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Inaugurele rede uitgesproken op 15 april 2016 bij de openbare aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar Pedagogiek.

Using data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, this paper compares the partners of economically successful women with those of women who have fared less well on the labor market. First, socioeconomic and attitudinal within-couple homogamy is investigated. Second, hypotheses derived from social capital theory and companionate theory are tested to examine how socioeconomic and attitudinal characteristics of male partners are related to women's economic success. Economically successful women tend to have high-income men, suggesting an accumulation of favorable material resources. Men's supportive behavior rather than their attitudes contribute to their wives' economic success.

Abstract
Benefit cutbacks have been prominent after the Great Recession. The Family Economic Stress Model (FESM) theorizes how financial losses such as those spurred by cutbacks might adversely affect parental and child well-being. Yet, few links with policy have been established. We extend current knowledge by comprehensively assessing how benefits cutbacks may affect parents and their adolescent children. We rely on the first ten waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2019) and an event-study approach to examine the aftermath of an exceptional raft of benefit cutbacks. We find that mothers with lower incomes and single mothers accumulated losses equal to 20–30 percent of their household benefit income. Mothers could not fully compensate for such benefit income losses via their extra earnings, despite increased workforce participation. Financial worries, some forms of material hardship, and mental health worsened among mothers with lower incomes and single mothers exposed to cutbacks. Adolescent socio-emotional difficulties also increased in the period. We find little evidence, though, that cutbacks disrupted parenting. Parents thus display more agency than that accorded by the FESM. Nonetheless, findings point to deepening socioeconomic divides in financial and mental well-being, questioning the rationale for cutbacks.

Objective: This study aims to investigate what factors contribute to the display of intimate fatherhood amongst contemporary urban Chinese fathers.
Background: Although a growing body of research has investigated men's involvement in physical, and more recently, also emotional involvement in childcare, what drives men to be emotionally involved in childcare has received scant attention in the research literature, particularly in Asian countries such as China.
Method: Our study draws on in-depth interviews with 19 urban Chinese fathers to investigate why men display intimate fatherhood in parenting. The thematic analysis procedure is used to answer our research questions.
Results: Findings show that men's disappointed feelings about the limited involvement of their own fathers, the intimate fatherhood contents presented in social media, and encouragement from their partner were important contributing drivers for contemporary Chinese fathers to display intimate fatherhood.
Conclusion: Our study highlights the importance of personal biographies, partner influences, and social media in contributing to men's emotional involvement in childcare. Our findings are useful for policymakers and professionals to understand, and to promote, as well as strengthen, men's commitment to displaying intimate fatherhood.

Objective: Our objective is twofold: First, to examine whether, to what extent and for whom (by sex and educational attainment) work-to-family conflict (W→F-conflict) and family-to-work conflict (F→W-conflict) increased from the pre-Covid-19 period to the first lockdown period. Second, to examine whether and to what extent the negative associations between W→F-conflict/F→W-conflict and perceived parenting (positive encouragement, coercive parenting and the parent-child relationship) became stronger. Background: During the first Covid-19 lockdown, parents were asked to provide childcare and home-schooling for their children while also being expected to fulfil their work obligations. Under these circumstances, this study was set out to examine how W→F-conflict/F→W-conflict, perceived parenting and their associations were affected. Method: Multilevel regression models were applied to longitudinal data collected among 55 employed mothers and 76 employed fathers with a 3-year-old child at wave 1. Results: We found that F→W-conflict/W→F-conflict increased most strongly among highly educated mothers, followed by lower/medium educated mothers and highly educated fathers, while no increase or even a decrease was observed among lower/medium educated fathers. We found some associations between W→F-conflict/F→W-conflict with perceived parenting, but these did not consistently become stronger during the Covid-19 wave. Although overall heightened levels of conflict did not strongly spill over to mothers' and fathers' perceived parenting, our results showed that for some parents conflict clearly increased with negative implications for their perceived parenting. Conclusion: With some noteworthy exceptions, increases in F→W-conflict/W→F-conflict did not coincide with decreases in perceived parenting, indicating that most parents did not let increased conflict between work and family affect their parenting.

Using data from 29 countries from the Luxemburg Income Study, we demonstrate that married men earn on average 7% more than unmarried men. Unmarried men would have to work 43 hours per week in order to earn the same as married men working 40 hours. We find substantial cross-national variation: in some countries married men make 25% more than unmarried men, while in others no difference in earnings exists. We extend existing research in several ways: (1) by distinguishing intra-household specialization and married men's sense of responsibility, (2) by including a wide range of countries, and (3) by employing accurate country-level indicators, enabling us to tap more closely into country-level conditions affecting the male marriage wage premium. Following the argument that country variations depend on the pressure for men to be the breadwinner, we identify four country conditions: gender differences in labor market circumstances, gendered cultural norms, marital stability, and social protection provisions. The premium is smaller in countries where both women and men actively participate in economic and political life and in decision making and in countries with a higher divorce rate. Our study reiterates the necessity to employ cross-national comparisons to reveal influential structuring conditions.

Using data from the second wave of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) for 3069 female and 2096 male respondents, we studied differences in norms of universal and of personal familial responsibility between childless individuals and parents. Differences depend on the type of norm studied. Childless individuals, and in most cases only those who opt voluntarily for a childless life, express weaker norms of universal familial responsibility in comparison with parents. Women's norms of personal familial responsibility do not vary by parental status. Men appear to need the presence of children to activate feelings of personal responsibility for family members. Differences between childless individuals and parents are attributable to selection rather than to adaptation. The theoretical and social implications of our findings are discussed.

The men behind successful women: 'Big shots' or 'sharing companions'? .Using data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, this paper compares the partners of successful women with those of women who have fared less well on the labor market. Success is measured
as belonging to the top ten percent income bracket of the female sample. The male breadwinner model where husbands contribute most to the household income characterizes the majority of couples, particularly in the older age groups. Successful women tend to have 'sharing companions'
who make less money than they do rather than 'big shots' who have high incomes. Whether their partners espouse gender egalitarian attitudes makes no differences for women's success. Rather, having a partner who performs a fair share of domestic tasks relates to women's
socio-economic achievement. Mothers with resident children are more successful when their partners have short work weeks, but the success of childless women and empty nest mothers shows no association with their partners' work hours. With women's increasing socio-economic independence,
partner relations will likely become premised on different logics compared with the past. For economically autonomous women, men's disposition towards companionship will be an important consideration, whereas men faced with economically autonomous women will be required to substantively
contribute to domestic work.

SummaryUsing data from the first wave of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) for 2867 women and 2195 men aged 40 to 79, this study examines to what extent educational, employment and marital pathways shape the likelihood of remaining childless, and whether these pathways are gendered. The findings indicate that women and men have distinctive pathways into childlessness. Educational attainment increases the likelihood of remaining childless among women only. A stable career increases the likelihood of remaining childless among women, but it increases the likelihood of entering fatherhood. Years without a partner is positively associated with childlessness among both women and men. Not having had a partnership and having had multiple partnerships are strong determinants of childlessness, especially among men.