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Trends in Completed Fertility by Educational Field: Swedish Men and Women Born 1946–1975
Abstract
Previous research on fertility by field of education has revealed stronger fertility variation than by the more frequently studied metric of educational level. However, this line of research has not focused on both men and women and changes across cohorts. Our study is the first to analyze cohort trends in fertility by field of education for both sexes and includes the cohorts of educational expansion and the development towards the dual‐earner–dual carer family model. We focus on native Swedes born 1946–1975. Swedish register data are used to depict educational orientation, educational level, and the number of children at age 45. The ranking of educational fields by childlessness and completed fertility is remarkably similar for men and women and stable across cohorts. Distinguishing the fields by level gives a largely analogous picture, but detailing educational fields reveals some different developments by sex and cohort. The similarity in patterns between men and women suggests that field‐based attributes and conditions in resulting occupations may matter more than gender conformity for fertility outcomes.
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Fertility declined sharply and unexpectedly in Finland in the 2010s across educational levels. Using Finnish register data, we calculated total fertility rates (TFRs) and the proportion of women expected to have a first birth in 2010–2019 for 153 educational groups—reflecting field and level—and estimated how the characteristics of a group predicted its decline. As the educational field predicts factors related to economic uncertainty, heterogeneity in fertility decline across fields could shed light on the role of economic uncertainty behind the recent fertility decline. In general, women with the highest initial fertility levels (health, welfare, and education) and women in agriculture experienced weaker fertility declines (around −20% or less), while women with the lowest initial levels (ICT, arts and humanities) experienced stronger declines (around −40% or more). The extent of the fertility decline increased with higher unemployment and lower income levels in the field and with a lower share employed in the public sector. These uncertainty measures together explained one-fourth of the decline in TFR and two-fifths of the decline in first births. The results imply that fertility declined across all groups, but those with stable job prospects escaped very strong declines. Objective economic uncertainty is one aspect that mattered for the recent fertility decline.
This study uses income accumulated over ages 20–60 to examine whether richer or poorer individuals have more children. Income histories are calculated using yearly administrative register data from contemporary Sweden for cohorts born 1940–70. Differences by parity and income distribution are examined separately by sex. There is a strong positive gradient between accumulated disposable income (and to a lesser extent earnings) and fertility for men in all cohorts and a gradual transformation from a negative to a positive gradient for women. In particular, accumulated incomes are substantially lower for childless men and women than those with children. For men, fertility increases monotonically with increasing income, whereas for women much of the positive gradient results from low fertility among women with very low accumulated incomes in later cohorts. Most of the positive income–fertility gradient can be explained by the high incomes of men and women with two to four children.
We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, as well as parental occupations and family wealth. In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women’s empowerment. We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women’s empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in. Implications for better understanding the sources of sex differences in career aspirations and associated policy are discussed.
Previous studies have consistently shown that religious persons both intend and have more children than their non‐religious peers. However, it is yet unknown whether their higher number of children entirely reflects their higher intentions or whether religious persons also realise their intentions more often than non‐religious individuals. By including different geographical regions—four countries from Western Europe and four countries from Central and Eastern Europe—this study focuses on short‐term fertility intentions and their realisation over 3 years. Our study, which is mainly informed by the Theory of Planned Behaviour, compares three groups, based on two panel waves from the Generations and Gender Survey (2002–2013 and 2006–2016): Christians who regularly attend church services, nominal Christians, and non‐affiliated persons. The results confirm that practising Christians generally intend and have more children than nominal Christians and non‐affiliated persons. Effects are much stronger in Western than in Central and Eastern Europe. However, we find only weak significant differences in realising childbearing intentions by religiosity. This is in line with the theoretical assumption that obstacles to childbearing are already considered in the formation of fertility intentions.
We know that parenthood has different consequences for men’s and women’s careers. Still, the research remains inconclusive on the question of whether this is mainly a consequence of a fatherhood premium, a motherhood penalty, or both. A common assumption is that women fall behind in terms of pay when they become mothers.
Based on longitudinal data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU), and individual fixed-effects models, we examine the support for this assumption by mapping the size of parenthood effects on wages during the years 1968–2010. During this period, Swedish women’s labor supply increased dramatically, dual-earner family policies were institutionalized, and society’s norms on the gendered division of labor changed. We describe the development of parenthood effects on wages during this transformative period.
