Families and Personal Networks An International Comparative Perspective

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means that Swiss men have more cross-gender relationships, and Swiss
women have more same-gender relationships.
The dominance of women in personal networks is consistent with the
demographical distribution of men and women in the population of the
three countries. Portuguese networks are more gender balanced, which
may be a sign of a stronger presence of men in family life, reinforced by
public policies encouraging male participation in childcare and house-
hold tasks. The overall cross-gender orientation is linked to the high per-
centage of respondents citing a partner and the fact that a large majority
of couples are heterosexual. By contrast, the orientation of women
towards same-gender ties in Switzerland seems to be linked to an inclina-
tion for female friendships, which may result from the low female partici-
pation in the labour market in this country.

Identifying the Main Shaping Factors of Personal
Networks

We now consider the impact of various factors on the proportion of each
compositional characteristic described in the previous section. We con-
sidered three types of factors, which were introduced in the linear regres-
sion models by blocks. The first block includes country effects (Portugal,
Switzerland, and Lithuania). In the second block, we introduced three
structural effects: birth-cohort (1950–1955 and 1970–1975), gender
(male, female), and education (low, medium, and high). Finally, in the
third block, we added two indicators of family-related attitudes – child-

Table 3.3 Average proportion of male and female alters in personal networks by
country (N = 2774)

Portugal Switzerland Lithuania

Men Women Total Men Women TotalMen Women Total

Proportion

of male

alters

0.42 0.50 0.47 0.43 0.46 0.44 0.35 0.52 0.43

Proportion

of female

alters

0.58 0.50 0.53 0.57 0.54 0.56 0.66 0.49 0.57

R. Gouveia et al.