ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates social group differences in how couples organise paid work, housework and childcare after they have their first child. It explores the importance of earnings and gender role attitudes for social stratification processes after the transition to parenthood. Whereas data limitations do not allow us to capture all of these, this chapter explores a limited set of economic and cultural drivers of social stratification across the transition to parenthood. The effects of men's earnings are less clear, since higher earnings may allow their female partners to reduce their paid work/make it easier to pay for formal childcare. Sociologists have advanced several arguments for why economic theories are likely to underestimate the differences between men and women and within each gender group. Cultural capital includes childhood investment from the family in terms of values and learned preferences for certain activities.