Our results indicate that both genders benefit from a gross parenthood premium, both at the beginning of the period and in recent years, but the size of this premium is larger for men. Individual fixed-effects models indicate that the wage premium is mainly the result of parents’ increased labor market investments. Controlling for these, women suffer from a small motherhood penalty early in the period under study whereas parenthood is unrelated to women’s wages in later years and to men’s wages throughout the period. Neither for men nor for women do we find a statistically significant period change in the parenthood effects. Instead, patterns are remarkably stable over time given the radical changes in family policies and norms that took place during the period examined.
The reversal of the gender gap in higher education has been a major social transformation: women now outnumber men in higher education in nearly all OECD countries. Patterns of assortative mating have also changed as highly educated women increasingly form relationships with men who have less education (hypogamous unions). In this article, we draw on rich register data from Sweden to ask whether the emergence of hypogamous unions signals the emergence of a new female status dominance in unions. We also consider how the status distribution in these unions compares to homogamous (both highly educated) or hypergamous (he highly educated) unions. We use Swedish register data and study couples who have their first child together. We refer to a multi-dimensional view of status and use indicators of social class background, income, and occupational prestige. We find that in hypogamous unions, women tend to have a higher social class background and occupational prestige, but lower income than their partners. The income gap between partners is not simply a consequence of the gender wage gap, but driven by selection into different union types. Men and women who form hypogamous unions are negatively selected in terms of their income.
Aim:
The aim of this study was to analyze possible changes in the gender composition of occupations in Sweden, using register data covering the whole working population.
Methods:
Cross tabulations on gender by occupation were computed and comparisons made of numbers and proportions of women and men aged 20-64 years to illustrate occupational gender-segregation categories in 2003 and 2011, respectively. All of those in working ages, employed in 2003 and 2011 (4.2 resp 4.7 millions individuals), were included. Differences in the distribution of women and men in all occupations were summarized using two gender-segregation indexes from 2003 and 2011, separately.
Results:
The proportion of women increased in the gender-integrated (⩾40-<60% women) occupations. Also, the proportion of women in high-skilled professional occupations in the male-dominated category increased, as well as the proportion of men in mostly low-skilled female-dominated occupations, mainly in the service sector. The gender-segregation of occupations measured by the Index of Dissimilarly and the Karmel and MacLachlan Index was lower in 2011 than in 2003.
Conclusions:
The process of de-segregation has continued during our study period, from 2003 to 2011. The proportion of women increased in occupations that demand higher education, both in gender-integrated and in male-dominated occupations, which can contribute to a decrease in the level of sickness absence for women. Men increased their proportion in low-skilled, female-dominated occupations - a group with high levels of sickness absence or disability pension.
By investigating changes in the association between women’s socioeconomic status, labor market activity and fertility outcomes during the Swedish baby boom 1900–60 this study reaches three main conclusions. First, the results show that a convergence of fertility behavior occurred across female socioeconomic strata during the peak baby boom period in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of a strong two child norm. Second, the negative socio-economic gradient of fertility found in Sweden before the baby boom declined sharply among women who came of age during the 1940s and 1950s, as white-collar women increased their fertility more than all the other strata. Third, this was especially the case for women engaged in the so called ‘caring professions’ that exhibit the largest changes in behavior. The pattern found in contemporary Western contexts where women in healthcare and education have a substantially higher fertility was thus formed in Sweden already during the 1940s and 1950s. The empirical finding fit with the interpretation that middle-class women employed in the public sector experienced stronger reductions in constraints to family formation compared to women employed in the private sector. We propose that the pronatalist polices implemented in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the extensive improvements in employment protection implemented for women who got married or became pregnant in the late 1930s in Sweden, is one important factor to consider when we try to understand why especially women employed in the public sector in education and healthcare increased their fertility more than other groups.
This article presents a new way of analysing educational assortative mating patterns, using a detailed ‘micro‐educational’ classification capturing both hierarchical and horizontal forms of educational differentiation. Taking advantage of rich Danish population data, we apply log‐linear models that include four ways of measuring educational homogamy patterns: (a) by returns to education, (b) by macro‐education (five aggregated levels), (c) by field of study (16 categories), and (d) by a disaggregated micro‐educational classification, combining levels and fields of study (54 groups). Our results show declines in educational homogamy from 1984 to 2013, but the odds ratios of being educationally homogamous at the university college and university levels remain of substantial magnitude, by both the macro‐ and micro‐educational measures. The micro‐educational classification outperforms all other measures in explaining the associations in the homogamy tables. The income measure (‘returns to education’) does a particularly poor job of explaining homogamy patterns from 1984 to 2013.
