Explaining the Associations of Education and Occupation with Childlessness: The Role of Desires and Expectations to Remain Childless
Although there are well-established relationships between women’s higher education, labour force participation (LFP), and occupation on the one hand and childlessness on the other hand in the US, the underlying reasons and the role that childlessness desires and expectations play remain unclear. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the United States (N=4,198 women) and apply both logistic regression models to examine the role of childlessness desires early in life, and multilevel models for repeated measures to examine the role of childlessness expectations throughout the life course. We find that higher educational attainment and LFP are positively associated with childlessness. We do not find, however, that higher educated and working women more often desire or expect to remain childless. In contrast, we find that among women who ultimately remain childless, those women who work full-time and have higher status occupations have higher expectations to have children throughout their life course. These results suggest that education and occupation produce constraints, resulting in the postponement of childbearing which hinders women in realizing their desires and expectations. Since many working women remain childless despite the desire and expectation to become a mother, our findings stress the importance of work-life reconciliation. It furthermore highlights the importance of increasing public awareness regarding the decrease in fecundity with age.
Population Review
Volume 60, Number 2, 2021
Type: Article, pp. 166-194
Explaining the Associations of Education and Occupation with Childlessness: The Role of Desires and Expectations to Remain Childless
Authors: Renske M. Verweij, Gert Stulp, Harold Snieder, Melinda C. Mills
Authors affiliations: Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and Department of Sociology and ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG, Groningen, The Netherlands (Verweij); ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG, Groningen, the Netherlands (Stulp); Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen, Hanzeplein 1, 9713 GZ, Groningen, The Netherlands (Snieder); Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, University of Oxford, 42 Park End Street, Oxford OXI 1JD, UK (Mills)
Corresponding author/address: Renske M. Verweij, email: [email protected]
Abstract
Although there are well-established relationships between women’s higher education, labour force participation (LFP), and occupation on the one hand and childlessness on the other hand in the US, the underlying reasons and the role that childlessness desires and expectations play remain unclear. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the United States (N=4,198 women) and apply both logistic regression models to examine the role of childlessness desires early in life, and multilevel models for repeated measures to examine the role of childlessness expectations throughout the life course. We find that higher educational attainment and LFP are positively associated with childlessness. We do not find, however, that higher educated and working women more often desire or expect to remain childless. In contrast, we find that among women who ultimately remain childless, those women who work full-time and have higher status occupations have higher expectations to have children throughout their life course. These results suggest that education and occupation produce constraints, resulting in the postponement of childbearing which hinders women in realizing their desires and expectations. Since many working women remain childless despite the desire and expectation to become a mother, our findings stress the importance of work-life reconciliation. It furthermore highlights the importance of increasing public awareness regarding the decrease in fecundity with age.
Keywords
Childlessness, education, occupation, fertility desires, longitudinal research
Acknowledgements: MCM received funding from the ERC grants 615603(SOCIOGENOME) and 835079 (CHRONO) and The Leverhulme Trust, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Research. GS was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, VENI grant number 451-15-034.
© 2021 Sociological Demography Press
