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This paper demonstrates that education influences men's childbearing behaviour in multiple ways. Focusing particularly on childlessness and multi-partner fertility, key elements in our analyses are factors related to a man's capacity for economic and practical parenting, reflected e.g. through income prospects, job-security, job-flexibility and the gender-composition of the job. Our data covers all men living in Norway during 1970-2006 which allows for a detailed analysis of diversity along a wide range of different educational groups and cohorts. Childlessness among men is most pronounced among those with low education and least pronounced among those with high education, but at a given educational level, we also observe sharp contrasts between men within different fields of education. The educational pattern of multi-partner fertility is different from childlessness, as the propensity to have children with more than one woman is most pronounced among those with low education.
Keywords: men, fatherhood, childlessness, multi-partner fertility, Norway
This article is about men's childbearing behaviour, which is a relatively unexplored area in fertility research. Traditionally, this research has been highly gendered with a strong focus on women's childbearing. Consequently, shifting fertility trends have usually been ascribed to changes in female behaviour, while male fertility behaviour have been regarded as more or less constant (Goldscheider & Kaufman, 1996). An obvious reason why fertility research has remained highly gendered is that entry into parenthood continues to have more consequences for women than for men, as the mother is still the main caregiver. However, changing gender roles have brought more attention to fatherhood and men's role in fertility decisions and over the years more studies of female fertility have incorporated men in a couple perspective (e.g., Liefbroer & Corijn, 1999; Sorensen, 1989; Thomson and Hoem 1998; Winkler-Dworak & Toulemon, 2007). Still, analyses of male fertility behaviour per se are relatively uncommon, except for some recent contributions mainly from the U.S. (e.g., Guzzo & Furstenberg, 2007; Hynes, Joyner, Peters, & Delone, 2008; Manlove, Logan, Ikramullah, & HoIcombe, 2008), and Europe (Martín-García, 2009; Puur, Olah, Tazi-Preve, & Dorbritz, 2008).
Another reason why analyses of male fertility are few and far between is a lack of appropriate data. So far, most analyses of fertility behaviour have been based on survey data, but some authors have questioned the quality...