ABSTRACT. During the second half of the twentieth century, the expansion of the educational system in Mexico has achieved an important goal: children and youth increasingly attend and remain in school. Gender inequalities in school attendance and attainment have disappeared but inequalities between socioeconomic sectors remain. Most students only attain low middle education and access to higher levels continues to be restricted to higher socioeconomic sectors. Growing education levels and a rapid urbanization process are related to an important increase in female labor force participation. However, female participation remains relatively low and labor markets have been growingly unstable, precarious and segmented, and better job opportunities greatly differ by education levels. At the same time, the fertility transition has taken place in Mexico. Fami-ly size has been notably reduced. In spite of this and other profound transfor-mations related to family values, patterns during the first stages of family for-mation have shown only minor changes in the population as a whole. Most women enter a conjugal union and have the first child at early ages. Mothers aged less than 20 years give birth to one out of every five births. Only a small minority of women delay their marriage and childbearing period. These different behaviors are strongly associated to education inequalities and unequal labor perspectives. Early ages at birth of first child are associated to economic and social disadvantages. Maternity at early ages causes low education and participation in the labor market. When young mothers work, they have more precarious jobs and lower incomes than older mothers. Early timing of fertility can act as a trigger of accumulation of disadvantages in later stages of life. Nevertheless, having an early birth is also a probable consequence of poverty because of previous disadvantages young women face before becoming pregnant. It has been pointed out that the opportunities of Mexican women who become pregnant as teenagers to receive education and progress toward rewarding and fulfilling jobs are limited, regardless of their fertility decisions. Also, among Mexican young women, mainly from the poorest sectors, the desire to get pregnant often results from the lack of education and work opportunities. Teen age pregnancy is perceived by the Mexican government as a popu-lation problem that widens social and gender gaps. In order to prevent these preg-nancies, a national program which involves the Health, Education and Economy Ministries has been recently implemented (ENAPEA, 2015). One of its goals is to reduce teenage fertility rate (70 per thousand) in half. However, a complete suc-cess of the program is not expected, given the lack of scientific knowledge on sev-eral issues, mainly the long term effects of early pregnancies and the experience of young boys who are often the teenage mothers’ couples. Most studies on teenage fertility that show the association with economic and social disadvantages are cross-sectional or follow ups for short periods of time. In Mexico, it is unknown if early mothers catch up latter on in other spheres of their lives and end having similar conditions as women of the same social sec-tor who started their childbearing period at latter ages or remain childless. Mexican males’ reproductive patterns have been scarcely studied and early fatherhood has not been a matter of concern. However, given the male bead winner traditional role, adopting the responsibility of a child and a family at early ages might also affect their family and work life paths. In this paper, our objective is to study family and work trajectories of in-dividuals and determine if early transitions to parenthood are associated to adverse consequences in later stages of life that exacerbate previous socioeconomic inequalities. We study women's as well as men's trajectories, given our interest in both experiences and in gender inequalities. The main contributions of the paper are the use of a life course perspec-tive to observe long term trends; the simultaneous analysis of the interwoven school, work, marital and reproductive trajectories; the evaluation of inequalities by social strata, and the inclusion of men’s as well as female’s experiences. 1.1 Methodology and data source A Multichannel Sequence Analysis is applied in order to simultaneously study the trajectories in the family and work domains. A distances matrix is calculated ap-plying optimal matching analysis. In order to group the life paths, an agglomera-tive hierarchical clustering of the distances matrix data is computed; the Average Silhouette Width is used to define the number of groups.

We analyze school, work, marital and reproductive dimensions. States are in school and out of school for the first dimension. Work states are at home, self employed (mainly associated to informal jobs) and salaried work (associated to more formal and stable jobs). In the marriage dimension, states are single, in first, second and third or more marital union (marriage or cohabitation) and previously married. In the reproductive dimension states are the number of children ever born that goes from zero to 5 or more.

To explore the social composition of the groups of the life paths defined by the cluster analysis, multiple correspondence analyses is carried out for women and men separately; besides the cluster groups, variables are birth cohort, social strata and having had an early birth.

