JOIN USCareer women choose work over motherhood
In countries where women’s labour market opportunities expand but women are still expected to do most of the housework and childcare with little assistance from men, many women exercise the only choice available—they remain childless when work and family roles are too difficult to reconcile.
Perhaps even in the US, motherhood may be foregone as women devote time to careers and face the difficulty of “fitting it all” in when jobs are both fulfilling but also demanding of time and energy. Currently in the US, among women aged between 40 and 44, twenty per cent have never had a child, double the percentage 30 years ago, and this percentage rises to 27 per cent for those with graduate or professional degrees.
As we noted in a recent post based on a Pew Research Center report, as of 2008 greater education was generally associated with lower rates of motherhood — except for women with the most advanced degrees. That is, women with professional degrees and PhDs are slightly more likely to have had children than their counterparts with just master’s or bachelor’s degrees.
And compared to their equally educated counterparts from the early 1990s, today’s advanced-degree women are actually much more likely to have children by age 44. More than a third of these women with professional/PhD degrees in 1992-94 decided to forgo having children; in 2006-08, less than a quarter of such women made the same choice.
Perhaps this means that the employers of the most educated women have indeed been convinced to provide more flexible work arrangements, as Claudia Goldin has found for at least some careers.
Maybe a real-life “ Idiocracy” won’t be in our future, after all.