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Sibship Characteristics and Transition to First Marriage in Taiwan: Explaining Gender Asymmetries

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Abstract

Sociologists have long been interested in the effects of sibship structures. Although previous research generally focuses on the impacts of sibship characteristics on educational outcomes, these characteristics may also affect individuals’ decisions about marriage by shaping their resource availability, parental expectations, or social skills and contacts. Using a nationally representative sample from Taiwan, we examine how sibship size, birth-order rank, and sibship sex composition are associated with men’s and women’s transitions to first marriage. The analysis shows that men who have no male siblings tend to accelerate their rates of entering marriage. By contrast, women with more siblings or in earlier birth positions are likely to do the same. We argue that the findings for women reflect the influences of sibship structures on household resource allocation, whereas those for men have to do with the cultural emphasis on sons’ responsibility for carrying on the family lineage. Moreover, Chinese cultural norms that prescribe different roles for married sons and daughters account for the asymmetrical mechanisms revealed for men and women in Taiwan. Results from this study thus underscore the need to consider family norms and cultural contexts in explaining the transition to marriage.

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Notes

  1. In rare cases, relatively wealthy parents with no son may arrange a uxorilocal marriage for their daughter, making the son-in-law marry into their family (Li et al. 2000). Research on marriage in Taiwan during the last several decades, however, indicates that cases of coresidence with the wife’s parents, a requirement for uxorilocal marriage, have been extremely few (Weinstein et al. 1990; Chu et al. 2011). We therefore do not consider such a scenario in our study.

  2. Having a brother may also postpone an individual’s marriage timing more than having a sister if the cost for a son’s marriage is higher than a daughter’s. Specifically, if parents must pay a higher amount for bride price than dowry, then having a brother will limit the parents’ ability to finance the other child’s marriage to a greater extent, especially if that child is also male. Mehrotra and Parish (2001), however, show that the custom of paying bride prices and dowries has declined rapidly since 1970, and that the average amount of bride price has been no greater than that of dowry since 1960 in Taiwan. In addition, because the cash gifts Taiwanese parents receive for their son’s wedding generally exceed the wedding expenses by a substantial amount, they are likely to be able to recover most of the bride price from the surplus. As to the cost of marrying a daughter, only a small minority of Taiwanese parents actually pay for, instead of transferring the bride price to, their daughter’s dowry (Mehrotra and Parish 2001). Given that the real costs of bride prices, dowries, and weddings are all relatively small for Taiwanese parents, such costs are unlikely to explain the effects of sibship structures on children’s rates of entering first marriage.

  3. Besides, it is not certain that brining in an adult woman to the family is always a net loss of household resources, given that the additional member could contribute to domestic work and family income.

  4. In a separate analysis, we included all cases from one-child families and found the main results barely affected. When we added a dummy variable for being the only child in the final models for transitioning to marriage, the results indicated that net of the effect of being the only male or female child in the family, having no sibling is associated with a postponement of first marriage for men, but it accelerates women’s entry into marriage. This finding is consistent with our argument that having no sibling signifies preexisting family issues, such as the parents’ marital discord or disruption. These issues are likely to make women more eager to separate from their families of origin (through entering marriage), whereas delay men’s marriage by making it difficult to find partners who are willing to marry into their relatively undesirable family settings. Although the association between being the only child and hidden family problems might be changing, with merely 60 male and 40 female cases of only children in the sample, we are unable to effectively test whether such individuals’ marriage timings have changed over time. For the same reason, we cannot be certain about the stability of the results regarding only children, which also advocates for excluding them from the analysis.

  5. An exploratory analysis indicated that using finer cohort categories made virtually no difference to the main results.

  6. With respect to the indirect effect of sibship configuration for men, one prior study finds sons’ advantages in schooling to be greater in families with more daughters than sons (Yu and Su 2006), suggesting that being the only son in the family might help educational attainment. If so, being the only son can also have a negative effect on the rate of entering marriage through increasing a man’s years of school enrollment. Nevertheless, the coefficient for having no brother on the rate of entering marriage remained positive and statistically significant (with a relatively little change in magnitude) when we removed the variables for education and school enrollment in the models for men. We also observed little change in the effects of the other sibship characteristics, including the number of siblings and ordinal position of birth, on men’s rates of entering marriage, after removing the variables related to schooling. Perhaps because education does not play an as important role for men’s marriage transitions as for women’s, there is hardly any indirect effect of sibship configuration on men’s marriage timing through education.

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Acknowledgments

The first author receives support from the Taiwanese Study Program Development Grant awarded to the University of Texas at Austin by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. The research is also funded by a grant (NSC97-2628-H-002-176) to the second author from the National Science Council in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, A1700, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Wei-hsin Yu & Chi-Tsun Chiu

  2. Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Da-an Dist., Taipei, 10617, Taiwan

    Kuo-hsien Su

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  1. Wei-hsin Yu
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Correspondence to Wei-hsin Yu.

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Yu, Wh., Su, Kh. & Chiu, CT. Sibship Characteristics and Transition to First Marriage in Taiwan: Explaining Gender Asymmetries. Popul Res Policy Rev 31, 609–636 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9236-7

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