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Female labor force participation and fertility: Some methodological and theoretical considerations Monica S. Fong a
a b
East‐West Population Institute , Honolulu, Hawaii
b
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , Via delle Terme di Caracalla, Rome, 00100, Italy Published online: 23 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Monica S. Fong (1976) Female labor force participation and fertility: Some methodological and theoretical considerations, Biodemography and Social Biology, 23:1, 45-54, DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1976.9988202 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19485565.1976.9988202
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Female Labor Force Participation and Fertility: Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations
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Monica S. Fong* East-West Population Institute Honolulu, Hawaii
A new approach to discovering a consistent relationship between female employment and fertility valid over different stages of economic development is proposed. A better understanding of the relationship will be gained by taking into account: (1) ecological and individual levels of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of fertility and labor force participation; (3) the matching of current and historical perspective on both work and fertility; (4) measures of fertility that provide information on both the number and the spacing of children, and (5) an approach to measuring labor force participation that emphasizes the utilization of labor. ABSTRACT:
ing countries (e.g., Berelson, 1969; Blake, 1971; Davis, 1967; Heer, 1964; Kasarda, 1971). More research on the relationship between female employment and fertility is especially important in developing countries in order to discover if a relationship exists, explore its underlying causes, and suggest guidelines for more specific policy research. Because of the ambiguous findings of research to date, a new approach is needed.
This paper proposes a new way of clarifying the relationship between female employment and fertility, with special emphasis on societies in the early stages of economic development. Whereas female employment and fertility are generally inversely related in already developed economies, no clear-cut relationship can be found in developing economies. The absence of a uniform relationship is related to problems of measurement for both variables. New methods of investigating the relationship that will provide better insight into the relationship as well as improved measurements of both employment and fertility are given here. A clear understanding of this relationship is needed because a number of authors have suggested increasing the employment of women as a means to reduced fertility for both developed and develop-
EMPIRICAL STUDIES
The relationship between female labor force participation and fertility has been fairly well established and explained in both the United States and in Europe (United States: Bowen and Finegan, 1969; Cain, 1966; Mason, ms.; Mott, 1972; Ridley, 1969; Sweet, 1973. Europe: Berent, 1970; de Laval, 1970; Leroy, 1968.) It is not equally well understood in developing countries. Since the early work of Jaffe and Azumi (1960), a number of studies have
* Present address: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy.
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been done, based on both individual and aggregate data. Because of the different levels of analysis, these studies are not strictly comparable. Moreover, even within one level of analysis, different measures of fertility and of labor force participation render many of the findings difficult to evaluate in relation to each other. With these limitations in mind, the results of previous research on developing countries can be briefly summarized as follows. A negative relationship between female employment and fertility, similar to that in developed countries, has been found both with aggregate data (Ben-Porath, 1970; Collver, 1968; Hass, 1972; Heer and Turner, 1965; Maurer et al., 1973) and with individual data (Harman, 1970; Speare et al., 1973). Less conclusive evidence suggesting an ambiguous relationship, no relationship, or a positive relationship between work and fertility has also been found in several investigations (Mueller et al., ms.; Stycos and Weller, 1967; Zarate, 1967; for a list of relevant studies, see Weiler, 1971). THEORETICAL STUDIES
Attempts have been made to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings and to explain their underlying causes. These explanations draw upon demographic, economic, sociological, and psychological theory and encompass voluntary as well as involuntary restrictions on both employment and fertility. Voluntary restrictions on employment are exemplified by role conflict theory (Stycos and Weiler, 1967), work location (Jaffe and Azumi, 1960), role definitions (Fortney, 1971) and salary levels (Preston, 1971). Involuntary restrictions on employment encompass both the availability of employment (Preston, 1971) and of child care (Berent, 1970), lack of knowledge of fertility limitation (Stycos and Weiler, 1967), and social organization
Social Biology
and family structure (Youssef, 1974). Voluntary restrictions on fertility include both celibacy and the postponement of marriage (Dixon, 1973) and the decision to limit fertility through abstinence or contraception (Sastry, 1973). Involuntary restrictions on fertility encompass both involuntary celibacy and, theoretically at least, a marriage squeeze along with subfecundity and infertility (Stycos and Weiler, 1967). A more elaborate theory of causation from socioeconomic background to fertility to employment in a recursive relationship has also been advanced (Terry, 1974). It differs from the others in its treatment of the causal elements: (a) by postulating joint causation by an antecedent variable, socioeconomic status, and (b) by making both employment and fertility change from a dependent to an independent variable in a recursive model. This model goes further than the previous ones in exploring the different relationships between female employment and fertility. By attributing differences entirely to antecedent and primarily socioeconomic variables, it allows for no relationship at all between work and fertility. In fact, even when a considerable number of socioeconomic variables are controlled, empirical data have shown a relationship (U.S. Bureau of the Census, I973a,b; Fong, 1974; Mueller, ms.; Terry, 1974). Terry suggests that the remaining relationship she finds with U.S. data can be attributed to a failure to control for all relevant antecedent variables. If repeated efforts at control replicate this result, as we suggest they already have, the theory, even if correct, becomes unverifiable. Despite these efforts to explain the relationship between female employment and fertility, through both empirical and theoretical work, the need for a more thorough understanding of the interaction between work and childbearing remains. The num-
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ber of different explanations put forth call for a consolidation of findings into a more parsimonious explanation.
are current or cumulative; (4) the nature of the fertility measures; and (5) the nature of the work measures.
