Changes in gender relations since the late 1960s are considered a ‘revolution’: progress in women's educational attainment, labour force participation, occupational status and earnings in modern societies is undeniable. Despite these fundamental changes, there is still insufficient progress to ensure gender equality in employment, access to positions of authority and power or the division of unpaid work within the household, among others.
Why is this so? Scholars agree that one key reason is that trends underlying the gender revolution were uneven and have stalled in recent decades, for example in terms of persistent gender-based discrimination in hiring, promotion and firing practices, enduring ideals of gender essentialism, devaluation of traditional female activities and the emergence of new cultural standards such as intensive motherhood.
Much less discussed is the fact that within-family processes also play an important role in women's life courses and their position in societies. We concretely refer to the reproduction of life courses within families – from mothers to daughters – that takes place through long-term processes such as (1) the socialisation and social control that parents exert, (2) social learning from parental attitudes and behaviour, (3) the provision of resources to children and (4) even through genetic inheritance.
In a study we published at the journal Demography with our colleagues Marita Jacob and Karsten Hank, we investigated intergenerational dynamics in women's life courses considering both societal and within-family processes. We bring a new perspective by adopting a trajectory approach, meaning that our empirical analyses take into account the fact that individuals' life choices follow a biographical logic that starts early in life and that parents likely transmit general guidance about life, rather than specific behaviours and outcomes, to their children.
In a first exercise, we compared work-family statuses between German mothers born between 1930 and 1950 with their daughters born between 1960 and 1980 when both generations were in the age group between 18 and 35 years old. We found that about one-third of the structure of the mothers' trajectories persisted in their daughters' trajectories, which can be interpreted as moderate intergenerational interdependence in women's life courses.
In a second step, to establish whether these associations were due to wider societal or within-family processes, we compared daughters with unrelated women from about the birth year of the mother. We found that daughters replicate the trajectories of unrelated women to a somewhat smaller degree, confirming that within-family processes partially, though not substantially, operate these intergenerational associations.
Our second exercise was devoted to measuring systematic associations between typical trajectory patterns of each generation – mothers and daughters. This approach recognises that mothers may have an influence on their children, even if daughters' life courses are different than those of their mothers because daughters adjust to the different socio-historical conditions they face. Our analysis of the same two generations of German women showed a significant correspondence across typical trajectory patterns of each generation, without daughters necessarily resembling their mothers' trajectories.
Overall, our study highlights that continuities and changes in women's life courses are better understood by addressing interdependences in age-graded trajectories rather than point-in-time or age-specific outcomes across generations. Even though the reproduction of gendered life courses is largely due to persisting gender inequality in the wider society, we find that the role of families in shaping life opportunities is not trivial, particularly among higher social background families. Accordingly, to break gender inequalities in societies, policymakers should not forget that interventions should start early in life.