She Wants, He Wants: Couple’s Childbearing Desires in Austria

Abstract

This paper analyses couples’ childbearing desires by using data from the Austrian Generation and Gender Survey (GGS) conducted in 2008. Couple disagreement is examined, first, independently of whether only she or he wants a child, second, by looking at the predictors of his and her dissent separately. Special emphasis is given to the role of the intra-household bargaining power of each member of the couple. Results show that disagreement is most likely for all unmarried couples that do not have any common child and if the male partner is unemployed. Moreover, conflict increases in all partnerships with at least one common child if the female partner has brought biological children from a previous relationship into the current union. Generally speaking, women attribute more importance to their own desires than to their partner’s ones, while men give as much emphasis to their partner’s fertility desires as to their own ones when they report their personal child-timing intentions. Couple disagreement is one of the most relevant predictors of subsequent fertility behaviour.