In most countries, men are more likely to be childless than women. Understanding how this inequality arises is important given the significance of parenthood for individuals' lives. The objective of this study was to explore how three prominent explanations for sex inequalities in childlessness relate to the Sex Gap in Childlessness (SGC) in Sweden. The three explanations examined were sex ratio imbalance (more men than women), mismeasurement of fatherhood (inequalities in registration) and partnership differences (inequality in multi-partner fertility). Administrative register data for cohorts born in 1945-1974 were used. The population was restricted to men and women who were born in Sweden or arrived prior to the age of 15, and all registered childbearing partnerships were examined. To explore the possible significance of the three explanations, counter-factual standardization was used. Of the three explanations examined, the population sex ratio had the largest positive impact on the SGC, while multi-partner fertility had a negative impact. The results show that inequalities in the sex ratio can explain about 20-34% of the SGC depending on cohort. Inequalities in registration of fathers explain about 9-24% of the SGC depending on cohort. Finally, results show that women are slightly more likely to have multiple partners, and that this behaviour has a substantial minimizing effect on the SGC (minimizing it by 6-65%). To the authors' knowledge this was the first paper to estimate the scope of the impacts of these three mechanisms on the SGC. Differences in multi-partner fertility have in many instances been used as an explanation for men's higher childlessness. This study shows that women have slightly more childbearing partners than men, and that this actually leads to a smaller SGC in the studied population.

It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality inparticipation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. Thispaper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher VocationalEducation (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven bylabor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who hasbeen served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansionof HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rateof growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes.We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss theseresults in relation to social (in)equality in formalized HVE.

The reversal of the gender gap in higher education has been a major social transformation: women now outnumber men in higher education in nearly all OECD countries. Patterns of assortative mating have also changed as highly educated women increasingly form relationships with men who have less education (hypogamous unions). In this article, we draw on rich register data from Sweden to ask whether the emergence of hypogamous unions signals the emergence of a new female status dominance in unions. We also consider how the status distribution in these unions compares to homogamous (both highly educated) or hypergamous (he highly educated) unions. We use Swedish register data and study couples who have their first child together. We refer to a multi-dimensional view of status and use indicators of social class background, income, and occupational prestige. We find that in hypogamous unions, women tend to have a higher social class background and occupational prestige, but lower income than their partners. The income gap between partners is not simply a consequence of the gender wage gap, but driven by selection into different union types. Men and women who form hypogamous unions are negatively selected in terms of their income.

Previous research has established the link between individuals' housing characteristics and their childbearing behavior. This study contributes to this literature by examining the association between first, second and third parity transitions and housing tenure and type. The study design distinguishes between owner-occupied apartments, rental apartments and owner-occupied detached houses. This study also uniquely takes into account individual housing histories in relation to later life fertility outcomes. The data used are an extract from Swedish registers covering 25% of the population. Housing information is available from 1986 to 2006, and the study follows four birth cohorts of women who are aged 15-18 when the study starts, until ages 35-38. Descriptive results on housing and childbearing transitions over the life course are complemented by event-history models to model the parity transitions. Women living in detached housing have the highest likelihood of parity transitions, while women living in rental apartments have the lowest likelihood. Although women from different housing backgrounds have similar outcomes in terms of parity and timing, housing of origin is related to housing context during childbearing transitions, and thus, serves as a good insight to individual housing norms and constraints.

Among men with post-secondary degrees in Sweden, one in four are childless by age 45, and this level has been constant over time (in this study, for men born 1956-1972). This high level of childlessness is somewhat surprising in the context of a significant gender imbalance among the highly educated (and thus the relative scarcity of highly educated men). In this study, I examine differences in childlessness among the highly educated by studying how educational prestige, social class, and income are associated with the likelihood of becoming a father. Higher income and social class background are positively associated with fatherhood, and this association has not changed over time. Educational prestige (higher degrees, or degrees from traditional universities) is not positively associated with fatherhood, while 2-year degrees have become more positively associated with fatherhood over time. The findings of this study suggest that socioeconomic resources are important for men's family formation in Sweden compared to educational resources, contrary to expectations from educational homophily and partner market perspectives.