The data source is the Retrospective Demographic Survey (Eder 2011), carried out in urban areas of Mexico. We use annual data on school, work, and family life histories from ages 12 to 41 of 888 women and 851 men of two birth cohorts born in 1951-1953 and 1966-1969.

As indicator of the social strata, we use a variable created with data on education and economic features of parents of the interviewees at age 15. This variable is particularly relevant given the profound social inequalities that charac-terize de Mexican society; it reflects the socioeconomic conditions of the parents’ household when the individual was about to start his family and work trajectories.

Because of the traditional gender roles, we analyze women and men’s work and family experiences separately. Besides, nuptiality and fertility timing among men take place at later ages than among women and we are especially interested in the effects of the social timing. We consider an early motherhood when occurred before age 18 and an early fatherhood when occurred before age 20. At age 18, young people attain the age of majority, are supposed to finish the upper secondary school which is compulsory and are legally able to have full time jobs. As mean differences by sex in age at first marriage and first birth are around two years, we suppose an early birth for males occurs before reaching the 20 years of age.

References Abbot, Andrew and A. Tsay (2001) “Sequence Analysis and Optimal Matching Methods in Sociology. Review and Prospect” Sociological Methods and Research 29(1): 3-33. Ali, Mohamed M y John Clealand (2005) “Sexual and reproductive behaviour among single women aged 15–24 in eight Latin American countries: a comparative analysis” Social Sci-ence & Medicine, 60 (6): 1175-1185. Arceo-Gomez, Eva O. and Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez (2014). Teenage Pregnancy in Mexico: Evolution and Consequences, Journal of Economics 51(1), 109-146. Billari, Francesco C. (2004) “Becoming an adult in Europe: A macro (/micro)-demographic perspective”, Demographic Research, Special Collection 3(2):15–44. doi:10. 4054/DemRes.2004.S3.2. Billari, Francesco C. and Raffaella Picarreta (2005) “Analyzing Demographic Life Courses through Sequence Analysis” Mathematical Population Sudies: An International Journal of Mathematical Demography, 12:81-106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08898480590932287; download at the UNAM April 1rst 2013. Blossfeld, Hans-Peter and Johannes Huinink (1991) “Human Capital Investments or Norms of Role Transition? How Women's Schooling and Career Affect the Process of Family For-mation”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jul., 1991), pp. 143-168 Brewster, K.L. and Rindfuss, R.R. (2000) “Fertility and women’s employment in industrialized nations”, Annual Review of Sociology 26(1): 271–296. doi:10.1146/ annurev.soc.26.1.271. Budig, Michelle J. (2015). The Fatherhood Bonus & Motherhood Penalty. Parenthood and the Gender Gap in Pay, Third Way Next Research Report Series Estrategia Nacional para la Prevención del Embarazo en Adolescentes (ENAPEA) (2015). 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ABSTRACT. The aim of our study is to investigate the “long arm of childhood” under two divergent political regimes in Germany. Children of the former socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) grew up in a regime with full-time working mothers and around the clock child care services – in a regime that differed significantly from the German Federal Republic (FRG, also West Germany). GDR, year 1980: Almost 60% children aged 0-3 attend nurseries and more than 90% children aged 3-6 attend all-day kindergartens. In contrast, the respective percentages in the FRG are 1% for nurseries and 65% for predominantly part-time kindergartens. Thus, a great majority of children born and raised in the GDR experienced “equal” educational and nutritional conditions during early childhood regarded as a critical period of development, irrespective of their families’ socio-economic situation. Within few years after the German unification health care in East Germany came up to the level of West Germany, nonetheless, for the “former children of the GDR” early childhood influences may continue to affect their adult health in a specific way. Our research question is: Does the childhood experience under a socialist regime play a role in explaining health at subsequent stages of the life course? First, we hypothesize that spending childhood in the GDR, unlike in the FRG, might have an adverse long-term effect on health. Second, we assume that “equal” GDR childhood conditions might attenuate the long-term impact of parental socio-economic status on adult health. To examine these hypotheses we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for birth cohorts 1950-1980 and apply latent growth curve analyses. Our preliminary results provide evidence of health disparities according to the kind of socialization. Further, we observe different patterns in the social health gradient for East and West Germans.

