THE COMPATIBILITY OF EMPLOYMENT AND CHILDBEARING IN CONTEMPORARY SWEDEN

Popular theory wants to explain much of the fertility decline of the 1960s and the 1970s as a consequence of the growth in paid employment among women during the same period. The negative relationship generally found between family size and women's labour-force participation on the individual level is often given a similar interpretation. Our findings in this paper suggest that such notions are too simple. In an analysis of data from the Swedish fertility survey of 1981, there is a reduction in labour-force participation connected with childbearing, but we are unable to discern any appreciable converse influence of the individual employment history on childbearing patterns, represented here by the progression to the third birth. We also find the opposite of what economic theory has predicted concerning the impact of education on childbearing: more highly educated Swedish mothers of two children progress to a third birth more readily than corresponding women with less education. The one-sided influence from childbearing to reduced employment should be sufficient to explain the negative relationship mentioned, and it seems that an understanding of the causes of the fertility decline must be found elsewhere than in a theory of labour-specific or education-based human-capital accumulation on the individual level. We offer as a hypothesis the possibility that present-day general fertility trends in affluent populations may be governed more by ideational developments that flow through societies as a whole than by an accumulation of effects of materialistic computations made independently by individual couples.