A NEW APPROACH
UNITS OF ANALYSIS
We suggest that full understanding of female employment and its relationship to fertility cannot be achieved without measuring each phenomenon on several new dimensions. These dimensions are basic to research other than labor force participation as well. However, because most labor force research to date has failed to measure either fertility or work on several or all of these dimensions, it is important to state them clearly. We outline these basic aspects of work and fertility when relating them to each other, despite the fact that they are by no means innovative to research in general. We suggest that it is the lack of attention to these important dimensions that is responsible for the failure to establish a clear-cut relationship between work and fertility. Moreover, no such relationship can be established with confidence unless these basic dimensions of work and fertility are taken into account explicitly.
The use of ecological data severely limits the conclusions as well as the precision of the findings in a study relating female employment to fertility. Since areal data are appropriate only for areal inferences, the specifics of the relationship between female employment and fertility cannot be fully explored to advantage with areal data. On the other hand, individual data are not appropriate for areal inferences either (Weiler, 1973). For making national policies with respect to female employment and fertility, it is important to study the relationship on a national level. In order to gain a thorough understanding, both individual and areal data should be examined. Individual data can yield information on the details of the interaction between work and fertility. They are necessary for establishing a causal relationship. Areal data yield information better suited for policy purposes than individual data. As pointed out by Weiler (1973), if female labor force participation is to be used as a policy to lower the birth rate, it must be measured on the same level as the birth rate, namely, with cross-sectional period data.
We are at present making plans for the preliminary testing of this argument in a survey of female employment in a developing country. We hope that the results of this survey will give a firmer basis for our recommendations. At the same time, we would like to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between female employment and fertility through discussion of the new approach at this date, and we also wish to make it available for more extensive testing. The new approach takes into account five basic dimensions that are new or little used in the analysis of labor force participation and fertility: (1) the units of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of work and fertility; (3) whether the measures used
LIFE-CYCLE CONSIDERATIONS
Because both fertility and employment are likely to vary with different stages of the life cycle and not in the same way, it is desirable to delimit these stages into standard five-year age or marital duration groups. If employment presents a bimodal curve when classified by age or marital duration, and age-specific as well as cumulative fertility presents the typical unimodal curves (Figure 1), then relating overall employment to overall fertility is likely to
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30
10 •
Age
IS
SO
Fie. 1.—Labor force participation rates (LFPR), age-specific fertility rates (ASFR), and children ever born (CEB), expressed as percentages of maximum rate by five-year age groups, United States females, 1970 (from U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1973 a,b; National Center for Health Statistics, 1974).
obscure rather than clarify whatever relationship exists between the two variables. As is evident in Figure 1, the overall relationship is a combination of both positive and negative relationships in each age group. Thus, the correlation between the measures of work and of fertility represents at best the dominant trend of the relationship; at worst, an average of little meaning. For instance, in Figure 1 the agespecific fertility rates and labor force participation rates in age group 15-19 are positively related; both rates increase to the 20-24 year age group, where they maintain a positive relationship, but decline together. Number of children ever born increases with labor force participation rates in age group 15-19, a positive relationship, and continues to increase in the next age group 20-24, when labor force participation rates decline, the correlation thus
Social Biology
becoming negative. In age group 30-34, the correlation again becomes positive, only to switch sign in the next age group, 35-39, when the number of children ever born declines. This latter relationship is, of course, confined to period rates. For cohort rates, the number of children ever born obviously shows a monotonie increase over age. Their relationship to labor force participation also changes, but only with variations in the labor force participation by age. It is clear that relating fertility to work becomes meaningful only when age is held constant, which is most easily accomplished by analyzing the relationship in five-year age groups. The same division can be made using five-year marriage groupings, i.e., marriage cohorts, but labor force data are rarely tabulated or collected in this format. CURRENT VERSUS CUMULATIVE MEASURES
When related to fertility, employment is often measured in current terms, i.e., whether the woman is employed or not at the time of interview or some specified time period preceding it. Fertility, on the other hand, is more often than not measured in cumulative terms, namely children ever born. Cumulative fertility is likely to affect current employment, although the direction is not clear. A woman with many children may not have the time to work, or she may have to work in order to feed them. However, cumulative fertility will also affect "cumulative employment." By "cumulative employment" we mean past employment experience, such as number of years worked or proportion of married life worked. In studies relating work and fertility, it is therefore important to include some measures of past as well as current employment when cumulative fertility measures are used. By the same token, current employment must be related to current fertility as well
