When men don’t want. Exploring the profile of voluntary childless men in Italy

Maria-Letizia Tanturri, University of Pavia

In Italy, very little is known about men who come to their late adult life without having children, and the factors that might have determined it. This paper investigates childlessness among men over forty in Italy, using data from the Multipurpose Italian survey, Family and Social Actors, carried out by the National Institute of Statistics in 2003. A weighted multinomial logit model is used to contrast voluntary childless men with other two categories: involuntary childlessness and fathers. Four groups of dependent variables have been considered: early life course characteristics; family formation; work related characteristics, attitudes and values. The results will be compared with an analogous analysis carried out on childless women in the same age groups. Some variables are associated to childlessness similarly by sex, while others can affect the probability of being voluntary childless in a different way for men and women (e.g.occupational position).