ABSTRACT. Research has examined the recent patterns of childbearing out-of-wedlock as well as the associations between childbearing and union transitions. Less systematic has been research on deciphering fertility patterns after union dissolution. This is limiting since life courses are increasingly diverse regarding partnership and family careers, and part of the well-documented changing fertility patterns across union types may be due to factors that lead individuals to dissolve unions and re-partner. We address this gap in knowledge by theorizing and examining how childbearing evolves after union dissolution. For the empirical analysis, we use hazard regression for first-, second- and third-order childbearing episodes of women aged 16 to 40 from the panel study Household, Income and Labor dynamics in Australia. Preliminary results from parity-specific models show that fertility rates are the highest among first-order marital unions. We also find that subsequent unions (to the first one) have increased first-order childbearing rates. Our study contributes to the understanding of contemporary fertility patterns, by shedding light on fertility variations across partnership life courses. Further work will include, among others, the simultaneous estimation of childbearing and union transitions to assess the effect of unobserved factors that commonly affect both processes.

ABSTRACT. This paper uses relational sequence networks to study the gendered differences of migration biographies. Starting from an integrated model of kinship and migration relations as parts of a single bi-modal network of individuals and events, sequence networks are constructed by classifying mobility events according to the social (kinship or other) relation between the individuals they link together (e.g. as migrants and hosts). Itineraries thus are conceived of as walks in a space of relational positions. Using data from 508 migration biographies collected in South-east Togo between 2010 and 2015, it is shown that male and female trajectories do not so much differ in their degree of mobility or their geographical orientation, as in the topology of the social spaces they traverse and in the structure of the social sequences they trace. While both rest on a basic kinship axis (linking an “internal” parent pole and an “external” extended-kinship pole), male networks tend to evolve through a succession of multiple but structurally isolated non-kinship links, whereas female networks develop into complex and integrated multifocal networks sewn together by marital and affinal ties. Data have been analyzed with the open source software Puck 2.2., which implements the model presented in the paper.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this study is to examine whether the co-residence structures in which young adults grew up is likely to affect their propensity of leaving the parental home. The empirical research was based on the LIVES Cohort study, a panel survey that started in autumn 2013 in Switzerland. Two longitudinal statistical methods were used as complementary approaches. First, sequence and cluster analyses were conducted to identify typical trajectories of childhood co-residence structure. Second, event history analysis was used to estimate whether these aforementioned structures influence home-leaving. Analyses show that it is not only the occurrence of an event that increases the risk of experiencing another event, but also the order in which various states occurred. What is more, it seems that two features have a significant influence on the departure from the parental home, which are the co-residence structures and the arrival or departure of siblings from the parental home.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between processes and time-varying covariates is of central theoretical interest in many social sciences research questions. On the one hand, event history analysis has been the method of choice to study these relationships. However, it is limited to outcomes that can meaningfully be specified as simple instantaneous events or transitions. On the other hand, sequence analysis (SA) has made increasing inroads into the social sciences to analyze trajectories as holistic ``process outcomes''. However, it does not allow for studying their relationship with time-varying covariates.

We propose the sequence-analysis multistate model (SAMM) that combine the advantages of both approaches. SAMM models the relationship between time-varying covariates and trajectories specified as processes outcomes that unfold over time. it proceeds in two steps. First, we use an adapted sequence analysis to identify typical sequencing and spacing between main transitions in trajectories. Second, we adapt multistate models to estimate the chances to follow each kind of the identified typical sequence. The usefulness of SAMM is illustrated with an example from life course sociology on how 1) time-varying family status is associated with women's employment trajectories in East and West Germany, and 2) how the German reunification affected these trajectories in the two sub-societies.

