Whose Parents Matter? Intergenerational Transmission of Earnings Arrangements in Different-Sex Couples: A Research Note

Abstract Over the past few decades, the United States has witnessed a gender revolution and transformation in family economic arrangements. However, little research has investigated the intergenerational transmission of earnings arrangements within different-sex couples, even though such knowledge illuminates the mechanisms underlying changes and continuities in the economic organization and gender relations within U.S. families. We use a life course perspective to examine whether and how different-sex couples’ earnings arrangements two years after the birth of their first child are shaped by their parents’ earnings arrangements across four periods (same life stage, contemporaneous, sensitive period, and cumulative). Two-generational panel data on different-sex couples and their parents are drawn from the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968–2021). Regression models indicate that women tend to contribute more earnings if their male partner's mother contributed a larger share to the family income either during the same life stage (two years after her first birth) or over the life course of the male partner. No similar patterns emerge for the earnings arrangements of the female partner's parents. This two-generational life course study underscores the importance of couples’ social origins and reveals the social (re)production of family economic arrangements and its gendered nature.