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as to cumulative fertility. Current fertility can be measured as number of children under five, "own children present in the home" under five, or number of years since last birth. It measures much more immediately the pressure of time and conflicting demands between work and fertility. A woman with two children born twelve and nine years ago, for instance, will not experience the same constraints on her work outside the home as a woman with two children, born one and three years ago; yet, measured by cumulative measures, their fertility is the same. Hence, it is important to include measures of current fertility, when studying current or recent employment. IMPROVED FERTILITY MEASURES
Fertility must be measured both cumulatively and currently, both in terms of past fertility and in terms of recent or current fertility. Both the number of children ever born and the number of children under, say, five years of age must be measured. A very useful approach to recent fertility is the measurement of own children, under a specified age present in the home, the so-called "own children approach" (Cho et al., 1970). The "own children approach" allocates children to their mothers in the same household. For "own children" estimates of fertility, births in previous years as calculated by "reverse-survival" of the children present. In studying the relationship between work and fertility, "own children" are only enumerated with their mothers in a census or survey. The chief advantages of using own children data in relating fertility and employment are: (1) as with fertility estimates, the enumeration and coverage of young children is improved by this method ; (2) it is children present in the home that affect or are affected by the mother's work. Children born but not reared by the mother
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are likely to have much less effect on her work. However, whether the children are own children or adopted children may be less relevant in this context than in estimating fertility. Thus, it is through the measurement of young children present in the home that the relationship of fertility and work can be understood. Of course, fertility may, in addition, be measured in terms of both past performance and future plans. While it is not likely to have as pronounced a relationship to work as own children under five present in the home, total number of births may also be meaningfully related to work. This is true both of current work, which may be influenced by the dependency burden of children, and of past work, which may be more or less continuous depending upon past births. Births planned in the future are also associated with work. A woman who has completed her desired family size faces a different work situation than a woman who plans to have two more children. Intervals between births are also related to work. Shorter intervals may mean a longer expectation of working life once childbearing is completed. Combinations of intervals and numbers such as the new measures of child dependency proposed by Schnaiberg (1973) also show great promise in relating work and fertility. Both in life-cycle studies of this relationship, and in studies of periods such as five years, child dependency offers a clear measure of a very pertinent aspect of fertility, principally by giving an index of the cost of children. This index measures the cost in time as well as in money, which may leave a certain ambiguity, to the extent that time and money are interchangeable. It becomes increasingly clear that all these measures of the different dimensions of fertility and their potential influence upon woman's work may profitably be
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taken into account in studying the relationship of work and fertility. This statement is not merely a call for more complete data. Rather, we argue that it is important to measure one particular dimension of fertility when relating it to work, namely dependency. Own children under five present in the home, birth intervals, and the childdependency measure all address different aspects of dependency. It is also in their measure of dependency that total number of births and planned births are relevant, again as much as substitutes for spacing as for the actual number of children. IMPROVED MEASURES OF WORK
Employment, even more than fertility, will benefit from new and more detailed measurements. The applicability of the concept of labor force participation in a non-Western setting has been questioned extensively (for a summary, see Myrdal, 1968, Volume II, and United Nations, ECAFE, 1972). Even if the concept, defined as work for income, can be used meaningfully in developing countries, its traditional measurement has been less than completely successful. The Western concept of labor force participation is meaningful only as long as work is a dichotomy of employment and unemployment. For the employed, it implies constant work participation by days per week (say five or six) and by hours per day (normally eight in Western countries). In many less developed economies, the mean time input may not only be considerably lower, but the variance in input per worker is much greater both on a daily basis and on a seasonal basis. Therefore, the traditional dichotomization into labor force and nonlabor force, employed and unemployed, does not yield a meaningful measure of the supply of labor or its activities. The very absence of unemployment com-
Social Biology
pensation, as Myrdal (1968) points out, makes unemployment too costly on an individual as well as a societal basis. Persons who would otherwise be unemployed are absorbed and supported by various forms of activity with low or inefficient input of time. In this way, male workers who become unemployed disappear among the vast numbers of underutilized employed; many more are absorbed directly into this sector. Women are even more susceptible than men to this form of "disguised unemployment," or even "disguised employment," i.e., they do work, but they do so intermittently and in the context of the household and are therefore not counted as members of the labor force at all. For employed women, especially when they have child and household responsibilities, the time input is frequently both less than the assumed full-time norm and more variable. In more developed economies, the labor force participation of women can be meaningfully related to fertility because variance around the full-time norm for work is small enough not to obscure the relationship of work and fertility, and also because the measurement of work is often considerably more detailed than the simple labor force dichotomy. Developing economies, however, do not have such a well-defined full-time norm, nor small enough variance around the norm. For women, this can be ascribed, on the one hand, to constraints imposed by the labor market in terms of jobs and, on the other, to familial constraints imposed by childbearing and rearing. Moreover, when data on female work participation are gathered, they are often not detailed enough to give information on differences in work input. Additional problems are introduced by the implicit assumption of constant productivity. In a non-Western context, the assumption of an input of skills that is both
