Childbearing, Women's Employment and Work-Life Balance Policies in Contemporary Europe

Ewa Fratczak, Kenneth A. Loparo, Livia Sz. Oláh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137318541
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

This volume addresses the relationship between childbearing, paid work and work-life balance policies across Europe in the 21st century, illuminating the uncertainty and risk related to insecure labour force attachment, the incoherence of women's and men's access to education and employment and the unequal share of domestic responsibilities.

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Introduction: Aspirations and Uncertainties. Childbearing Choices and Work–Life Realities in Europe

Livia Sz. Oláh and Susanne Fahlén

1. Background

Europe is facing a demographic challenge based on the conjuncture of population ageing and a shrinking labour force that in the long run jeopardises economic growth and sustainable development. The current situation is the outcome of three trends: (i) long-term below-replacement level period fertility (that is less than 2.05 children per woman on average); (ii) increasing longevity; and (iii) a growing proportion of people in their late 50s and above in the labour force. While the latter two trends nearly equally apply to every society in Europe, cross-country variations in fertility levels are quite substantial, accelerating population ageing in societies where fertility rates have remained below the critical level of 1.5 children per woman for longer periods (McDonald, 2006; Myrskylä et al., 2009). In addressing country differences in fertility, the importance of the childbearing, female employment and work–life balance policy interplay has been increasingly recognised in contemporary scholarships of the welfare state, economics, gender and demography (see e.g. Castles, 2003; Gornick and Meyers, 2003; Engelhardt et al., 2004; Frejka et al., 2008a; Thévenon and Gauthier, 2011).

Economists have since long pointed out that there is a link between high and/or greatly increasing rates of female employment and the simultaneous decline of fertility from the late 1960s onwards. While the cost of the time that mothers, who were not engaged in paid work, spent raising children was negligible, having little impact on fertility rates under the primacy of the male-breadwinner family model, the opportunity cost of childbearing has become substantial as women increasingly remained in the labour market after entering marriage and even motherhood (Becker, 1991; Joshi, 1998). As a result, couples’ desire to have more than one or two children has greatly diminished. Highly efficient and easily available contraceptives have provided women with nearly total control over their fertility over the past decades, while a range of new opportunities beyond the family sphere have become available to them on a par with men, so that childbearing has more and more become a choice (Morgan and Berkowitz King, 2001). At the same time, relationships have grown less stable as seen in increasing divorce rates even among couples with children and a growing prevalence of less committed partnership forms, such as non-marital cohabitation and living-apart-together relationships, which are inherently more fragile than marriages. Hence, being able to support oneself economically has nearly become an imperative in contemporary Europe independent of one’s gender (Oláh, 2011). Consequently, young women increasingly prepare themselves for a long employment career, carefully planning childbearing, both number and timing, while considering how best to combine the dual responsibilities of work and family under given structures of social support (Brewster and Rindfuss, 2000).

During the mid-/late 1980s, the negative macro-level correlation between birth rates and female employment rates shifted to a positive one, known as ‘the positive turn’, capturing the attention of welfare state and gender scholars alike (Ahn and Mira, 2002; Castles, 2003; Gornick and Meyers, 2003). Later studies have shown that the reversal of sign in cross-country correlation has been related to substantial differences across countries in the magnitude of the negative time-series association between fertility and female work, as well as to unmeasured country-specific factors (Engelhardt and Prskawetz, 2004; Engelhardt et al., 2004; Kögel, 2004). In any case, since the late 1980s, countries with low female employment rates are the ones with very low fertility levels, whereas societies that have embraced the dual-earner family model display reasonably high fertility rates (Bernhardt, 1993; Hobson and Oláh, 2006a; OECD, 2011a). Hence, the role of work–life balance policies in this relationship has become increasingly important to address (Rindfuss et al., 2003; Neyer, 2006; Hoem, 2008). Indeed, fertility has remained at very low levels (below 1.5 children per woman), at least since the early 1990s, in German-speaking countries, Southern European and most Central-East European countries, where policy support for women to combine paid work and family responsibilities has been less consistent and/or comprehensive, while the Nordic states, France and other West-European societies with (usually) more developed reconciliation policies displayed fertility rates quite close to the replacement level (that is 2.05 children per woman).