Systematic comparisons of fertility developments based on education, gender and country context are rare. Using harmonized register data, we compare cohort total fertility and ultimate childlessness by gender and educational attainment for cohorts born beginning in 1940 in four Nordic countries. Cohort fertility (CTF) initially declined in all four countries, although for cohorts born in the 1950s and later, the CTF remained stable or declined only modestly. Childlessness, which had been increasing, has plateaued in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Women’s negative educational gradient in relation to total fertility has vanished, except in Finland, while men’s positive gradient has persisted. The highest level of men’s childlessness appears among the least educated. In the oldest female cohorts, childlessness was highest among the highly educated, but these patterns have changed over the cohorts as childlessness has increased among the low educated and remained relatively stable among higher educated women. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, childlessness is now highest among the least educated women. We witness both a new gender similarity and persistent (among men) and new (among women) educational disparities in childbearing outcomes in the Nordic region. Overall, the number of low educated has decreased remarkably over time. These population segments face increasing social and economic disadvantages that are reflected as well in their patterns of family formation.
This article deals with the question of how different institutional structures affect ultimate levels of childlessness. We compare rates of childlessness by educational field and educational level among women born in 1955–1959 in two different welfare states: Austria and Sweden. We find similar patterns of childlessness by educational field in both countries: i.e., women who have been educated to work in the education or health sector have lower rates of childlessness than women who have been educated to work in most other occupational fields. However, rates of childlessness by educational level differ markedly between the two countries: Austrian women with upper-secondary or tertiary education are significantly more likely to be childless than Swedish women with comparable levels of education and Austrian women with lower levels of education. We attribute these differences to the educational systems, the labour market structures, and the family policies of the two countries; which in Sweden promote equality across educational groups, and in Austria create cleavages between educational groups. We conclude with reflections on the implications of our results for demographic research on education and fertility.
Women have made considerable gains in educational attainment and increased their labour market participation, which has in turn impacted childbearing behaviour. The current study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of educational fields and occupation on fertility. We examine how women’s field of study, occupation, and occupational sex segregation shape the transition to first and higher order births. Using data from a repeated cross-sectional survey of the Dutch population (born 1940–1985), we estimate a series of discrete-time complementary log–log models with frailty. We find differences in the transition to first birth by educational field. Compared to women with a degree from educational studies (teaching), women who studied technological, economical, or cultural subjects have a significantly lower transition to first birth. Compared with those in economic and technical jobs, women in communicative jobs (healthcare, teaching) have faster transitions for all births. We also find evidence that occupational sex segregation impacts fertility, with women employed in occupations with a higher proportion of women having a significantly faster transition to first birth.
Although women in higher professional and managerial occupations are more likely to postpone first births, they compress the time to motherhood, having additional children significantly faster.
This paper demonstrates that education influences men’s childbearing behaviour in multiple ways. Focusing particularly on childlessness and multipartner fertility, key elements in our analyses are factors related to a man’s capacity for economic and practical parenting, reflected e.g. through income prospects, job-security, job-flexibility and the gender-composition of the job. Our data covers all men living in Norway during 1970-2006 which allows for a detailed analysis of diversity along a wide range of different educational groups and cohorts. Childlessness among men is most pronounced among those with low education and least pronounced among those with high education, but at a given educational level, we also observe sharp contrasts between men within different fields of education. The educational pattern of multi-partner fertility is different from childlessness, as the propensity to have children with more than one woman is most pronounced among those with low education.
To explore factors associated with occupational sex segregation in the United States over the past four decades, we analyzed U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the percent of women employed in 60 varied occupations from 1972 to 2010. Occupations were assessed on status, people-things orientation, and data-ideas orientation. Multilevel linear modeling (MLM) analyses showed that women increasingly entered high-status occupations from 1972 to 2010, but women's participation in things-oriented occupations (e.g., STEM fields and mechanical and construction trades) remained low and relatively stable. Occupations' data-ideas orientation was not consistently related to sex segregation. Because of women's increased participation in high-status occupations, occupational status became an increasingly weak predictor of women's participation rates in occupations, whereas occupations' people-things orientation became an increasingly strong predictor over time. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of occupational sex segregation and social policies to reduce occupational sex segregation.
URL: http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/22/30-22.pdf
Background: The fields of demography, sociology, and socio-psychology have been increasingly drawing on social network theories, which posit that individual fertility decision-making depends in part on the fertility behavior of other members of the population, and on the structure of the interactions between individuals. After reviewing this literature, we highlight the benefits of taking a social network perspective on fertility and family research.
Objective: We review the literature that addresses the extent to which social mechanisms, such as social learning, social pressure, social contagion, and social support, influence childbearing decisions.
