Wilfred Uunk

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Innsbruck

Despite the importance of subject choice for later education and the occupational career, we know little about the development of girls’ and boys’ mathematics and language performance during their secondary education. This paper aims to fill this gap and describes the gender-specific development of mathematics and language performance—in terms of g...

Recent decades have seen major changes in the educational profiles of the populations of Western industrialised countries, notably a sharp rise in educational attainment and a reversal of the gender gap in education. These trends are likely to have affected patterns of educational assortative mating and its consequences. In this editorial, we first...

Across the globe, women choose science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors (STEM) less often than men. One frequently suggested explanation of this gender gap is that women perform less well in math and better in language than men in secondary school and have a comparative advantage in language. Studies for the Anglo-Saxon context have...

The Gender-Equality Paradox (GEP) describes the phenomenon that the gender gap in the preference for and choice of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors is larger in more affluent and gender-egalitarian societies. GEP has theoretically been explained by greater economic opportunities in affluent societies for gendered self...

Starting at the earliest phase in the educational career, our analyses show that there are already gender differences in mathematical competencies at early preschool age, but against the usual expectations, in favour of girls. In primary school, the early gender-specific differences are then reinforced: Boys perform better in mathematics and girls...

The start and end of a romantic relationship are associated with substantial changes in life satisfaction. Yet, whether Big Five personality traits moderate these relationship transition effects is hardly known. Such knowledge helps to understand individual variation in relationship transition effects and provides the possibility to further test th...

We study gender differences in the selection of traditional universities versus universities of applied sciences in Germany. Do women, due to life and job goals, less often enrol than men in traditional universities and more often enrol at the more practice- and profession-oriented universities of applied sciences? Or are women overrepresented at t...

Over the past decades, the social protection of unemployed people has been high on policy agendas of many welfare states. Here, we address the question how the Dutch general public’s solidarity with the unemployed—in terms of the welfare benefits they would grant this group—has been influenced by economic developments and changes in unemployment ra...

Typically, grandmothers are actively involved in the lives of their grandchildren, most frequently as care providers. At the same time, these individuals become grandparents while still employed. These two roles—of active grandparent and worker—might conflict, since both demand time and energy. This study examines whether the birth of the first gra...

Despite considerable variation in gender-role attitudes across contexts and its claimed influence on female labour supply, studies provide little support for a contextual gender-role attitude effect. In this study, we reassess the contextual gender-role attitude effect on female labour supply because earlier studies are hampered by two shortcomings...

Rising levels of unemployment in European welfare states have revived questions on the social protection of the unemployed and the people’s solidarity with this claimant group. Does people’s solidarity with the unemployed—in terms of the welfare benefits they would grant this group—decrease when the economy fares ill and unemployment is on the rise...

Lower levels of homeownership among immigrant populations have frequently been related to the particular financial constraints that immigrant households can face. Various problems have been raised with this explanation for the ethnic gap in homeownership rates. This paper responds to these criticisms by sensitizing the financial constraints explana...

Previous research has shown that labour supply – especially of partnered women with supplemental incomes – is positively associated with homeownership status. This literature is advanced by testing whether wanting to move into homeownership before the actual entry into homeownership affects individuals’ labour supply in couples. The empirical analy...

Using large-scale, representative survey data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 waves of Aanvullende Voorzieningengebruik Onderzoek (AVO) we study trends in educational homogamy for the Netherlands between 1960 and 2010. Prior studies for the Netherlands focused on relative homogamy, the tendency to marry within the group given the supply of marriage ca...

Despite substantial country variation in gender-role attitudes and female labor supply and theoretical arguments stressing the consequences of contextual attitudes for individual behavior, prior research did not find evidence for an effect of a country's gender-role attitudes on female labor supply. In this study I reassess this finding using a pow...

This work examines what role children play in the re-partnering process in five European countries (Norway, France, Germany, Romania, and the Russian Federation) by addressing the following research questions: (1) To what extent do men and women differ in their re-partnering chances?; (2) Can gender differences in re-partnering be explained by the...