ABSTRACT. To examine the relationships of strenuous and hazardous working conditions and night work with healthy life expectancy (HLE). The sample contained male gas and electricity workers from the French GAZEL cohort (n=13654). Six measures of physical working conditions were examined: Self-reports from 1989 and 1990 of ergonomic strain, physical danger, night work and perceived physical strain; company records of workplace accidents and a job-exposure matrix of chemical exposures. Partial HLEs (age 50–75) relating to 1) self-rated health and 2) chronic health conditions, obtained from annual questionnaires (1989–2014) and company records, were estimated using the multi-state life table method and microsimulation. The analyses were adjusted for social class and occupational grade. Participants who reported more physically demanding and dangerous work did not have shorter partial life expectancy but had shorter healthy life expectancies in terms of both chronic illness and self-rated health. No differences were ob-served in relation to night shift work. Strenuous and hazardous work may con-tribute to ill health in later life, which has implications for individuals’ quality of life as well as healthcare use and labour market participation.

ABSTRACT. The birth of a child induces parents to substitute family work for paid work. As responses to child care time demands remain remarkably gendered, division of child care in relation to parents’ work is key to understanding reproduction of gender inequality in both the family and the labor market. This study conceptualizes a ‘care strategy’ as a trajectory of time allocations by mothers and fathers to primary child care, i.e., care that requires absence from work, over the child’s early years. It makes use of detailed data on claims for parental leave and sequence analysis to identify care strategies. Results show that half of all Swedish couples realize dual-caring strategies in which each parent serves as primary caregiver for substantial periods of the child’s early life. Despite a uniquely flexible parental leave system that allows egalitarian couples to share care on a daily basis, the dominant dual-caring strategy consists of ‘taking turns’ in serving as primary caregiver where the mother takes leave to care for an initial period, followed by a period of solo-father care. One fourth of dual-caring couples, about 10 percent of all couples, use a ‘halving it all’ strategy in which primary care is shared in every point in time.

ABSTRACT. Using time diary data from Italy (time use survey 2008-09), on a sample of 5200 households with children younger than 14 years of age, this paper assesses the amount of differences (in any) in the time mothers and fathers devote to unpaid childcare in differently shaped family structures (marital or cohabiting union, single parent and blended family), and how in turn family structure reflects in children’s time use (addressing several activities from children’s time diaries, as well as the overall amount of time children spend in presence of their parents or other caregivers). Time-use data obtained from daily diaries allow examining both the overall amounts spent on activities by day and, through sequence analysis, the patterns though which parents and children in different family structures engage in specific activities.

[NOTE: This is a very preliminary draft with pilot analyses. Further refinements will include: (1) increase in the sample size by addition of the 2002-03 time use survey and a focus on weekdays (harmonization across time use categories has already performed); (2) from the parental diaries: sequence analysis of routine and engaged childcare, work and personal activities; (3) from children’s diaries: further distinction of institutionalized time (in school or extra curricular activities) from “time with others” and a clearer partition of “time alone” from sleeping time; (3) produce better representation of sequence index plots, with pos-sible streamlining of the space state; (4) if possible, statistical testing of the differ-ences across sequences in time use by family type (Liao and Fasang 2015, Jalovaara and Fasang 2015)].

ABSTRACT. Missingness in sequence data is a problem that has not received a great deal of attention. Two approaches are suggested in the literature: treating missingness as a separate state, and multiple imputation. In this paper I propose a new concept: a non-self-identical missing state, where missing/missing combinations are treated as mismatches. I apply this to both normal missingness (gaps) and truncation of sequences. Tests with simulated and real data show it works well with normal missingness, but is not a big improvement on OM's default behaviour with sequences of unequal length.