Education is one of the most important drivers of regional migration in European countries, and educational expansion has been a major social phenomenon in the last decades. We use decomposition analysis to examine how the expansion of tertiary education has affected intergenerational distance between adult children and their parents in Sweden. We use administrative register data for the complete population of Sweden and examine changes in intergenerational proximity between 1980 and 2010, using couples at the birth of their first child as the study population. An explicit policy goal of tertiary expansion was to widen the geographical access to tertiary education and the enrolment grew at newer regional institutions during this period. We additionally explore if this policy of regional expansion influenced average distance to parents. We find that intergenerational distances increased over the study period and that this was mainly attributed to the increased enrolment at traditional, older, universities.

The subject of this dissertation is trends in family formation among highly educated men and women in Sweden. The highly educated have typically differed from other educational groups in their patterns of childbearing. This has particularly been

the case for highly educated women, who used to be in the minority among the highly educated and who were much more likely to be childless than other women. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how the expansion of higher education has transformed  the formation of childbearing unions among the highly educated group. The context for the dissertation is the dramatic expansion of higher education which has occurred in Sweden over the last half century. As the share of cohorts graduating from post-secondary education has grown, diversity among the highly educated has also increased. This dissertation draws upon rich Swedish administrative register data to answer questions about changes in the behavior of the highly educated group, as well as emerging stratification within the group. This dissertation consists of five studies and an introductory chapter.

In Study 1, we examine changes in geographical distances between young couples and their parents. We find that among younger cohorts, generations live further apart. The expansion of higher education contributes to these distances, though the introduction of regional colleges has mediated the impact of educational expansion to some extent. In Study 2, we consider how effective colleges are as partner markets. We follow one birth cohort (1970), and examine the likelihood that they form a childbearing union with someone who attended the same university at the same time. We find that colleges are an important potential meeting place for childbearing partners, and examine how the likelihood of partnering with a fellow student is related to the college composition.

In Study 3, I assess changes in partner choice among the highly educated, by comparing the likelihood that highly

educated men and women born in 1940-2, 1950-2, 1960-2, and 1970-2 form a childbearing union, and whether they do

so with a highly or a lower educated partner. I find that female graduates are much more likely to enter unions, and to

“partner down”. Men’s likelihood of forming a childbearing union hasn’t changed across cohorts, but men from later cohorts are much more likely to find a highly educated partner than men from earlier cohorts. I show that partnership outcomes for graduates are related to social class background, university experience (degree length and institution type), and post-graduation income. In Study 4, we study unions with at least one highly educated partner, including men and women born in 1950-2, 1960-2, 1970-2, and 1980-2. We examine the extent to which educational (in)equality is mirrored in other measures of status such as social class background, income, and occupational prestige. We conclude that although the number of women “partnering down” in terms of education has increased dramatically, these unions are not necessarily characterized by female status-dominance more generally. In Study 5, I focus on highly educated men who do not form any childbearing union, studying men born in the years 1945-1974. I find that the consistent levels of childlessness among highly educated men may best be explained by changes in the composition of graduates in terms of field of study and post-graduation income.

In this paper, we analyze how school size and composition affect partnership formation in universities and in major programs within universities. Schools are commonly regarded important settings for partnership formation and matching in schools is an important explanation to educational homogamy. Yet we know little about which structural and compositional features of schools promote or dampen partnership formation. We analyze the probability of partnership formation in schools, namely the probability for a member of index cohort to have a partner with whom one overlapped in school with. Building on theories of marriage markets, we analyze the effects of school size, their sex ratios, and the age and ethnic compositions of universities on the likelihood of partnership formation. We use data from Swedish population registers for a cohort born in 1970. Our data includes the entire cohort and identifies the universities, and other students in them, which the cohort members attended.