Research has shown that several criteria underlie people's opinions about the welfare deservingness of benefit recipients. However, it remains unknown which factors are associated with the emphasis that people place on such criteria. Using a 2006 Dutch national survey on the welfare deservingness of disability pension recipients, we study the influ...

We investigate the association between union dissolution and self-assessed health in European panel data. Previous studies suggest that this association might be negative, yet it is unclear to what extent this reflects causation (an effect of union dissolution of health) and/or selection (an effect of health on union dissolution). We analyzed the r...

Long-term trends in deservingness opinions and how these fluctuate in relation to changes in the economic, institutional and political contexts have not often been examined. In this paper, we address these trend questions by analyzing 22 waves of the repeated cross-sectional Cultural Change in The Netherlands (CCN, 1975–2006) survey. Our analyses s...

In this paper, we focus on childbearing after the dissolution of the first marital union. The discussion of what drives fertility decisions after dissolution has been largely dominated by the arguments that: (a) people want to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the "parenthood hypothesis"), and that (b) a shared child...

In this article, we investigate to what extent remarriage functions as a strategy to overcome post-divorce financial distress, and whether this varies across welfare states. To this end, we estimate the impact of divorced women's income (changes) on repartnering and vice versa, using longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel for...

Studies on the economic consequences of divorce for women have paid little attention to changes in employment. In this article, we investigate changes in employment for separating women and the impact of individual and institutional factors on these changes using data on 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001). Our dyna...

Using data on 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001), we quantify separated women’s employment changes due to separation and study the impact of family-supportive policies on these changes. To investigate policy effects we use a welfare state typology distinguishing between four regime types of support for women: the m...

How does a nation's welfare spending affect people's concern for immigrants in comparison with other needy groups? Economic self-interest and cultural ideology theory and knowledge about immigration rates in welfare states suggest several hypotheses. Multilevel regression analyses of data for eighteen countries from the European Values Survey 1999/...

In this paper, we develop a novel way of testing the stigmatization hypothesis. The stigmatization hypothesis argues that people who break traditional norms, experience sanctions from the people that surround them. We apply this hypothesis to the case of divorce and examine whether higher normative intolerance toward divorce in the region of reside...

In this article we study job shift patterns in the former East and West Germany. We compare rates of (within-firm and across-firm) job mobility of East and West German men and study the impact of labor market composition (education, social class, industrial sector, and firm size) on the mobility rates. Our hypotheses are derived from an institution...

The proportion of women who withdraw from paid employment when they have children differs considerably among the countries of the European Union (EU), and the variation has mostly been attributed to institutional factors. In this study, we reassess the institutional explanation, because earlier supportive evidence is threatened by two alternative m...

Increasing divorce rates and growing concerns on welfare dependency urge the question whether welfare state arrangements moderate the negative economic consequences of divorce. In this study, the question is answered by comparing the short-term economic consequences of divorce for women across 14 Member States of the European Union. Using longitudi...

Das Ausmaß der Teilnahme an kulturellen Ereignissen ist in großem Maße abhängig von der sozialen Umgebung. In der Kindheit wird die Teilnahme bestimmt durch die Eltern oder die Schule, während der Adoleszenz ist das Ausmaß der Kulturteilnahme abhängig von dem jeweiligen Freundeskreis. Danach, im Leben eines Erwachsenen, ist es der Lebensgefährte, d...

In this article we compare bivariate and multivariate models for homogamy of social origin and education to test whether bivariate models of homogamy lead to biased results. We use data on Hungarian couples married between 1930 and 1979 and loglinear models of scaled association. The results indicate some differences between bivariate and multivari...

Studies on the economic consequences of divorce for women have paid little attention to changes in employment. In this article, we investigate changes in employment for separating women and the impact of individual and institutional factors on these changes using data on 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001). Our dyna...