Methods: We review the most recent contributions of the social networks approach for the explanation of fertility dynamics in contemporary post-industrial societies.
Conclusions: We find that all of the social mechanisms reviewed influence the beliefs and norms individuals hold regarding childbearing, their perceptions of having children, and the context of opportunities and constraints in which childbearing choices are made. The actual impact of these mechanisms on fertility tempo and quantum strongly depends on the structure of social interaction.
Sweden is known for its policies aimed at facilitating the combination of work and family for both mothers and fathers. The parental leave insurance is one important part of these policies, considered to reduce the work-family conflict for women. However, there is scarce knowledge about the effects a long family leave break may have on women's occupational careers and the studies on the topic so far mainly refer to the period up to the early 1990s. In addition, issues of selectivity are seldom dealt with. In the present study, we focus on mothers' leave-taking behaviour in the period from 1974 to 2000 and estimate the relationship between family leave length and the transition rate to an upward occupa-tional move upon return to work. Data from the nationally representative Swedish Level of Living Survey of 1991 and 2000 are used. The results indicate that women with leaves of 16 months or more were less likely to experience an upward occupational move once back on the job again. In a multilevel, multiprocess model including terms for unobserved heterogeneity, the main results remain, and we conclude that even after controlling for selectivity into different parental leave length, we find a negative effect of time out on subsequent career moves.
This article focuses on three countries with distinct policies toward motherhood and work: Germany, Sweden and the United States. We analyze the length of mothers' time out of paid work after childbirth and the short-term career consequences for mothers. In the United States, we identify a career punishment even for short time-out periods; long time-out periods increase the risk of a downward move and reduce the chances of an upward move. In Germany, long time-out periods destabilize the career and, the longer the leave, the greater the risk of either an upward or downward move. In Sweden, we find a negative effect of time out on upward moves. Hence, even in "woman-friendly" Sweden, women's career prospects are better if they return to paid work sooner rather than later. (Contains 12 notes, 5 tables, and 4 figures.)
Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from 33 countries located on six continents and five islands (total N = 10,047). For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study.
During the past 15 years, Swedish higher education policy has emphasized the spatial decentralization of post-secondary education.
We investigate the economic effects of this decentralization policy on productivity and output per worker. We rely upon a
14-year panel of output and employment for Sweden's 285 municipalities, together with data on the location of university-based
researchers and students, to estimate the effects of exogenous changes in educational policy upon regional development. We
find important and significant effects of this policy upon the average productivity of workers, suggesting that the economic
effects of the decentralization on regional development are economically important. We also find evidence of highly significant,
but extremely localized, externalities in productivity. This is consistent with recent findings (e.g., Rosenthal and Strange,
2003) on agglomeration in ‘knowledge industries.’
In this article, we investigate the determinants of job mismatches with regard to the field of education among school‐leavers in Europe. We also examine the effects of job mismatches on the labour‐market position of school‐leavers. Special attention is paid to cross‐national differences in this respect. The data used are from the EU LFS 2000 ad hoc module on school‐to‐work transitions. The empirical results show that a number of individual, structural and job characteristics affect the likelihood of having a job mismatch. Moreover, in countries in which the education system is vocationally oriented, the incidence of job mismatches among school‐leavers is higher than in countries in which the education system is mainly general. With respect to the labour‐market effects of job mismatches, it is found that school‐leavers with a non‐matching job achieve a lower occupational status, more frequently look for another job, and more often participate in continuing vocational training than those with a matching one. These labour‐market effects of job mismatches are smaller in countries in which the vocational orientation of the education system is stronger.
In this paper, we re-examine two established findings concerning the effect of education on women’s family formation. In addition
to considering educational choices as a way of accumulating human capital, we also see them as expressing orientations concerning
future roles, and as a place of socialization. This leads us to consider not only the level of education but also the type
of education. Furthermore, we investigate whether the timing of departure from education and entering into parenthood are
jointly determined. In order to disentangle these issues, we use the Spanish Family and Fertility Survey and apply event history
models that take into account the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show that the type of education is as
important as the level of education undertaken by women. More precisely, those academic studies concerned with the care of
individuals and/or which emphasize interpersonal skills, in turn have a positive influence on the timing of first birth in
Spain, irrespective of the level of education. We also find that both processes are partially determined by common (unmeasured)
determinants.
