Life-course trajectories of childless women: Country-specific or universal?

While existing research has documented complexities in the life-courses of childless women, few studies to date have systematically examined the life-course pathways of the childless from a comparative, cross-country perspective. In this paper, we analyse biographies of childless women in four countries – Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States – in order to investigate whether pathways into childlessness are country-specific or commonly shared across institutional, cultural, and geographical settings. Partnership, education, and employment histories are examined using sequence analysis with dynamic Hamming distance to reveal distinct clusters of life-course trajectories in each country. The results highlight a marked variation in the life-courses of childless women both within and between the analysed countries. Although a few typical clusters can be identified in all of the examined settings, the size of the clusters, as well as the socio-demographic characteristics of women within them, differ across countries.