The Impact of Labour-Force Participation on Childbearing Behaviour: Pro-Cyclical Fertility in Sweden during the 1980s and the 1990s

During the last two decades, Sweden has experienced strong fluctuations both in its economy and in its level of childbearing. A period of high employment and increasing fertility has been followed by a period of lower employment and decreasing fertility since the beginning of the 1990s. In this paper, we use register data for Swedish women in order to examine how various types of attachment to the labour market affect women's propensity to give birth at different parities. Specifically, we show what impact changes in women's employment status have had on recorded fertility trends in Sweden. We find that women who have relatively low levels of income and women who are enrolled as students generally have lower fertility than other women. We also find that a rise in the number of women with such characteristics can explain part of the decrease in fertility during the 1990s. It is evident, however, that other factors, working at the macro level, also have to be considered when one wants to explain the fluctuating fertility of Sweden. Social policy is one such factor. In sum, we find a pattern of pro-cyclical fertility, where levels of female earnings are positively related to levels of childbearing.     

Pathways to a Third Child in Sweden

The transition from two to three children is investigated, using data on Swedish women's fertility behaviour and labour force participation over a period of some 20 years ending in 1992/93. Two questions are examined: what is the relationship between working life and childbearing of two-child mothers? Are there differences in fertility between cohabiting and married couples? Several paths to the third child are identified, one of women with a university education and another of women with preference for more children, reflected by marriage after having the first or the second child or by persistent working experience followed by household work.     

农村人力资源开发与农业高校成人教育

我国农村劳动力数量大、科学文化素质低,必须加快农村人力资源开发,在这方面农业高校成人教育负有义不容辞的责任。主要从时代发展和人力资源开发的角度,分析了农业高校成人教育的改革之路。     

The choice of part-time work among Swedish one-child mothers

Swedish women have become more and more inclined to take up part-time work when they return to the labour market after the first birth. There has been a parallel development in the tendency to reduce working hours among one-child mothers who initially take full-time jobs when they return to market work. Consequently, full-time work has become more transitory among one-child mothers. Conversely, one-child mothers who work part-time tend to stick to this arrangement until it is time for the next child. The length of work experience prior to first birth is positively related to part-time work. Somehow, an ‘established’ position in the labour market seems to be a prerequisite for both getting and keeping a part-time job after childbirth. There is also a dimension which is captured either by education or by social background (two factors clearly related to each other). A high level of education or ‘upper middle class’ background is associated with a disinclination to work part-time. Fairly extended work interruptions (of a year or so) in connection with childbirth combined with part-time work seem to constitute a new strategy, which might be called the ‘combination strategy’. This way of organizing life after starting motherhood seems to have attracted the kind of women who previously tended toward the ‘homemaker strategy’ and the kind who in earlier times would have pursued a clearcut ‘career strategy’.     

Static versus dynamic analysis of the interaction between female labour-force participation and fertility

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between female labour-force participation and fertility. In theory, there could be three explanations of this finding: (i) causality runs from labour-force participation to fertility, (ii) causality runs from fertility to labour-force participation, (iii) causality runs both ways. Alternatively, the relationship may not be a causal one. In practice, empirical studies covering a wide range of Western countries at different times, and utilizing a great variety of methods and techniques, have shown all four possibilities to be plausible. This may be because outcomes differ from country to country for socio-cultural reasons, or from period to period for historical ones. If so, applying various methodologies to data for one country at a particular point in time should yield consistent results that all point in one direction only. If they did not outcomes would appear to be method-dependent. The single data set used in this study refers to the Netherlands in 1984 (ORIN project). The relationship between fertility and labour-force participation in this data set is investigated by means of three methodologies, ranging from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic’, i.e., differing according to the degree in which they take the temporal aspects of the decision-making process underlying this relationship into account: simultaneous logit analysis, Granger analysis and Markov analysis. Each main approach is applied in two different ways or on two different subgroups, for a total of six applications. In spite of diverging operationalizations of the basic variables, it turns out that four of these six analyses favour the inference that fertility decisions do have an impact on labour force participation decisions but not the other way around, whereas the other two confirm earlier findings (from data sets collected during the 1970s) that the relationship is reciprocal. Substantively, this might indicate that the pattern of covariance is changing. But ‘static’ simultaneous logit analysis is the only method to consistently point at this causal unidirectionality, while outcomes from Granger and Markov analysis depend on the modality applied. Methodologically, this means that the issue of method-dependency, at least in this area, remains largely unresolved.     

