Measures of married women's employment and fertility

FeministX has been arguing that employment among married women increases fertility by supplementing family income. It's easy enough to test with GSS data. I limited the sample to married women ages 35 to 44, measured during any survey since 1990 (to maximize N). A husband's income should matter as well, and in the absence of a question about his income, I used one concerning the socioeconomic status of his job.  Here are results for three different indicators of work: 1) full-time status versus all other statuses; 2) hours worked per week; and 3) personal annual income. 

All coefficients are negative: spouse's income as well as the three measures for the wife, but only those with asterisks reach significance.

As a women is more committed to work and earns more money, she has fewer children. This is true, independent of the husband's income.

The negative coefficient for income is smaller than the others: a large income might make job and children less incompatible as it better enables one to pay for services to lighten one's domestic duties. 


VARIABLES: CHILDS, FULLTIME2, SPSEI, HRS1, REALINC

The majority of working women don't want to work full-time

This graph from a recent Pew study shows that 62 percent of working women would prefer to work part-time. This leaves out housewives, most of whom presumably prefer their status.

So to all the women out there who would like to stay home but get the message from others that, "Everyone wants to have a career now, and you must be a loser if you don't," politely tell those people to go to hell.

Female employment and marital decline

Feminists have been telling us for decades that one's power in a marriage depends on one's personal income, and that women need to be employed to create equality between spouses. This equality, in turn, will lead to more mutually satisfying relationships. The lower graph is the employment status for women ages 30-60 over the period 1972-2006. Full-time employment has grown from 30 to 55%, while being a housewife has plummeted from 55 to less than 20%. While more and more women have moved into the workforce, women's marital happiness has slipped a little over this period (shown in the previous post). The top graph shows that, instead of improving marriage, growth in female employment has paraleled a decline in marriage--more divorced and never-married people. As we saw in the last post, rational predictions about the family made by liberal experts turned out to be exactly wrong.