Abstract:
This paper describes to what extent college-educatedWest German women manage to reconcile a career and a private life. In addition, it explicitly investigates how the concurrence of career and cohabitation/family/motherhood is linked to women’s life satisfaction. I attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with estimating this relation using fixedeffects models. The results suggest that only a small fraction of woman-year observations is categorised as having a career and cohabitation/family/children simultaneously. Considering different birth cohorts and generations of West German women, there are no significant improvements in the reconciliation between career and family. Further, while there are life-satisfaction gains related to both “career” and “cohabitation/family” separately, their interaction terms throughout are negative.