Women's paid work and the timing of births

It has been suggested that work-motivated women may shorten their birth intervals to allow a faster return to the workforce. This paper: (i) considers the circumstances under which such contraction would be expected; (ii) argues that British conditions in the 1940s to 1970s were favourable to the adoption of this strategy, among others; (iii) discusses some methodological issues arising in the empirical treatment of the question; and (iv) presents the results of analyses of work and maternity history information, which suggest that during the post-war period, labour-force participation was associated with both a contraction and a lengthening of birth intervals.     

周代男女角色定位及其对现代社会的影响

为考察周朝性别角色定位问题对现代社会的影响,通过对历史文献辨析,指出周代男女作为社会和家庭成员从小就在男权社会所需要的模式下接受教化,并被区别对待,后逐步形成了“男主女从”、“男主外女主内”的行为模式。分析结果表明,这一行为模式至今仍影响现代人的生活：现代男女受教育程度、在业和再就业比例差距拉大;家务劳动主要由女性承担。     

关于女子大学发展战略的思考

女子大学实施特色办学的发展战略是女性高等教育发展的本质要求，是对女性性别特征和女性成才规律的尊重，最终是为了促进女性的全面、自由与和谐发展，在实践中表现出来应该是全方位、多层面、立体化的。女子大学走特色办学之路，是国内外女子大学走向成功的基本经验，也是女子大学适应社会需求的多样化和个性化的必然选择，更是高等教育多样化背景下女子大学发展的根本出路。女子大学的特色办学是一个系统工程，其中树立特色办学的理念是先导，找准学校的办学定位是立足点，选择特色办学的路径是重点，发挥人的主体作用是关键。     

The timing of first birth

“The timing of first birth” is taken to mean the distribution of first births among a cohort of women. (1) How large is the final proportion of women who have at least one birth and (2) what is the distribution of women by age at first birth? “The percentage of non-fecund women” and “the age-specific risk for a fecund woman of remaining childless” are useful parameters in predicting final childlessness. These parameters are estimated. It is found that the risk of a fecund woman remaining childless is substantial even at the most common childbearing age. The effect of postponement of births on final childlessness is demonstrated and quantified. It is shown that the higher level of childlessness among women with long education can be explained by postponement of childbearing. The expression “later means fewer” is also true for first births. A method of predicting first birth rates, presented earlier by the author, is discussed and shown to give a good fit to Swedish data.     

Use It or Save It? Migration Background and Parental Leave Uptake in Sweden

Sweden is a welfare state with a family policy that strongly emphasizes equality without distinction by place of birth or gender. In this study, we investigate the differences in uptake of parental leave between native and immigrant mothers, and the connection to labour-market attachment. Sweden represents a unique case study, not only because of the strong effort to combine work and family for all women and men, the high level of fertility and the large presence of immigrants in the country; it also enables a detailed and sophisticated analysis based on the high-quality data derived from its population registers. We find that immigrant mothers use more parental leave benefit the first year after their child’s birth, but then fewer in the second year compared with native mothers. The differences diminish when labour-market activity is controlled for. Additionally, after a time in Sweden, immigrant mothers use leave more similarly to how native mothers do.     

Trends in Marriage Formation in Sweden 1971–1993

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a system of annual indices of the risks of marriage and remarriage and to use the system to display such marriage risks for Swedish women over the years since 1971. Our indices are produced by applying indirect standardization to register data. The propensity to marry decreased considerably during the 1970s and it has continued to decrease also during the first half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The decrease in marriage risks is mostly due to a decreased propensity to marry among never-married women with no children. The decrease is not so strong for never-married women with children and for divorced women. A sharp, but only temporary, deviation from the general pattern of Swedish marriage-risk trends occurred in 1989, when the number of marriages formed increased dramatically in response to the near-abolition of the public widow's pensions for women who were not married at the beginning of 1990.     

关于落后地区农村妇女思想政治教育的困境分析及对策思考

在建设社会主义新农村进程中,加强落后地区农村妇女思想政治教育工作是调动广大妇女群众的积极性、主动性和创造性的必由之路,也是加快农村全面建设小康社会进程的必然要求,更是党的农村思想政治工作的重要组成部分。然而落后地区农村妇女思想政治教育受到政治、经济、文化等诸多因素的制约,使得妇女思想政治教育工作难以开展,妇女思想政治素质普遍低。结合落后地区农村妇女生存现状和妇女思想政治教育面临的困境,提出了对落后地区农村妇女思想政治教育的对策和思考。     

金陵女子大学的办学特色初探

金陵女子大学是我国近代教育史上影响最大、办学最具特色并在国内外享有很高声誉的女子大学,挖掘其办学特色必将对发展高等教育、特别是发展女性高等教育、办好女子大学具有重要的现实意义。总结和归纳金陵女子大学的办学特色,主要有六个方面：弘扬“厚生”精神,注重女子人格教育;适应社会需要和女性特点,发展特色学科专业;确立先进的教学模式,培养全面发展的女性人才;实行专家治校,注重科学管理;尊重教师的主体地位,不断优化师资队伍;强调以学生为本,开展全方位育人。     

