Between tradition and change: the gendered fertility of men in Italy

Italy’s “low and late” fertility regime has intensified over recent decades, with first births postponed and progression beyond parity one weak. While this picture is well known for women, men’s fertility remains comparatively under-examined despite growing evidence that male timing and intentions are central to period and cohort outcomes. Men typically enter parenthood later, face wider age spans of potential reproduction, and translate employment, partnership and identity transitions into births under gendered constraints. Framing the men’s fertility within Gender as Social Structure (GSS) and Data Feminism (DF), men are situated as reproductive agents embedded in mutually constitutive levels, i.e., individual identities, interactional couple dynamics and institutional rules, while also foregrounding DF principle that what gets counted counts. In this view, explanation and measurement are inseparable: improving male statistics (paternal ages, leave use, couple time arrangements) is essential to identify the mechanisms through which identities, negotiations and organisational time regimes shape the feasibility and timing of fatherhood in contemporary Italy. In this context, the thesis pursues three objectives, each addressed in a dedicated chapter. First, it maps a population portrait of “three-dimensional gender” among Italian men, addressing gender attitudes, gender models, and power/decision-making, and documenting cohort and life-course gradients and linking these configurations to reproductive profiles. Second, it analyses the drivers of men’s fertility intentions in 2003 and 2016, distinguishing childless men from fathers, and estimates how gender attitudes and parental gender models operate directly and indirectly through education, employment, and partnership within a Structural Equation Modelling framework. Third, it examines the organisational conditions under which intentions become actionable by studying time regimes and recognition systems in Italy’s largest research-performing organisation, clarifying how boundaryless work, coordination burdens and care responsibilities structure work–life conflict (WLC) and, indirectly, reproductive planning. Methodologically, the thesis applies a suite of demographic and statistical tools to nationally representative surveys and original organisational data. The three-dimensional gender portrait uses cross-sectional data from Istat Families and Social Subjects 2016 to describe clustering of traditional versus egalitarian configurations across cohorts. The intentions chapters draw on Istat Families and Social Subjects 2003 and 2016, estimating ordinal models for near-term and longer-term intentions embedded in multivariate SEMs (cumulative probit), with gender models (parental education/occupation symmetries) shaping sons’ educational attainment, labour-market position and union status. Model comparison and predicted probabilities quantify both direct and mediated paths by parity and year. The organisational study combines a staff survey to build an index of WLC, conditional inference trees and variable-importance analyses to reveal segmentations by time load, family responsibilities and recognition regimes, and semi-structured interviews to interpret mechanisms and lived constraints. Findings are consistent across levels. Italy’s men display clear cohort polarisation between traditional and more egalitarian gender configurations. Among older men, traditional role divisions are associated with higher parity accumulated earlier; among younger cohorts, egalitarian orientations are more prevalent but their translation into realised fertility is contingent on institutional position and the timing of stable unions. In the intentions models, rejecting traditional female-role norms increases near-term fertility intentions among childless men, while strongly deinstitutionalised views of partnership depress near-term plans and push intentions outward in time. Among fathers, penalties linked to such “private” views attenuate by 2016, suggesting adaptation in family contexts after first birth. Parental gender models operate mainly indirectly: sons from more symmetric parental backgrounds attain higher education, more secure employment and more stable partnership contexts, which raise the probability that intentions are feasible. Composition changes between 2003 and 2016 (older ages, higher schooling, more precarious male employment, and more diverse unions) help explain stable headline intention levels alongside continued postponement. The organisational case adds the institutional layer. WLC is primarily a function of cumulative temporal pressure (night work, sustained overtime and ≥10-hour days) within recognition systems that award visible outputs while undervaluing coordination and compliance work. “Flexibility” often materialises as continuous availability, especially in junior roles. Exposure is gender-differentiated: when schedules are held constant, uneven childcare intensifies WLC among women, whereas for men segmentation is driven more by schedule intensity and peak-driven demands. These routines condition whether “caring masculinities” can be enacted without career penalties and help explain why similar attitudes yield different fertility trajectories across workplaces and cohorts. Taken together, the evidence supports a mutually constitutive, cross-level architecture of men’s fertility in Italy. At the individual level, identities and attitudes shift intention thresholds; at the interactional level, couple bargaining and domestic time use translate thresholds into plans; at the institutional level, organisational rules and policy frameworks determine whether plans are feasible and resilient. The thesis thus reframes men’s fertility not as a residual of women’s behaviour but as an outcome of gendered structures operating across levels, aligning with the call to count men properly in official statistics and to link measurement improvements to mechanism-based explanation.