At the same time, the picture at the micro level has become much more complex. As high levels of youth unemployment over an extended period of time in a number of European countries, combined with high economic aspirations and a reluctance to accept, if only temporarily, a lower living standard than in one’s parental home, have strengthened the sense of being able to support oneself among young people, labour force participation irrespective of gender may have become a precondition of childbearing in many societies across Europe (McDonald, 2002; Hobson and Oláh, 2006b). The substantial cross-country variations in fertility rates, which have long intrigued demographers (for a brief overview of that research see e.g. Caldwell and Schindlmayr, 2003; Billari et al., 2004; Frejka et al., 2008b), have been accompanied lately by a decrease in ideal family size among young adults in some societies with very low fertility (Goldstein et al., 2003). Therefore, the so-called low fertility trap hypothesis (Lutz and Skirbekk, 2005; Lutz et al., 2006) has called for close attention to childbearing intentions, seen as an influential predictor of future fertility in a country (see also Schoen et al., 1999). According to this approach, decreasing intentions in conjunction with specific demographic and economic forces, especially the negative population momentum seen in the declining number of women in childbearing ages who thus produce fewer and fewer births in Europe, and the not negligible mismatch between high personal consumption aspirations of young people and a negative, or at best stable, expected income development due to high (youth) unemployment rates and/or a high prevalence of precarious labour market positions are likely to inhibit a rise in fertility to above the critical level. The long-term risks are obvious in terms of future labour supply, economic competitiveness (as young workers are more willing and able to adapt to new technology, labour market restructuring or other changes in economic production) and the sustainability of welfare states that assume that the productive workforce will provide the resources to shoulder the costs of care for the aged and the disabled (McDonald and Kippen, 2001; Lutz et al., 2003; Bongaarts, 2004).

The importance of demographic sustainability has been increasingly recognised also in European policymaking. The discrepancy between the number of children desired and achieved fertility (much lower) was a point of departure of the European Commission’s Green Paper ‘Confronting demographic change: a new solidarity between the generations’ (European Commission, 2005), as the first comprehensive EU-level document openly concerned with demographic sustainability, acknowledging the need for the European Union to address the childbearing, employment, public policy nexus. In the Renewed Sustainable Development Strategy (European Council, 2006), demographic sustainability has been discussed as one of the key challenges that Europe is facing, given the distortion in the age structure of the population and the labour force due to long-term low fertility. In the same year, a communication on ‘The demographic future of Europe – from challenge to opportunity’ (European Commission, 2006) has called for a constructive response to the demographic changes, especially in terms of reducing uncertainties for young adults entering the labour market and via effective gender equality policies facilitating choices about childbearing. The progress of such work has been monitored in the bi-annual Demography Reports since then. Concerns about low birth rates are clearly articulated in the first two demography reports, to be addressed mainly by facilitating the reconciliation of paid work and care (European Commission, 2007, 2008), but little attention has been paid to fertility in the 2010 report (European Commission, 2011) that instead emphasised that the era of extremely low (so-called lowest-low, that is less than 1.3 children per woman) fertility levels (seems to have) ended (see also Goldstein et al., 2009).

Nevertheless, we may need to be cautious and maintain concern about fertility trends in Europe for at least three reasons. First, as pointed out in a recent article by Sobotka and Lutz (2010), much of the recent increase in period total fertility rates is the result of the slowing down or end of the postponement of childbearing, particularly of entering parenthood. Consequently, the tempo distortion of fertility diminished greatly, but this does not mean a real increase of fertility. Second, in a number of European countries even the tempo-adjusted total fertility rates (see Vienna Institute of Demography, 2008, 2010, 2012) indicate (much) lower fertility levels than what the simple replacement of the population with relatively stable age structure would require. Third, in line with previous studies on cohort fertility (see e.g. Frejka and Sardon, 2004; Sardon and Robertson, 2004) a recent forecast indicates that completed cohort fertility rates for women born in the mid-/late 1970s will remain at or even below the critical level of fertility in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and be only slightly above that level in Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Greece (Myrskylä et al., 2012); that is one-third of EU Member States. As completed family size declined in these countries over the cohorts of women born in the 1950s and 1960s, the forecast results may call for close attention to the factors influencing childbearing choices and behaviour, even if the gap between personal ideal family size and completed cohort fertility may seem modest, as is often the case due to a downward adjustment of childbearing desires given the constraints of childbearing (see McDonald, 2000, 2007).