ABSTRACT. We explore the relations between the notion of distance and a feature set based concept of similarity and show that this concept of similarity has a spatial interpretation that is complementary to distance: it is interpreted as ``direction''. Furthermore, we show how proper normalization leads to distances that can be directly interpreted as dissimilarity: closeness in normalized space implies and is implied by similarity of the same objects while remoteness implies and is implied by dissimilarity. Finally, we show how, in research into de-standardization of the life course, properly normalizing may drastically and unequivocally change our interpretation of inter-cohortal distances.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we use the example of the German division and reunification to assess how different state policies affect longitudinal employment and family trajectories from early adulthood to midlife. Statistically assessing differences in longitudinal life courses is difficult because they are far more complex than simple random variables measured at one point in time. We propose a new medoid-based method for formally assessing the difference between sets of life course sequences. Our paper thereby seeks to make both a substantive and a methodological contribution. First, we provide new insights on the formative impact of the East and West German state policies on life courses in divided Germany and their convergence after the reunification. Second, we demonstrate the added value of the medoid-based approach for statistical assessment of differences in sets of sequence data and propose a Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) and the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) statistic in the context of sequence comparisons. To evaluate the proposed methods we present an application to the German case study using retrospective life course data from the German National Education Panel Study (NEPS) as well as a simulation study. We conclude that the proposed test statistics for sequence comparison have many potential applications in life course sociology and beyond.

ABSTRACT. Why is intergenerational transmission of family formation weaker in some country contexts than in others? This paper employs the historically unique situation of the German division to study country context effects on intergenerational regularities in family formation. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to analyze the longitudinal family formation trajectories from age 15-35 of children born 1953-1978 and their mothers. Findings show that East German mother-child family formation trajectories are more dissimilar than West German mother-child family formation trajectories. Further, East German mother-child dyads are more likely to be categorized as patterns of intergenerational contrast, whereas West German mother-child dyads are more likely to display strong transmission. To account for these differences in intergenerational transmission of family formation between East and West Germany, we propose to combine multichannel sequence analysis, multinomial logistic modeling and decomposition methods for nonlinear probability models. This methodological approach enables us to show that differences in parental education and children’s educational mobility in East and West Germany mediate the strength of intergenerational transmission and contribute to explaining differences in intergenerational patterns of family formation in the two contexts. We conclude that the proposed approach is promising to disentangle cross-national differences in intergenerational regularities in family formation.

ABSTRACT. This paper adheres to calls for incorporating time and place as important aspects in shaping contemporary inequality. Drawing on Sharkey’s (2013) concept of ‘contextual mobility’– understood as the social composition of one’s neighbourhood over time – this paper seeks to investigate enduring structures of context in the Oslo region by following three complete birth cohorts left their parental home in 1989 and measure their social surroundings onwards until adult-hood in 2012. The context of each individual is recorded annually with particular emphasis on the extremes in the social environments, i.e. the affluent versus the deprived areas. Utilizing sequencing and clustering techniques, the analysis shows that lasting exposure to reoccurring contexts characterize neighbourhood biographies of both dense advantage and disadvantage – indicative of vastly limited life experiences. Moreover, those who experience a neighbourhood career of dense advantage are also more likely to have privileged class origins and to obtain access into the upper class in adulthood and the inverse relationship characterizes the career of neighbourhood disadvantage. Those who are surrounded by persistent advantage are, however, the most isolated geographically and thus the more likely to be socially acquainted, although all neighbourhood typologies become more clustered in the region over time. I argue that an understanding of how spatially mediated contexts unfold throughout the life course hints to processes of class structuration and thus makes for an important addition to insight into present-day inequality.

ABSTRACT. Our paper explores vulnerable trajectories across three life course domains: employment activity, cohabitation and health status. We embrace a compre-hensive point of view applying multichannel sequence analysis to a sample of about 1250 residents of the Canton de Vaud considering the period from age 1 to 40. Our results confirm the diffusion of the effects of vulnerable statuses across life course domains.

ABSTRACT. The contribution aims to discuss the use of Optimal matching analysis (OMA) to compare sequences defined by two or more idiosyncratic phases, called multiphase sequences. It relies on a study of individual careers defined as successions of rankings in pâtissiers’ competitions in France (N=1258). First, four properties of multiphase sequences will be set out. Then, an application of OMA to a set of two-phase sequences will be detailed. Lastly, questions related to multiphase OMA will be raised.

