Document Type
Working Paper
Date of this Version
8-14-2020
Funding
We are grateful to Hans Peter Kohler, Sarah Hayford, Ann Orloff, Mónica Caudillo, Abigail Weitzman and participants of the 2019 Gender, Power, Theory, the 2019 Global Family Change workshop, and the 2019 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge support for this paper through the Global Family Change (GFC) Project (http://web.sas.upenn.edu/ gfc), which is a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford (Nuffield College), Bocconi University, and the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Abstract
Background: Scant research explores the association between women’s employment and fertility on a truly global scale due to limited cross-national comparative standardized information across contexts.
Methods: The paper compiles a unique dataset that combines nationally representative country-level data on women’s wage employment from the International Labor Organization with fertility and reproductive health measures from the United Nations and additional information from UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank. This dataset is used to explore the linear association between women’s employment and fertility/reproductive health around the world between 1960 and 2015.
Results: Women’s wage employment is negatively correlated with total fertility rates and unmet need for family planning and positively correlated with modern contraceptive use in every major world region. Nonetheless, evidence suggest these findings hold for non-agricultural—but not agricultural—employment only.
Contribution: Our analysis documents the linear association between women’s employment and fertility on a global scale and widens the discussion to include reproductive health outcomes as well. Better understanding these empirical associations on a global scale is important for understanding the mechanisms behind global fertility change.
Keywords
employment, fertility, reproductive health, global, gender, families
Recommended Citation
Behrman, Julia, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons. 2020. "Women’s Employment and Fertility in a Global Perspective (1960-2015)." University of Pennsylvania Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC), 2020-53. https://repository.upenn.edu/psc_publications/53.
Included in
Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Finance Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Work, Economy and Organizations Commons
Date Posted: 14 August 2020