated than cities with a lower share families with young children. Cities with a high share single households and lone parents, on the other hand, are less segregated than cities with a low share single households or lone parents. We thus conclude that it is important to consider household characteristics when studying White Flight specifically and ethnic residential segregation more general