Labor market influences on Women's fertility decisions: Longitudinal evidence from Canada

Abstract

While fertility theories suggest that insecure labor market experiences encourage women to postpone having children, few have examined whether job insecurity perceptions influence fertility in the North American context—an omission we address in the current study. Findings from event history analyses of a panel dataset of Canadian workers (Canadian Work, Stress and Health Study) reveal that perceived job insecurity is salient for women's first birth decisions but not subsequent births. Further subgroup analyses show that the association between perceived job insecurity and likelihood of a first birth is limited to college-educated women and those in low unemployment labor market regions. Among women with less than a college degree and those in high-unemployment regions, the likelihood of a first birth does not vary by respondents' perceptions of insecurity. Results suggest a more nuanced relationship between insecure work and women's childbearing decisions than predicted by traditional pro-cyclical accounts of the economy-fertility association.

Introduction

In the years following the 2008 Great Recession, fertility rates fell across many Western countries (Brauner-Otto and Geist, 2018; Comolli, 2017; Goldstein et al., 2013; Cherlin et al., 2013). Experiences of financial hardship and feelings of uncertainty were the likely culprits for this decline in fertility (Auer and Danzer, 2016; Schaller, 2016; Schmitt, 2012; Schneider, 2015). While research to-date has demonstrated a robust link between fertility and indicators of economic and labor market uncertainty, fewer have examined whether women's perceptions of personal job insecurity shape their fertility decisions (Brauner-Otto and Geist, 2018). We address this omission by examining the association between Canadian women's perceived job insecurity and their fertility decisions in the recovery period following Canada's 2009 recession.

Most prior empirical research connecting labor market uncertainty to fertility is based on aggregate economic patterns, including national or regional unemployment rates (Comolli, 2017; Karaman Örsal and Goldstein, 2018; Schneider, 2015). However, while aggregate trends are suggestive of individual processes, they do not directly test whether women's experiences of uncertainty influence their fertility decisions (Seltzer, 2019). Some individual-level research has examined how experiences of job loss and fixed-term contract employment are associated with fertility intentions and decisions (Auer and Danzer, 2016); yet, these approaches overlook the experiences of women in the wider labor force, including those employed in permanent work arrangements that may also experience perceived job uncertainty. A broader assessment of women's job insecurity experiences, which is comparatively rare in the fertility literature, therefore offers an opportunity to better understand whether and how labor market uncertainty shapes fertility decisions of working women.

Research on the topic, which is predominantly European-based, has been traditionally guided by some version of the postponement hypothesis in which women are expected to delay having a child until they find more stable employment (Kreyenfeld, 2009). While some empirical research supports this possibility, other studies reveal evidence of a more nuanced relationship between insecure work and women's childbearing decisions—where women's social location may play an important role in shaping their reactions to job insecurity (Hanappi et al., 2017; Yu and Sun, 2018). We investigate this possibility with respect to fertility decisions among particular subgroups of job insecure women. As part of this, we draw from social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) to investigate socioeconomic and regional labor market contingencies in women's fertility responses to insecure work.

We focus on women's fertility choices, only, given the unique influence differences in childbearing and caretaking roles might have for men's and women's decisions. There is a clear biological distinction in the choice to bear children. Further, women are still responsible for the lion's share of childcare, especially in the early years of a child's life compared to men (Ball and Daly, 2012; Hochschild and Machung, 2012; Moyser and Burlock, 2018). With these ideas in mind, we follow others' approach in focusing on women's choices, only, to avoid confounding contrary gendered explanations surrounding fertility decisions (Kreyenfeld, 2009; Hoffman and Hohmeyer, 2013).

Our study is contributory, since we move beyond a European focus and examine recent Canadian panel data collected during the recovery period after the Great Recession (the Canadian Work, Stress and Health Study—CAN-WSH). This is an advantageous context in which to study a potential job insecurity-fertility link, since in the years following the recession, Canada saw an increase in temporary work three times the amount of permanent job positions, while it experienced one of the steepest declines in fertility among OECD countries (Lewchuk, 2017; Milan, 2013). Based on a subsample of employed women interviewed at intervening two-year periods between 2011 and 2017, we construct a discrete-time event history dataset to examine whether the likelihood of having a child is associated with prior experiences of job insecurity, and if socioeconomic and local labor market factors modify that association. In the following sections, we outline traditional theories of fertility decisions and literature supporting our hypotheses.