The Changing Effect of Paid Work on Canadian Women's Childbearing, 1946-2001

Benoît Laplante, Université du Québec à Montréal
Celine Le Bourdais, McGill University

Women’s labor force participation has increased continuously over the last century. It first evolved from few women working outside the home to a pattern of discontinuous work trajectories associated with family life and, more recently, to more continuous trajectories that are very similar to those observed for men. This process of change has long been seen as an anomaly rather than a transformation, and as a cause of low fertility. In this paper, we examine the variation in the effect of work on women’s hazard of having a child, according to their social condition, matrimonial state and birth history, and the evolution over time of each of these conditional effects from 1946 to 2001. The analysis is based on discrete time models with random effects using data from the 2001 General Social Survey (GSS15) that collected retrospective family and work histories for large sample of individuals.