Couple-level gender role attitudes and the transition to marriage in East and West Germany

This paper aims to leverage the heterogeneity in Gender Role Attitudes in Germany and the different prevailing ideas of marriage between the east and west of the country to investigate the role played by agreement on gender roles in partnership transitions, comparing contexts with different prevailing ideas of marriages. Marriage is still perceived as normative in Germany and enshrined in institutions, yet marriage rates have been declining in the last decades. I investigate whether attitudes towards gender roles held jointly by couples and their change might explain this discrepancy. I examine a sample of 1297 German couples followed yearly from the beginning of their partnership onwards from 2008 to 2019, with information on both partners, selected from a representative probability sample. I use a series of Competing Risk survival models, comparing couples from West Germany with couples from East Germany. Sharing attitudes towards gender roles at the beginning of the relationship is positively related to marriage likelihoods in the West but not in the East. Convergence to a shared attitude for couples who start with diverging attitudes is also correlated with higher marriage risks, with differences between West German and East German couples. Correlation between attitudinal convergence and marriage probabilities highlights the need for couple-focused research when investigating partnership patterns. Differences in the correlations between West- and East German couples indicate possible effects of the predominant idea of marriage on the relationship between couple’s gender attitudes and their relationship outcomes.