The sequence of occurrences of the starting socio-demographic events in the life course of Russians

Ekaterina S. Mitrofanova, National Research University Higher School of Economics

This paper illuminates how men and women from different generations gaining their first demographic and socio-economic events. Using Sequence Analysis, we represented the individual biographies on chronograms, the status transitions on parallel coordinate plots and the durations of statuses and the frequencies of subsequences on tables. The study was performed on a panel of the Russian part of the “Generations and Gender Survey” (GGS: 2004, 2007, 2011). The subsample consists of 4,857 respondents of 1935-1984 years of birth. Our analysis reveals the changes between sexes and generations. Men devote a significant part of their youth to achieving socio-economic events, while women much earlier and more actively initiate their demographic careers. Nevertheless, by the age of 35, there are more respondents among men who have children and relationships than men who do not face such events. Young people, compared to older generations, much more actively enter into cohabitations and have children in them, but they delay the onset of all these events, especially childbearing, to later ages.