ABSTRACT. This paper is an exposition of an analysis of employment entry pathways. Through a sequential analysis it selects individuals who emerged with different career pathways than might have been expected considering their working position 3 years after living school. It identifies young people who have developed a secure career pathway through their vocational experience. The Céreq survey Génération was carried out in 2011 recording the monthly “occupational calendar” over a 7 years period of 12,365 young people who left the French school system in 2004. Sequential analysis has become increasingly popular following the work of Abbott (Abbott, 1983). Its success derives from the adoption of an holistic approach which focuses on the entire career of an individual (Elzinga, Studer, 2015 ; Studer, Ritschard, 2015 ; Robette, Bry, 2012). Sequential analysis is now frequently applied to vocational pathway studies (Massoni and al., 2009 ; Grelet, 2002). The relationship between different career pathways in identifying the most successful students has already been used in a number of studies indicating a strong link between the vocational pathway and the qualification gained (Céreq, 2007). In our analysis we take the opposite perspective, that of identifying individuals who exceed expectations during the period 2007-2011 in relation to their potential, job security (high/low or increasing/decreasing level), as identified by their vocational situation at 2007. An open-ended contract or a fixed-term contract are two current employment contracts in common use that are perceived as having different potentials in relation to establishing secure employment pathways. In order to achieve our research objective we could have adopted a methodology that examines individual parameters as in DMM (Massoni et al, 2010). Such an approach requires sufficiently rich individual information and therefore very lengthy sequences. The aim of our study is to compare the achieved career pathway with the probable pathway . The matrices of dissimilarity, as for Optimal Matching (Halpin, 2010 ; Studer and Ritschard, 2014), only compare actual pathways. They can’t define a distance between actual career pathways and probable career pathways. As an alternative approach, Euclidian metrics allow for the projection from the past to the future. Therefore for individuals defined by their affiliation to a group, the probable career pathway is the mean pathway of the group and the gap between the actual and probable pathways measures inertia. We therefore selected Euclidian metrics methods to use in our analysis. The ² distance, applied directly between sequences, allows for controlling frequencies effects and does not take into account the order of sequences (Robette, Thilbault, 2008). Therefore the status of employment taken at two different points in time often had the same potential for establishing secure employment pathways but not the same frequency. The methodology outlined in Rousset and Giret (2007) and Rousset and al (2012) relates to our present work as it established a Euclidian metric between career pathways through the transitions matrix at every step giving weighting to the short and long term (function seqemlt can be found in Ritschard and al (2015) ). An inter-pathway matrix enables the measurement of the distance to the probable pathway. From the point of view of our study, the position of individuals reflects their potential for developing more secure employment pathways, that is the probability of maintaining or making the transition towards status of employment or unemployment. In terms of practical application, the literature indicates broadly that entry to the labour market in France is strongly linked to qualification, measured three years after the end of education. (Céreq, 2007). Our results show however, that the probable career pathway after three years is more closely linked to a more secure pathway than an insecure pathway which suggests that beyond the achievement of a qualification individuals remain active agents in the development of their career pathways. The typology which classifies individuals according to their achievement in terms of degree of job insecurity referring to employment status and the gap between probable pathway illustrates this point. This analysis will be developed fully in the paper as will the potential for the development of security of professional status. In the first instance, the paper will expand on the methodological analysis of career pathways. It will show, through comparison with other methodological approaches, the link with transitions and its pertinence to vocational pathways. The second part of the article will examine the prediction of pathways. The third part will illustrate the findings applied to the establishment of secure career pathways.

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ABSTRACT. The successfulness of the transition from education into working life is closely related to further career success. Graduates with good access to jobs earn higher wages and have lower probability of being unemployed. Access to jobs at the start of the career is therefore an important determinant of early career success and of importance for the whole career. In this paper, we study the effect of job accessi-bility on the school-to work transitions of recent higher education graduates. We use a GIS to calculate a job accessibility index based on driving time and use sequence analysis to calculate ideal-typical labor market entry trajectories and spatial mobility histories for 14,667 recent graduates of higher education. We subsequently relate job access, labor market entry trajectories and spatial mobility his-tories to analyze whether a suboptimal starting location in terms of job access leads to differing career paths and spatial mobility trajectories and how they in-teract to influence early career success.