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high and constant for different workers and results in constant productivity is not well founded. Thus, the statistics on the labor force participation of either sex need to be fleshed out to give a more accurate picture of the manpower supply. Statistics on female labor force participation particularly need greater detail and are even more likely than male rates to be improved by a new approach to collecting data on work. Greater detail in work information for females will, in addition, make possible more meaningful studies of the relationship between work and fertility. Recent developments in the measurement of manpower in developing regions, the labor utilization and the CAMS/ODA approach (Council of Asian Manpower Studies and the Organization of Demographic Associates) make considerable progress towards solving some of the existing problems of measuring work (Häuser, 1971, 1972, 1973; see also, Domingo, 1974; Hong Kong Census and Statistics Dept., 1974; Khoo and Palan, 1974; Lim, 1974; and Thailand Nati. Statistics Office, 1974). The labor utilization approach measures employment contrasted not only with unemployment but also with several forms of underemployment, namely by hours of work, by income, or by overqualification for the particular form of employment, termed "mismatch" of education and employment. The CAMS/ODA approach measures work on several additional dimensions, namely work in agriculture or in nonagriculture, work in the home or outside, work for a family member or for an outside person, work for payment in cash or payment in kind. Thus, the underutilization approach partly solves the problem of the variance in time input by asking a question on hours worked. If hours worked are tabulated by the week rather than by the day, the vari-
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ance in unknown input is reduced on two counts: variance in hours per day and days per week. However, the utilization approach does not take into account seasonality. The unknown variation introduced by seasonality can be partly handled by asking questions on hours worked at different times in the year. For illiterate populations unused to strict accounting of time, this approach may be the best solution to the problems of measurement imposed by seasonal variation. For other groups, empirical testing may show a month by month or season by season accounting of work schedules to be sufficiently accurate. More research is needed to determine how accurate such accounting is. The effect upon fertility of seasonally varying work has not been studied extensively (to the author's knowledge, not at all) and is, moreover, difficult to predict on a theoretical basis. The underutilization by income and by mismatch touch upon problems of differences in productivity. While productivity is of minor importance in a microlevel analysis of the determinants of fertility and employment, it has important implications for employment policies whether or not they are combined with fertility policies on a national level. Measuring underutilization by income looks at productivity from the point of view of actual output, assuming a close correlation between the price of labor and wages and a constant level of capital input and of profits. Measuring underutilization by mismatch of education and income looks at productivity from the point of view of potential output, assuming a close relationship among ability, education, and work skills. Neither approach or both together give a measure of productivity, nor claim to. At the same time, they give much fuller information on the labor force from the point of view of productivity than the standard approach.
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Fong When focusing on the determinants of fertility or work on the individual level, however, labor utilization by income and by mismatch assumes another importance. Work for inadequate compensation or work not commensurate with a woman's training is likely to have a very different effect on her fertility than economically and psychologically rewarding employment. Her commitment to work is likely to be much weaker. The entire utilization approach becomes especially useful when relating the work of women to fertility. We hypothesize that, given a situation where work and child care are antithetical, the less fully utilized a woman is in the labor force the higher her fertility and vice versa. Whether employment is posited as the independent variable or as the dependent variable, the lower the utilization of the individual, the less keen the conflict between the work and family—regarded in terms of a conflict of roles or simply in terms of a conflict of time—and the higher the fertility. Thus, a negative relationship between work and fertility will occur only where labor utilization is high enough to cause a conflict between work and family. Similarly, the greater the utilization, the keener will the conflict between work and fertility become. The CAMS/ODA approach does not address unemployment and underemployment per se, but is used to identify subfields in the economy particularly plagued by low utilization. Work is classified along four main axes, in addition to the standard labor force/nonlabor force dichtotomy. They can also be combined with the labor utilization approach, to greater advantage than can the standard labor force approach. The four axes are: (1) agriculture/nonagriculture; (2) home/outside the home; (3) family/nonfamily enterprise; and (4) payment in cash/payment in kind.
