Modern democracies rely on citizens’ media consumption to perform a variety of activities, from providing information about the political realm to mobilizing citizens. However, the time citizens choose to devote to becoming informed about politics also signals their preferences and motivations regarding obligations and leisure. For instance, more informed citizens are more likely to be politically involved (Strömbäck and Shehata 2010). Not only so, as individuals move forward in their lives, time also becomes a scarcer commodity, particularly as they adopt adult roles. Most importantly, time tends to be unequally distributed between women and men, which appears to be at the origin of some of the gender gaps in political involvement. To date, however, the relationship between media consumption and adult roles remains understudied. Thus, in this paper, we investigate whether the transition to adulthood has an effect on media consumption and whether the effect is different for women and for men. Do adult roles take a special toll on women that is likely to increase the gender gap in media consumption?

To answer this question, we use panel data from the Dutch LISS Panel, which allows us to examine the extent to which key life cycle events related to the transition to adulthood shape citizens’ media consumption. The panel structure of the data set is an asset to examine different causality processes for women and men.