Indeed, at the individual and couple level, the link between childbearing decisions and one’s labour market position is likely to have strengthened in the past decades due to increased economic uncertainties related to substantial business cycle fluctuations and relatively high unemployment rates, rendering the male-breadwinner family model unviable. At the same time, as childbearing is increasingly perceived as risk and individuals and couples seek to minimise uncertainties in their lives (Beck, 1999), fertility choices, intentions as well as behaviour are likely to be affected by policies perceived as facilitating, or rather, constraining labour force participation and the balance between paid work and family life for (prospective) parents (McDonald, 2006). Hence, crosscountry differences in fertility levels are linked to women’s agency and capabilities in specific institutional settings given the possibilities and/or constraints to combine employment and childrearing. A better understanding of the interplay between paid work, welfare regimes/policy configurations and fertility choices may be thus essential for constructing policies that would increase the capabilities of families to have the number of children they wish to have (Hobson and Oláh, 2006b; Hobson and Fahlén, 2009) and thereby promote sustainable development. We focus on heterosexual individuals, not addressing processes around childbearing decisions in same-sex relationships, which are a topic per se. With this book, we seek to contribute to the knowledge base of policymaking as we shed more light on the role of increased labour market flexibility and of work–life balance policies for combining family and employment in relation to childbearing choices (intentions, desires) in different fertility regimes across Europe in the early 21st century. To our knowledge, no other comprehensive work (book or special journal issue) has taken on such a challenge during the past two decades or so, which makes this volume especially important.

2. Conceptual issues

2.1 Two key concepts

Based on the comprehensive literature of fertility decision-making, we have identified two key concepts that are particularly relevant to address the childbearing, female employment and work–life balance policy nexus. These are (i) uncertainty and risk, and (ii) incoherence. Although a variety of theories has been applied to build the theoretical frameworks of the different country chapters in this book, they all relate to these key concepts, providing a common platform to study the tensions young women and couples face while making choices about childbearing and paid work in specific institutional contexts. Here, we explain the main features of these concepts and their importance for our topic.

The concept of uncertainty and risk is highly relevant to understand decisions on employment and family formation in contemporary Europe, which are increasingly linked. In the past decades, national labour markets have become more and more deregulated due to increasing globalisation and the spread of social liberalism (Blossfeld et al., 2006; McDonald, 2006); wage inequalities have increased along with substantial variations in the gender earning gap within and across countries (see Brainerd, 2000; Machin, 2008); and eligibility to social benefits and services has become increasingly dependent on own labour force participation, strengthening the impact of economic uncertainties on childbearing decisions. High youth unemployment rates and a growing prevalence of temporary positions (e.g. fixed-term contracts, project employment) in a number of European countries, increases in women’s earning power but declines in men’s earnings as well as growing j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Funding
• 1. Introduction: Aspirations and Uncertainties. Childbearing Choices and Work–Life Realities in Europe
• 2. Work and Childbearing Intentions from a Capability Perspective: Young Adult Women in Sweden
• 3. Employment Instability and Childbearing Plans in a Child–Oriented Country: Evidence from France
• 4. Female Employment, Reconciliation Policies and Childbearing Intentions in East and West Germany
• 5. The Interplay of Fertility Intentions, Female Employment and Work–Life Balance Policies in Contemporary Poland: Can Gender Equity, Preference and Social Capital Theories Provide a Better Insight?
• 6. Unattainable Desires? Childbearing Capabilities in Early 21st–Century Hungary
• 7. Concluding Thoughts on Childbearing, Women’s Work and Work–Life Balance Policy Nexus in Europe in the Dawn of the 21st Century
• Index