Association between Infertility and Educated Working Women: Evidences from Indian Data

Infertility is a medical problem and carries serious demographic, social, as well as health consequences. In the present study, an attempt has been made to study the relationship between infertility and highly educated working women after controlling for certain socioeconomic and demographic variables and efforts have been made to see this relational difference between urban and rural residing women. The information about infertile women is collected from currently married women aged 20-35 using fourth round of National Family Health Survey data. Bivariate analysis along with unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression is used to access the relationship of our objective. Findings of the bivariate analysis revealed that among sample of 40,401 currently married women 9.4% women are infertile in India. Out of 9.4% infertile women, 10.7% reside in urban and 8.8% in rural areas. Findings of logistic regression analysis show that women are 20% more likely to be infertile if they are highly educated as well as have a job. Due to aspirations to attain a higher educational level and attain employment, marriage is delayed as a result of which in confirmation with aforementioned causation factors (higher age at marriage, urban living style, etc.), the infertility rate is high among this subgroup of the population.