Previous analyses of period fertility suggest that the trends of the Nordic countries are sufficiently similar to speak of a common "Nordic fertility regime". We investigate whether this assumption can be corroborated by comparing cohort fertility patterns in the Nordic countries. We study cumulated and completed fertility of Nordic birth cohorts based on the childbearing histories of women born in 1935 and later derived from the population registers of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. We further explore childbearing behaviour by women’s educational attainment. The results show remarkable similarities in postponement and recuperation between the countries and very small differences in completed fertility across educational groups. Median childbearing age is about 2−3 years higher in the 1960−64 cohort than in the 1950−54 cohort, but the younger cohort recuperates the fertility level of the older cohort at ages 30 and above. A similar pattern of recuperation can be observed for highly educated women as compared to women with less education. An interesting finding is that of a positive relationship between educational level and the final number of children when women who become mothers at similar ages are compared. Country differences in fertility outcome are generally rather low. Childlessness is highest in Finland and lowest in Norway, and the educational differentials are largest in Norway. Despite such differences, the cohort analyses in many ways support the notion of a common Nordic fertility regime.
In this research note we extend our previous study of the association between educational attainment and permanent childlessness in Sweden (Hoem et al., 2006) to cover Austria, and we make comparisons between the two countries. In both investigations we have defined educational attainment in terms of both educational level and educational field. We find largely the same pattern of childlessness by educational field in both countries; in particular at each educational level women educated for teaching jobs or for health occupations typically have lower childlessness than other lines of education. However, for most groups childlessness is higher in Austria, and for academic educations it is much higher. We attribute these differences to institutional differences in the two countries which may bring about a different culture of reproductive behavior.
Evolutionary-related hypotheses about gender differences in mate selection preferences were derived from Triver's parental investment model, which contends that women are more likely than men to seek a mate who possesses nonphysical characteristics that maximize the survival or reproductive prospects of their offspring, and were examined in a meta-analysis of mate selection research (questionnaire studies, analyses of personal advertisements). As predicted, women accorded more weight than men to socioeconomic status, ambitiousness, character, and intelligence, and the largest gender differences were observed for cues to resource acquisition (status, ambitiousness). Also as predicted, gender differences were not found in preferences for characteristics unrelated to progeny survival (sense of humor, "personality"). Where valid comparisons could be made, the findings were generally invariant across generations, cultures, and research paradigms.
This is the second of two companion papers addressing the association between educational attainment and fertility for some sixty educational groups of Swedish women, defined according to field of education as well as level of education. The first paper is about childlessness and education, the present one about the mean number of children ever born. We find that ultimate fertility decreases somewhat with an increasing educational level, but its dependence on the field of education is much more impressive. In general, educational groups with relatively little childlessness also have relatively high ultimate fertility, and educational groups with much childlessness have relatively low ultimate fertility. In particular, women educated for the teaching or health-care professions have less childlessness and a higher ultimate fertility than others. Conversely, women with an education for esthetic or (non-teacher) humanist occupations have unusually high fractions childless and low ultimate fertility. Women with religious educations stand out by having very high fractions childless but quite ordinary mean ultimate fertility nevertheless; such women have very little childbearing outside of marriage. Women with research degrees have remarkably ordinary childbearing behavior; they do not forego motherhood to the extent that some theories would predict.
This paper estimates family spillovers in high school major choice in Sweden, where admission to oversubscribed majors is determined based on GPA. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find large sibling and intergenerational spillovers that depend on the sex mix of a dyad. Same-sex siblings copy one another, while younger brothers recoil from an older sister’s choices. Fathers and mothers influence sons but not their daughters, except when a mother majors in the male-dominated program of engineering. Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that these within-family spillovers have sizable implications for the sex composition of majors. (JEL I21, J12, J13, J16)
In this book, Hakim presents a new, multi-disciplinary theory for explaining and predicting current and future patterns of women’s choice between employment and family work. Preference theory is the first theory developed specifically to explain women’s behaviour and choices. As such, it constitutes a major break from male-centred theorizing to date in sociology and economics. Preference theory is grounded on the substantial body of new research on women’s work and fertility that has flourished within feminist scholarship. It identifies five major historical changes that collectively are producing a qualitatively new scenario for women in prosperous societies in the 21st century. Throughout the analysis, the USA and Britain illustrate what the new scenario means for women, how it alters their preferences and work-lifestyles choices. Hakim also reviews research evidence on contemporary developments across Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the far East to develop a new theory that is genuine international in perspective.