Social Biology
A cross-tabulation on these axes or dimensions, in combination with either approach to measuring the work force, yields substantially fuller information on the activity of the population, the manpower supply, the employment needs, and the information required for planning development strategies than does a standard occupation and industry approach. When relating the work of women to fertility, this approach also becomes potentially very useful. Work in agriculture, for instance, is likely to have little or no impact on fertility compared to work outside agriculture. Similarly, work at home is less likely to limit fertility than work outside the home. Work for the family is also less likely to affect fertility than work for someone else. Payment in cash or in kind presents a less clear dichotomy with respect to effects on employment, but payment in cash would appear more likely to affect fertility than payment in kind. This is not necessarily a direct causal relationship, but more likely an indirect one through the involvement in a market rather than a subsistence economy, with concomitant implications of modernization. SUMMARY
Theoretical and logical considerations suggest that a better understanding of the relationship between fertility and work for women may be gained by taking into account the considerations outlined above, namely: (1) the ecological or individual level of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of fertility and labor force participation, through the use of small age groups in the analysis, or cohort data, if available; (3) the matching of current or historical perspective on both work and fertility; (4) more complete measures of fertility, taking into account both the number and the spacing of children; (5) a new approach
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to measuring the labor force and labor force participation, as outlined in the CAMS and ODA approaches. Our main emphasis is not on the need for more data, although that is a part of the guidelines, but on the need for different data and different combinations of fertility and work data. The collection of labor force data, in particular, need to be approached differently than in the past. Both the gainful worker approach and the labor force approach were designed to measure the work of men in a Western setting. They were not designed, nor can they be expected to give useful service, for measuring the very different work of women in developing economies, much less in relating work to other variables, such as fertility. It is hardly surprising that the re-
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lationship between work and fertility is so elusive under these circumstances. Neither the labor force dimension, nor the other dimensions have been taken widely into account in studies of work and fertility in developing countries. The most frequently used dimension is the life-cycle dimension, which is partly taken into account by the use of fivt-year age groups. However, no study has been made using all the dimensions outlined here. We contend that the use of these dimensions is necessary to gain a full understanding of the relationship between female employment and fertility. Obviously, reality will provide the best test of their validity. We hope that this framework will be widely tested so that this outline can be built upon and refined, if the approach proves useful.
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sus of population: Employment status and work experience. PC(2)-6A. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. _____. 1973b. 1970 Census of population: Women by number of children ever born. PC(2)-3A. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. WELLER, R. H. 1968 The employment of wives, role incompatibility and fertility. Milbank Mem. Fund Quart. 46:507-527. _____. 1971. The impact of employment upon fertility, p.154-166. In A. Michel, Family isNATIONAL CENTER FOR HEALTH STATISTICS. 1974. sues of employed women in Europe and AmerMonthly vital statistics report. Brockville. Md. ica. E. J. Bill, Leiden. PRESTON, S. H. 1971. Marital fertility and female _____. 1973. Female labor force participation, employment opportunity: United States, 1969. fertility and population policy. Contributed paPaper delivered at the meeting of the Populaper to the International Population Conference, tion Association of America, Washington, D.C. Liège. Mimeo. RIDLEY, J. C. 1969. The changing position of YOUSSEF, N. H. 1974. Women and work in deAmerican women: Education, labor force parveloping societies. Institute of International ticipation and fertility, p.199-250. In Fogarty Studies of California, Berkeley. International Center, Proceeding No.3, The ZARATE, A. O. 1967. Fertility in urban areas of family in transition. Bethesda, Md. Mexico: Implications for the theory of demoSASTRY, R. K. 1973. Female work participation graphic transition. Demography 4:363-373.
Biodemography and Social Biology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hsbi20
Female labor force participation and fertility: Some methodological and theoretical considerations Monica S. Fong a
a b
East‐West Population Institute , Honolulu, Hawaii
b
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , Via delle Terme di Caracalla, Rome, 00100, Italy Published online: 23 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Monica S. Fong (1976) Female labor force participation and fertility: Some methodological and theoretical considerations, Biodemography and Social Biology, 23:1, 45-54, DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1976.9988202 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19485565.1976.9988202
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Female Labor Force Participation and Fertility: Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations
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Monica S. Fong* East-West Population Institute Honolulu, Hawaii
A new approach to discovering a consistent relationship between female employment and fertility valid over different stages of economic development is proposed. A better understanding of the relationship will be gained by taking into account: (1) ecological and individual levels of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of fertility and labor force participation; (3) the matching of current and historical perspective on both work and fertility; (4) measures of fertility that provide information on both the number and the spacing of children, and (5) an approach to measuring labor force participation that emphasizes the utilization of labor. ABSTRACT:
ing countries (e.g., Berelson, 1969; Blake, 1971; Davis, 1967; Heer, 1964; Kasarda, 1971). More research on the relationship between female employment and fertility is especially important in developing countries in order to discover if a relationship exists, explore its underlying causes, and suggest guidelines for more specific policy research. Because of the ambiguous findings of research to date, a new approach is needed.
