Women’s Employment and Fertility: Global trends 1960 - 2015

• In Event: 3148 - Understanding Fertility across Time and Context

Abstract

Although the relationship between women’s employment and fertility has been extensively explored in high income countries, there has been limited exploration of this relationship in low-and middle- income countries. We create a novel global dataset that combines data from national censuses, the Luxembourg Income Study, the Demographic and Health Surveys, and the United Nations. We show graphically that there have been parallel increases in women’s employment and declines in fertility every major world region since the 1960s. Multivariate analyses further confirm a significant negative association between women’s employment and fertility. Our findings broaden the scope of the debate on women’s work and a fertility by incorporating low and middle-income countries and proposing that employment might lead to reductions in fertility not solely as a result of constraints and incompatibilities—the dominant perspective of literature in high income countries— but also as a result of changes in desired fertility outcomes.

Author

• Julia A Behrman, Northwestern University