The Impact of Women's Employment on Second and Third Births in Modern Sweden

Abstract This paper demonstrates some striking and sometimes initially surprising differentials and developments in Swedish fertility patterns during the 1960s and 1970s. The surprise will often have been due to untenable preconceptions. For instance, we question the assumption that the opportunity cost of a second or third birth is necessarily higher for Swedish women with a better education, or otherwise with a firm position in the labour force than for others. In our opinion, the situation may plausibly be the reverse. Also, total time in the labour force has turned out not to be the useful predictor of demographic behaviour that economists seem to have expected. A more adequate summary of a woman's employment history should capture more directly her role orientation and any signals of changes in childbearing and employment plans. Her early demographic history seems to contain similar information for the analyst, manifested here as a strong influence of age at first birth and first inter-birth interval on third-birth intensities. All in all, a woman's personal values and life course strategy (whether deliberately chosen or pressed upon her by accident and circumstances) appear as the strongest determinants of her childbearing behaviour, while income effects and opportunity cost differentials are valuable concepts which provide an understanding of more marginal changes and marginal differences. Perhaps a main outcome of the many-faceted developments over the last quarter-century has been the emerging dominance of the two-child norm and the ability to live up to it, while more directly measurable influences have been reduced to mediators.