The extent of sex differences in psychological traits is vigorously debated. We show that the overall sex difference in the pattern of adolescents' achievement and academic attitudes is relatively large and similar across countries. We used a binomial regression modeling approach to predict the sex of 15 and 16 year olds based on sets of academic ability and attitude variables in three cycles of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data (N = 969,673 across 55 to 71 countries and regions). We found that the sex of students in any country can be reliably predicted based on regression models created from the data of all other countries, indicating a common (universal) sex-specific component. Averaged over three different PISA cycles (2009, 2012, 2015), the sex of 69% of students can be correctly classified using this approach, corresponding to a large effect. Moreover, the universal component of these sex differences is stronger in countries with relative income equality and women's participation in the labor force and politics. We conclude that patterns in academic sex differences are larger than hitherto thought and appear to become stronger when societies have more socioeconomic equality. We explore reasons why this may be the case and possible implications.
Research has indicated that fertility spreads through social networks and attributed this phenomenon to social interaction effects. It remains unclear, however, whether the findings of previous studies reflect the direct influence of network partners or contextual and selection factors, such as shared environment and common background characteristics. The present study uses instrumental variables to improve the identification of social interaction effects on fertility. Using data from the System of social statistical data sets (SSD) of Statistics Netherlands, we identify two networks—the network of colleagues at the workplace and the network of siblings in the family—to examine the influence of network partners on individual fertility decisions. Discrete-time event-history models with random effects provide evidence for social interaction effects, showing that colleagues’ and siblings’ fertility have direct consequences for an individual’s fertility. Moreover, colleague effects are concentrated in female-female interactions, and women are more strongly influenced by their siblings, regardless of siblings’ gender. These results are the first to demonstrate spillover effects across network boundaries, suggesting that fertility effects accumulate through social ties not only within but also across different domains of interaction.
This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the qualitative effects of children across countries, but also sharp differences in the magnitude of the effects. We discuss the potential role of family policies (parental leave and child care provision) and gender norms in explaining the observed differences.
The existing research on education and fertility has been enriched by studies that take into account educational field in addition to educational level. The present paper adds western Germany, which has exceptionally high levels of childlessness, to the list of cases for which comparable research has been conducted. The association between educational attainment, childlessness, and ultimate fertility among women born between 1955 and 1959 is examined using data from the 2008 German Microcensus. Despite the strong association with the level of education, childlessness also varies by educational field in western Germany. Consistent with findings from other countries, the results show that women educated in teaching and health care have the lowest rates of childlessness at each educational level, while women educated in administration, economics or social sciences have the highest levels of childlessness. Educational field and level account equally for variation in ultimate fertility.
Persistent gender differences in caretaking and the parental leave length have been proposed as one important reason why the gender wage and income gap has remained stable in Sweden for a long period of time. In this article, we study whether and how parental leave uptake (PL) affects mothers’ and fathers’ earned income and wages during a period of up to eight years after the first child is born. Focusing on those who had their first child in 1999, the descriptive results based on Swedish population registers show that social transfers compensate for a large part of the loss in earned income for mothers. Multivariate analyses of fixed effect models indicate small wage effects of PL. PL results in greater wage reductions (or the loss of wage increases) for the higher educated than for others. For women, the longer their leaves are, the more their wages suffer. For men, the negative wage effect is more immediate but increases less with time in parental leave, which leads to the conclusion that human capital depreciation most likely is not the main reason for the wage decreases that fathers experience. Instead, it seems that men’s leave taking is perceived as a signal of work commitment by employers, given that the negative wage effect appears already at very short leaves.
The extensive existing research on the relationship between educational attainment and fertility behaviour has been expanded
by adding the new dimension of the specific field of education This article addresses the question of how the educational
field influences the transition to parenthood of women and men in western Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic
Panel (SOEP) (1984–2010), discrete-time event history models are applied, looking at the time after graduation up until the
first child is born. The results show that educational fields only affect the transition to parenthood for women and not for
men. However, the findings also point at the importance of the educational level for the probability of men becoming fathers.
High transition rates are found among women educated in both female-dominated and male-dominated fields while low rates are
found among women educated in public sector fields. Further analysis implies that the relationship between women’s educational
field and their transition to parenthood is also affected by an underlying set of person-specific preferences.
Educational institutions are important settings in which future partners meet and where inequalities in the current and next generation formed. Yet there is little research on educational institutions as mating markets, partly due to limitations with existing data. In this study, we use population register data to follow the educational histories of an entire birth cohort of Swedes, born in 1970. We are able to identify the educational institutions the members of this cohort attended, and assess whether their partners overlapped in these institutions. We focus on high schools (Gymnasium) and universities. As the outcome, we focus on first births and analyze assortative mating through the characteristics of the parents. We estimate which share of our cohort members overlapped with (“met”) their partner in high school or university and use contextual level information on the structure and social compositions of the high schools and universities attended to analyze the probability of meeting one’s partner in these institutions, and on the probability of assortative mating according to age, ethnicity, and class background. Our preliminary results suggest that up to 40 % of tertiary educationally homogamous couples have met in university, and that the social and demographic compositions of both high schools and universities shape meeting chances and mating along demographic and social lines.
