The thesis illustrates current processes of women’s stratification over their family and occupational biographies. The individual biography is studied in a dynamic perspective, so that family decisions taken at different stages of the life course (e.g. remaining single or forming a partnership, choosing one partner or another, having children or remaining childless) have been correlated with the resulting occupational patterns. The main concern has been to investigate the extent to which similar family related decisions, e.g. forming assortative mating partnerships, have had different effects on women’s patterns of labour force participation. The cause o f these differentiated effects has been theoretically attributed to differences in family background, cultural context, individual ascribed features (e.g. educational attainment), position in the labour market (e.g. job placement, working in public or private sector) and, last but not least, the influential role o f the partners’ characteristics. The interaction of these variables, observed across time and generations, has explained the course of women's early occupational trajectories.
I have hypothesised that women's strategy of careful mate selection determines their occupational behaviour and career advancement. The argument is that the formation of assortative partnerships (i.e. both partners have with similar educational attainment and, therefore, relatively equal earning capacity in the market place) enhances women's chances of achieving parallel careers with their husbands. The results show that women with high educational attainment tend to reconcile their career obligations and family life, but at the cost of reduced family size. The ongoing process of polarisation across family models indicates that the lesser educated have a higher likelihood of being trapped in one-earner families, while the highly educated have a higher likelihood of forming dual-career families. I finally conclude that it is the combination of two main variables, educational attainment and careful mate selection, that best predicts the formation of dual-career families in young generations o f women bom after the mid-1950s.