The Positive Effect of Women’s Education on Fertility in Low-Fertility China

Despite pervasive evidence of more educated women having lower fertility, it remains unclear whether education reduces women’s fertility. This study presents new evidence of the causal effect of women’s education on fertility from China, where fertility has remained below the replacement level since the early 1990s. To account for endogeneity, the study exploits the timing and varying intensity of China’s higher education expansion as exogenous sources of increase in women’s education. Using data from China General Social Survey (2010–2012), findings show that each year of women’s education induced by the higher education expansion increases the number of children ever born by 10%. According to the average marginal effects, each additional year of women’s education increases the number of children ever born by 0.14, decreases the probability of having no children by 3 percentage points, and increases the probability of having two or more children by 4 percentage points. Two mechanisms drive the positive effect of education: first, education does not cause an increase in the mean age at first marriage; second, among ever-married women, education increases their demand for children. Findings from this study have important implications for China and other low-fertility developing countries.     

The Impact of Children on Divorce Risks of Swedish Women

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of children on divorce risks in 1971–1994 for first-married Swedish women. This impact is examined using two measures of family composition, namely the number of children and the age of the youngest child, and we find an independent effect from each of these factors on the propensity to divorce. There is an additional impact of births prior to marriage on the subsequent divorce risk. We present time series of divorce risks for women with different types of children, showing trends for both the factors of parity and age of youngest child. The general picture of Swedish divorce-risk trends shows a strong increase in 1974, mostly among childless women, in response to a reform of the divorce legislation. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the risks have increased steadily, mostly among mothers. Our study is performed by indirect standardization of register data and we also control for the effects of age at and duration of marriage.     

The interpretation and role of work-associated accelerated childbearing in post-war Britain

The paper examines a variety of data relating to work-associated differentials in birth-spacing and concludes that these may be interpreted as work-motivated. Two effects of employment on fertility are hypothesized: current work exerting a negative, decelerating influence and prospective employment a positive, accelerating influence. It is argued that the post-war rise in fertility to the mid-60s may have been brought about, in part, by the strong trend in women's labour-force participation. The ‘pull’ of future work is argued to have been stronger during the 1950s and 1960s and that of current economic activity to have increased during the 1970s. The changing balance of attractiveness between current and prospective economic activity may therefore initially have had an accelerating and later a decelerating impact on birth rates.     

马克思劳动力产权思想及启示

劳动力产权是产权研究的重要研究对象,马克思对资本主义生产关系下劳动力的所有权、使用权和收益权以及这种产权制度的形成后果作了深刻而精辟的论述。研究马克思劳动力产权的思想,对于我们认识当代资本主义社会的工人阶级的地位与历史使命,以及进一步研究社会主义初级阶段的劳动者与企业的关系具有重要的理论指导意义。     

The impact of education on modern family-union initiation

The impact of education on formation of first unions is analyzed using interview data from a sample of Swedish women born in 1936–1960. A distinction is made between achieved level of education and the effect of being a student. The former appears to have little effect, but students start consensual unions at lower rates than corresponding non-students, and they also marry at much lower rates. Social background has not been important for marriage formation, but it has been for cohabitation, which was pioneered by the working class. There is no evidence that modern cohabitation started as a campus movement.     

论汉代的家学

汉代是中国古代家学发展的一个重要历史时期,无论从家学的内容上,抑或从家学的形式上都起了奠基的作用。其时的家学具有三个特点:一是经学已在家庭文化知识的教育中占据了主导地位;二是教育对象不限于家庭成员,具有开放性;三是妇女也能接受家学教育。汉代的家学在传承社会文化,培养造就各种专门人才中,发挥了积极的历史作用。     

Divorce-risk trends in Sweden 1971–1993

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an updated system of annual indexes of divorce risks and to use the system to display trends in divorce risks for Swedish women over the years since 1971. Divorce-risk trends turn out to have been quite different for women at different parities. Trends for women in their first marriage (the majority) are also somewhat different from trends in later marriages. After a spurt in divorces at parity 0 connected with a divorce reform in 1974, divorce risks have been quite stable for women at this parity, but they have increased steadily among married mothers, mostly as an effect of an increasing prevalence of premarital childbearing. Our indexes are produced by an indirect standardization of register data with respect to women's age at marriage, duration of marriage, and order of marriage. We also recommend standardization with respect to an indicator of premarital childbearing, which is particularly important in a population with extensive nonmarital cohabitation.