Women’s Employment Prospects and the Time Gap between the First and the Second Child

Ewa Cukrowska-Torzewska , University of Warsaw
Anna Lovasz, University of Washington Tacoma

We show how the time gap between the first and the second child, also referred to as birth spacing, relates to women’s employment prospects following the second birth. We argue that employment consequences of birth spacing differ for women with different employment histories before the pregnancies. We use SHARELIFE retrospective survey to construct completed employment-fertility histories for women from 12 European countries. We proceed in two steps. First, we apply sequence analysis to distinguish between four groups of women based on their pre-birth employment trajectories: home-stayers, early and late workers, and dropouts. For each group of women we then estimate complementary log-log regressions to show how the birth spacing relates to their risk of entering/dropping employment. The results show that birth spacing matters for employment prospects of all groups of women except for the group of women who started working early in their lives and continued working after the first birth (early workers). For those who continued working after the first birth, but enter the labor market at later ages, the lowest risk of dropping employment is observed when the time gap between pregnancies is of moderate length (3 to 7 years). Among women who leave their jobs after the first birth (dropouts) the lowest chances of re-entering employment are when the second child appears late (more than 7 years after the first one). Finally, for the group of home-staying women the chances of entering employment are lowest when the second birth appears close to the first birth.

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 Presented in Session 27. Flash session 1 Economics, Human Capital and Labour Markets