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’.