ABSTRACT. The effect of family background on educational and labor market outcomes is the most studied question in sociological research on intergenerational mobility. It has been shown that family background affects both educational and labor market outcomes. Furthermore the mediating effect of education on labor market outcomes has been studied and debated in detail. However, very few studies have covered the entire educational and labor market trajectories and even fewer have considered them from the intergenerational perspective. We show here that family background affects education and labor market statuses, observed not only as the outcomes at the selected time points, but also as the trajectories leading to these outcomes. We use Finnish register data from cohorts born in 1970 to 1980 to construct longitudinal educational and labor market trajectories in young adulthood for siblings and unrelated dyads (over 10,000 dyads). The labor market trajectories are analyzed from the age of 16 to 35 (years 1987 to 2010) using sequence analysis. The results show that the distances between siblings’ trajectories are clearly smaller than distances between unrelated persons. The difference is even more pronounced when comparing same sex siblings. In order to acquire more detailed understanding on the factors behind sibling similarity, we apply a quasi-experimental dyadic regression design to analyze which family background characteristics are associated with the similarity and show that around 20 percent of the association can be explained away with observed family background. We further analyze the sequences and show that certain trajectories are stronger associated with family background than others. Finally, we show that family background affects the trajectories strongly even, if the end outcomes are identical in the dyads, i.e. much of sibling similarity in trajectories remains hidden when looking only at outcomes at certain age.

ABSTRACT. This article explores labor market trajectories of the cohorts of women who spearheaded the switch towards a largely uninterrupted presence in the Danish labor market. Cohorts born during the 1940s have been the ones identified as those that broke the middle-class ideal of female domesticity and the ones following have been gradually converging with their male peers. The novelty of this article lies into bringing together and treating synthetically and longitudinally several determinants of the labor market trajectories that have been mostly analyzed separately. The extent and conditions of gender convergence in the labor market for the 1941-1980 cohorts is assessed via sequence and regression analysis.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyses retirement benefits in Switzerland in a life course perspective. We are focused on the forms of causality that links together positional factors, especially gender, occupational trajectories and retirement benefits. Which form of causality is most adequate to explain the links between positional factors, occupational trajectories, and retirement benefits? Our issue links the regime of retirement insurance in Switzerland with occupational trajectories and social characteristics of individuals. In Swiss case, the level of retirement benefits is strongly related to the preceding occupational trajectories of individuals. Additionally, the inequality of retirement benefits in Switzerland is reinforced by the gendered nature of individual life course. We compared retirement benefits of the groups of individuals which are obtained by using two different methodologies combined with sequence analysis: the cluster analysis (Gauthier et al. 2009) and the discrepancy analysis (Studer et al, 2011). We used the data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), particularly the retrospective biographic data SHARELIFE gathered during its third wave in 2009. According to our first provisory results, it is not clear enough to answer to the question of which model of temporal causality is best adapted to deal with this issue.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we compare gender differences in career advancement across gender-typical occupations in West Germany. More expressly, we ask whether men are more likely to hold a managerial position compared to women in female-typical, mixed or male-typical occupations. Drawing from the literature on “glass ceiling” and “glass escalator” effects, we test theoretical propositions concerning gendered (dis)advantages in upward occupational mobility in West Germany. In doing so, we add to previous empirical research, which has thus far primarily focused on the American or Scandinavian context. Using a combination of sequence analysis and multivariate analysis, we then holistically assess whether the work organization of gender-typical occupations partially explain these gender differences. Results from sequence analysis demonstrate that female-typical occupations have the fewest managerial shares, although women have a slight advantage over men for holding a managerial position in these occupations. The opposite is true of mixed and male-typical occupations, suggesting that a glass escalator does not appear to apply to the West German case, although a glass ceiling effect is indeed evident. Our next step is then to further disentangle the work organization of gender-typical occupations using a series of regression analysis in order to explain gender differences in holding a managerial position across these occupations.