DIFFERENTIAL FERTILITY WITHIN AN ETHNIC-MINORITY - THE EFFECT OF TRYING HARDER AMONG CHINESE-AMERICAN WOMEN

In this paper we introduce a mechanism by which membership in a minority group can depress fertility. Institutionalized discrimination against Chinese-American women is commonplace in U.S. society. Chinese women who want to overcome labor market discrimination and achieve social and economic equality with women in the majority population must therefore try harder or make extra effort. Not all women choose this path, but those who do and who succeed generally do so at a price in terms of time and energy. The price is also reflected in reduced numbers of children. We simultaneously test the hypothesized fertility effect of efforts to overcome structural discrimination against other theories of fertility determinants concerning the effects of (1) pro-natalist subcultural norms and (2) socioeconomic and cultural assimilation. We fit Poisson regression models for the number of children ever born to individual-level data from the 1980 U.S. Census of Population and find strong empirical support for each of the three hypotheses. In particular, the measure of the extra effort Chinese-Americans make in combatting structural discrimination is negatively related to their fertility, and this effect is highly significant across several models. Chinese-American women who are the most successful in achieving social and economic equality with non-Hispanic white women have 18 percent fewer children than their Chinese sisters who have made little effort to overcome discrimination. This effect is twice as large as the net differential impact on fertility of being foreign-born versus native-born.