This paper proposes a new way of clarifying the relationship between female employment and fertility, with special emphasis on societies in the early stages of economic development. Whereas female employment and fertility are generally inversely related in already developed economies, no clear-cut relationship can be found in developing economies. The absence of a uniform relationship is related to problems of measurement for both variables. New methods of investigating the relationship that will provide better insight into the relationship as well as improved measurements of both employment and fertility are given here. A clear understanding of this relationship is needed because a number of authors have suggested increasing the employment of women as a means to reduced fertility for both developed and develop-
EMPIRICAL STUDIES
The relationship between female labor force participation and fertility has been fairly well established and explained in both the United States and in Europe (United States: Bowen and Finegan, 1969; Cain, 1966; Mason, ms.; Mott, 1972; Ridley, 1969; Sweet, 1973. Europe: Berent, 1970; de Laval, 1970; Leroy, 1968.) It is not equally well understood in developing countries. Since the early work of Jaffe and Azumi (1960), a number of studies have
* Present address: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy.
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been done, based on both individual and aggregate data. Because of the different levels of analysis, these studies are not strictly comparable. Moreover, even within one level of analysis, different measures of fertility and of labor force participation render many of the findings difficult to evaluate in relation to each other. With these limitations in mind, the results of previous research on developing countries can be briefly summarized as follows. A negative relationship between female employment and fertility, similar to that in developed countries, has been found both with aggregate data (Ben-Porath, 1970; Collver, 1968; Hass, 1972; Heer and Turner, 1965; Maurer et al., 1973) and with individual data (Harman, 1970; Speare et al., 1973). Less conclusive evidence suggesting an ambiguous relationship, no relationship, or a positive relationship between work and fertility has also been found in several investigations (Mueller et al., ms.; Stycos and Weller, 1967; Zarate, 1967; for a list of relevant studies, see Weiler, 1971). THEORETICAL STUDIES
Attempts have been made to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings and to explain their underlying causes. These explanations draw upon demographic, economic, sociological, and psychological theory and encompass voluntary as well as involuntary restrictions on both employment and fertility. Voluntary restrictions on employment are exemplified by role conflict theory (Stycos and Weiler, 1967), work location (Jaffe and Azumi, 1960), role definitions (Fortney, 1971) and salary levels (Preston, 1971). Involuntary restrictions on employment encompass both the availability of employment (Preston, 1971) and of child care (Berent, 1970), lack of knowledge of fertility limitation (Stycos and Weiler, 1967), and social organization
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and family structure (Youssef, 1974). Voluntary restrictions on fertility include both celibacy and the postponement of marriage (Dixon, 1973) and the decision to limit fertility through abstinence or contraception (Sastry, 1973). Involuntary restrictions on fertility encompass both involuntary celibacy and, theoretically at least, a marriage squeeze along with subfecundity and infertility (Stycos and Weiler, 1967). A more elaborate theory of causation from socioeconomic background to fertility to employment in a recursive relationship has also been advanced (Terry, 1974). It differs from the others in its treatment of the causal elements: (a) by postulating joint causation by an antecedent variable, socioeconomic status, and (b) by making both employment and fertility change from a dependent to an independent variable in a recursive model. This model goes further than the previous ones in exploring the different relationships between female employment and fertility. By attributing differences entirely to antecedent and primarily socioeconomic variables, it allows for no relationship at all between work and fertility. In fact, even when a considerable number of socioeconomic variables are controlled, empirical data have shown a relationship (U.S. Bureau of the Census, I973a,b; Fong, 1974; Mueller, ms.; Terry, 1974). Terry suggests that the remaining relationship she finds with U.S. data can be attributed to a failure to control for all relevant antecedent variables. If repeated efforts at control replicate this result, as we suggest they already have, the theory, even if correct, becomes unverifiable. Despite these efforts to explain the relationship between female employment and fertility, through both empirical and theoretical work, the need for a more thorough understanding of the interaction between work and childbearing remains. The num-
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ber of different explanations put forth call for a consolidation of findings into a more parsimonious explanation.
are current or cumulative; (4) the nature of the fertility measures; and (5) the nature of the work measures.
A NEW APPROACH
UNITS OF ANALYSIS
We suggest that full understanding of female employment and its relationship to fertility cannot be achieved without measuring each phenomenon on several new dimensions. These dimensions are basic to research other than labor force participation as well. However, because most labor force research to date has failed to measure either fertility or work on several or all of these dimensions, it is important to state them clearly. We outline these basic aspects of work and fertility when relating them to each other, despite the fact that they are by no means innovative to research in general. We suggest that it is the lack of attention to these important dimensions that is responsible for the failure to establish a clear-cut relationship between work and fertility. Moreover, no such relationship can be established with confidence unless these basic dimensions of work and fertility are taken into account explicitly.
The use of ecological data severely limits the conclusions as well as the precision of the findings in a study relating female employment to fertility. Since areal data are appropriate only for areal inferences, the specifics of the relationship between female employment and fertility cannot be fully explored to advantage with areal data. On the other hand, individual data are not appropriate for areal inferences either (Weiler, 1973). For making national policies with respect to female employment and fertility, it is important to study the relationship on a national level. In order to gain a thorough understanding, both individual and areal data should be examined. Individual data can yield information on the details of the interaction between work and fertility. They are necessary for establishing a causal relationship. Areal data yield information better suited for policy purposes than individual data. As pointed out by Weiler (1973), if female labor force participation is to be used as a policy to lower the birth rate, it must be measured on the same level as the birth rate, namely, with cross-sectional period data.