This work aims at understanding whether, and the extent to which, the intention of having other children is influenced by aspects related to the employment sector chosen by ‘‘new’’ mothers. Using Italian data from the Birth Sample Survey (ISTAT-2005), this work models new mothers’ preferences for family formation and for ‘‘working conditions’’, namely the sector of employment, taking into account the potential endogeneity of the latter. Working in the public sector, which benefits from stronger employment protection, tends to influence the desired (realized) fertility of working mothers. However, the choice of the working sector could be endogenous. Actually, once the selection effect is taken into account and the choice of working sector and the desired fertility are modelled together, the correlation among unobservable women’s characteristics affecting the two choices is found to be negative: women who desire more children seem to be less likely to self-select into the public sector.
Building on recent European studies, we used the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide the first analysis of fertility differences between groups of US college graduates by their undergraduate field of study. We used multilevel event-history models to investigate possible institutional and selection mechanisms linking field of study to delayed fertility and childlessness. The results are consistent with those found for Europe in showing an overall difference of 10 percentage points between levels of childlessness across fields, with the lowest levels occurring for women in health and education, intermediate levels for women in science and technology, and the highest levels for women in arts and social sciences. The mediating roles of the following field characteristics were assessed: motherhood employment penalties; percentage of men; family attitudes; and marriage patterns. Childlessness was higher among women in fields with a moderate representation of men, less traditional family attitudes, and late age at first marriage.
High levels of gender segregation in Scandinavian labour markets have been referred to as a paradox in view of these countries’ commitment to gender equality and advancements in other areas. The status of gender segregation in these welfare states is addressed here: Are they (still) the most gender segregated? What processes drive (de)segregation? Relatively fast occupational desegregation in recent years has moved Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the group of highly to moderately gender segregated labour markets, and women’s share of management positions is rising. Empirical case studies selected to shed light on (de)segregation processes are discussed in relation to two presently influential theoretical theses – ‘gender essentialism’ and the ‘welfare state paradox’. Findings suggest the existence of gender essentialist ideas, but the weakening of such ideas is likely to be a main driver of desegregation. Findings on the role of the public sector and work–family policy in segregation processes are somewhat conflicting.
This work investigates how fertility rates of working women have been influenced by employer characteristics (public versus
private sector and small versus large firms) and features of the employment contracts using a representative sample of Italian
working women in the last 30 years of the twentieth century. In particular, we find that women working in the public sector
have a higher probability of having a child during a working spell than women working in the private sector. Furthermore,
women working in large private sector firms, who enjoy stronger employment protection, have a higher probability of having
a child than those working in smaller firms. In turn, more-stable contracts also increase the likelihood of having a child
during a working spell. Results are robust to controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity and for the possible endogeneity
of working in the public sector.
This study examines how the workplace situation of both parents affects fathers’ parental leave use. We used parental leave-taking register data from Statistics Sweden for dual-earner couples who resided in Stockholm and had children in 1997 (n= 3,755). The results indicate that fathers shorten their parental leave if their workplaces are such that one can expect leave to be associated with high costs and that fathers appear to be influenced by the leave use of other fathers in the workplace. Mothers’ workplace situation appears to be less important for fathers’ leave use. The results point to the importance of actors other than parents (such as employers) for understanding the gender-based division of child care.
This paper studies the influence of religious affiliation and frequency of church attendance in shaping preferences for family size across 13 developed countries and over five broad religious groups. The ideal number of children is higher for Conservative Protestants and Catholics, affiliations with more pronatalist teachings, than for Mainline Protestants or individuals with no religious affiliation. Religious affiliation regardless of religiosity is more significant in explaining differences in the ideal number of children for older individuals and for men than for women. With the progressive loss of influence of religious institutions in society, the degree of church attendance has become a more salient predictor of family norms, particularly for women. Church membership, independent of religiosity, exerts greater influence in demographic preferences in pluralistic societies than in countries monopolized by one religious affiliation.
Longitudinal studies have shown the long-term impact of attitudes, values, and aspirations on labor market behavior and outcomes. However, sociological theory has so far failed to incorporate this new knowledge. Preference theory does so, positing that recent social and economic changes give women genuine choices for the first time in history. A 1999 national survey in Britain shows that women choose three distinct combinations of market work and family work: They have home-centered, work-centered, or adaptive lifestyle preferences. The survey confirms that lifestyle preferences are a major determinant of fertility, employment patterns, and job choice. However, lifestyle preferences no longer determine occupational choice.