We are at present making plans for the preliminary testing of this argument in a survey of female employment in a developing country. We hope that the results of this survey will give a firmer basis for our recommendations. At the same time, we would like to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between female employment and fertility through discussion of the new approach at this date, and we also wish to make it available for more extensive testing. The new approach takes into account five basic dimensions that are new or little used in the analysis of labor force participation and fertility: (1) the units of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of work and fertility; (3) whether the measures used
LIFE-CYCLE CONSIDERATIONS
Because both fertility and employment are likely to vary with different stages of the life cycle and not in the same way, it is desirable to delimit these stages into standard five-year age or marital duration groups. If employment presents a bimodal curve when classified by age or marital duration, and age-specific as well as cumulative fertility presents the typical unimodal curves (Figure 1), then relating overall employment to overall fertility is likely to
Fong
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30
10 •
Age
IS
SO
Fie. 1.—Labor force participation rates (LFPR), age-specific fertility rates (ASFR), and children ever born (CEB), expressed as percentages of maximum rate by five-year age groups, United States females, 1970 (from U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1973 a,b; National Center for Health Statistics, 1974).
obscure rather than clarify whatever relationship exists between the two variables. As is evident in Figure 1, the overall relationship is a combination of both positive and negative relationships in each age group. Thus, the correlation between the measures of work and of fertility represents at best the dominant trend of the relationship; at worst, an average of little meaning. For instance, in Figure 1 the agespecific fertility rates and labor force participation rates in age group 15-19 are positively related; both rates increase to the 20-24 year age group, where they maintain a positive relationship, but decline together. Number of children ever born increases with labor force participation rates in age group 15-19, a positive relationship, and continues to increase in the next age group 20-24, when labor force participation rates decline, the correlation thus
Social Biology
becoming negative. In age group 30-34, the correlation again becomes positive, only to switch sign in the next age group, 35-39, when the number of children ever born declines. This latter relationship is, of course, confined to period rates. For cohort rates, the number of children ever born obviously shows a monotonie increase over age. Their relationship to labor force participation also changes, but only with variations in the labor force participation by age. It is clear that relating fertility to work becomes meaningful only when age is held constant, which is most easily accomplished by analyzing the relationship in five-year age groups. The same division can be made using five-year marriage groupings, i.e., marriage cohorts, but labor force data are rarely tabulated or collected in this format. CURRENT VERSUS CUMULATIVE MEASURES
When related to fertility, employment is often measured in current terms, i.e., whether the woman is employed or not at the time of interview or some specified time period preceding it. Fertility, on the other hand, is more often than not measured in cumulative terms, namely children ever born. Cumulative fertility is likely to affect current employment, although the direction is not clear. A woman with many children may not have the time to work, or she may have to work in order to feed them. However, cumulative fertility will also affect "cumulative employment." By "cumulative employment" we mean past employment experience, such as number of years worked or proportion of married life worked. In studies relating work and fertility, it is therefore important to include some measures of past as well as current employment when cumulative fertility measures are used. By the same token, current employment must be related to current fertility as well
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as to cumulative fertility. Current fertility can be measured as number of children under five, "own children present in the home" under five, or number of years since last birth. It measures much more immediately the pressure of time and conflicting demands between work and fertility. A woman with two children born twelve and nine years ago, for instance, will not experience the same constraints on her work outside the home as a woman with two children, born one and three years ago; yet, measured by cumulative measures, their fertility is the same. Hence, it is important to include measures of current fertility, when studying current or recent employment. IMPROVED FERTILITY MEASURES
Fertility must be measured both cumulatively and currently, both in terms of past fertility and in terms of recent or current fertility. Both the number of children ever born and the number of children under, say, five years of age must be measured. A very useful approach to recent fertility is the measurement of own children, under a specified age present in the home, the so-called "own children approach" (Cho et al., 1970). The "own children approach" allocates children to their mothers in the same household. For "own children" estimates of fertility, births in previous years as calculated by "reverse-survival" of the children present. In studying the relationship between work and fertility, "own children" are only enumerated with their mothers in a census or survey. The chief advantages of using own children data in relating fertility and employment are: (1) as with fertility estimates, the enumeration and coverage of young children is improved by this method ; (2) it is children present in the home that affect or are affected by the mother's work. Children born but not reared by the mother