The study outline differences among classes and genders within higher education. Because of the expansion of places of study, higher education has lost some of its former selectivity. The matriculation of one full birth cohort into Swedish higher education was studied. The results showed that the enrolment of working- and intermediate-class women had increased, while women from the upper-middle class, also previously enrolled in higher education, had expanded their educational options becoming involved in prestigious and previously male-dominated programmes.
This paper studies gender discrimination at hiring in the Swedish labor market. It examines data compiled from an experiment conducted in 2005-6 in which two qualitatively identical applications, one with a woman's name on it and the other with a man's name, were sent to employers advertising positions in Stockholm and Gothenburg (the two largest labor markets in Sweden). The study adds to previous international field experiments by providing additional analysis of the Swedish labor market to determine whether hiring discrimination is a primary cause of occupational gender segregation. The results show that, on average, women have a somewhat higher callback rate to interview in female-dominated occupations, while in male-dominated occupations there is no evidence of gender difference. These findings suggest that the bulk of the prevailing gender segregation in Sweden cannot be explained by discrimination in hiring.
This article studies the composite effect of education on young women’s entry into motherhood, using longitudinal data from Norway from 1971 to 2001. In line with previous research, we find that school enrolment delays motherhood, but having finished education there is a catching-up effect, as women who have completed at higher levels have their first child sooner than women who have completed at lower levels. Contrasting behaviour between women within various fields of education further indicate a career-adjustment effect related to differences in opportunity costs and/or preference heterogeneity. Finally, increasing educational differences in the timing of motherhood among younger cohorts suggest that long parental leaves and generous family benefits may fit better with a career track in some jobs than others.
Theory suggests that the field of study may be at least as consequential for fertility behavior as the duration and level of education. Yet, this qualitative dimension of educational achievement has been largely neglected in demographic studies. This article analyzes the mechanisms relating the field of study with the postponement of motherhood by European college-graduate women aged 20-40. The second round of the European Social Survey is used to assess the impact of four features of study disciplines that are identified as key to reproductive decision making: the expected starting wage, the steepness of the earning profile, attitudes toward gendered family roles, and gender composition. The results indicate that the postponement of motherhood is relatively limited among graduates from study disciplines in which stereotypical attitudes about family roles prevail and in which a large share of the graduates are female. Both the level of the starting wage and the steepness of the earning profile are found to be associated with greater postponement. These results are robust to controlling for the partnership situation and the age at entry into the labor market.
European demographers rarely study religion as a determinant of contemporary demographic behaviour. One reason could be the secularisation observed in European countries, implying that the effect of religiosity has been diminishing. This paper aims to show that religion can have an important impact on ideals, intentions and behaviour related to fertility. First we discuss recent trends in religiosity. We base our ensuing hypotheses on three deliberations why religion may have a bearing on fertility: importance of religious teaching, effect of social capital and function of religion to decrease uncertainty. Using FFS data we examine the influence of several measures of religiosity on the ideal number of children and intentions to have a second and third child, as well as on the expected and actual number of children. We find that all measures of religiosity are in general related to a higher ideal number of children, higher odds to intend another child and higher expected and actual number of children. Participation in religious services turns out to be slightly more salient than affiliation and self-assessed religiosity. We also discover that the effect of religion on ideals is more pronounced than its effect on intentions. Ideals stay further away from behaviour than intentions do and hence the influence of religion is intermediated by other social systems.
In this paper we extend the concept of educational attainment to cover the field of education taken in addition to the conventional level of education attained. Our empirical investigation uses register records containing childbearing and educational histories of an entire cohort of women born in Sweden (about a quarter-million individuals). This allows us to operate with a high number of educational field-and-level combinations (some sixty in all). It turns out that the field of education serves as an indicator of a woman’s potential reproductive behavior better than the mere level attained. We discover that in each field permanent childlessness increases some with the educational level, but that the field itself is the more important. In general, we find that women educated for jobs in teaching and health care are in a class of their own, with much lower permanent childlessness at each educational level than in any other major grouping. Women educated in arts and humanities or for religious occupations have unusually high fractions permanently childless. Our results cast doubt on the assumption that higher education per se must result in higher childlessness. In our opinion, several factors intrinsic and extrinsic to an educational system (such as its flexibility, its gender structure, and the manner in which education is hooked up to the labor market) may influence the relationship between education and childlessness, and we would not expect a simple, unidirectional relationship.