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are likely to have much less effect on her work. However, whether the children are own children or adopted children may be less relevant in this context than in estimating fertility. Thus, it is through the measurement of young children present in the home that the relationship of fertility and work can be understood. Of course, fertility may, in addition, be measured in terms of both past performance and future plans. While it is not likely to have as pronounced a relationship to work as own children under five present in the home, total number of births may also be meaningfully related to work. This is true both of current work, which may be influenced by the dependency burden of children, and of past work, which may be more or less continuous depending upon past births. Births planned in the future are also associated with work. A woman who has completed her desired family size faces a different work situation than a woman who plans to have two more children. Intervals between births are also related to work. Shorter intervals may mean a longer expectation of working life once childbearing is completed. Combinations of intervals and numbers such as the new measures of child dependency proposed by Schnaiberg (1973) also show great promise in relating work and fertility. Both in life-cycle studies of this relationship, and in studies of periods such as five years, child dependency offers a clear measure of a very pertinent aspect of fertility, principally by giving an index of the cost of children. This index measures the cost in time as well as in money, which may leave a certain ambiguity, to the extent that time and money are interchangeable. It becomes increasingly clear that all these measures of the different dimensions of fertility and their potential influence upon woman's work may profitably be
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taken into account in studying the relationship of work and fertility. This statement is not merely a call for more complete data. Rather, we argue that it is important to measure one particular dimension of fertility when relating it to work, namely dependency. Own children under five present in the home, birth intervals, and the childdependency measure all address different aspects of dependency. It is also in their measure of dependency that total number of births and planned births are relevant, again as much as substitutes for spacing as for the actual number of children. IMPROVED MEASURES OF WORK
Employment, even more than fertility, will benefit from new and more detailed measurements. The applicability of the concept of labor force participation in a non-Western setting has been questioned extensively (for a summary, see Myrdal, 1968, Volume II, and United Nations, ECAFE, 1972). Even if the concept, defined as work for income, can be used meaningfully in developing countries, its traditional measurement has been less than completely successful. The Western concept of labor force participation is meaningful only as long as work is a dichotomy of employment and unemployment. For the employed, it implies constant work participation by days per week (say five or six) and by hours per day (normally eight in Western countries). In many less developed economies, the mean time input may not only be considerably lower, but the variance in input per worker is much greater both on a daily basis and on a seasonal basis. Therefore, the traditional dichotomization into labor force and nonlabor force, employed and unemployed, does not yield a meaningful measure of the supply of labor or its activities. The very absence of unemployment com-
Social Biology
pensation, as Myrdal (1968) points out, makes unemployment too costly on an individual as well as a societal basis. Persons who would otherwise be unemployed are absorbed and supported by various forms of activity with low or inefficient input of time. In this way, male workers who become unemployed disappear among the vast numbers of underutilized employed; many more are absorbed directly into this sector. Women are even more susceptible than men to this form of "disguised unemployment," or even "disguised employment," i.e., they do work, but they do so intermittently and in the context of the household and are therefore not counted as members of the labor force at all. For employed women, especially when they have child and household responsibilities, the time input is frequently both less than the assumed full-time norm and more variable. In more developed economies, the labor force participation of women can be meaningfully related to fertility because variance around the full-time norm for work is small enough not to obscure the relationship of work and fertility, and also because the measurement of work is often considerably more detailed than the simple labor force dichotomy. Developing economies, however, do not have such a well-defined full-time norm, nor small enough variance around the norm. For women, this can be ascribed, on the one hand, to constraints imposed by the labor market in terms of jobs and, on the other, to familial constraints imposed by childbearing and rearing. Moreover, when data on female work participation are gathered, they are often not detailed enough to give information on differences in work input. Additional problems are introduced by the implicit assumption of constant productivity. In a non-Western context, the assumption of an input of skills that is both
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high and constant for different workers and results in constant productivity is not well founded. Thus, the statistics on the labor force participation of either sex need to be fleshed out to give a more accurate picture of the manpower supply. Statistics on female labor force participation particularly need greater detail and are even more likely than male rates to be improved by a new approach to collecting data on work. Greater detail in work information for females will, in addition, make possible more meaningful studies of the relationship between work and fertility. Recent developments in the measurement of manpower in developing regions, the labor utilization and the CAMS/ODA approach (Council of Asian Manpower Studies and the Organization of Demographic Associates) make considerable progress towards solving some of the existing problems of measuring work (Häuser, 1971, 1972, 1973; see also, Domingo, 1974; Hong Kong Census and Statistics Dept., 1974; Khoo and Palan, 1974; Lim, 1974; and Thailand Nati. Statistics Office, 1974). The labor utilization approach measures employment contrasted not only with unemployment but also with several forms of underemployment, namely by hours of work, by income, or by overqualification for the particular form of employment, termed "mismatch" of education and employment. The CAMS/ODA approach measures work on several additional dimensions, namely work in agriculture or in nonagriculture, work in the home or outside, work for a family member or for an outside person, work for payment in cash or payment in kind. Thus, the underutilization approach partly solves the problem of the variance in time input by asking a question on hours worked. If hours worked are tabulated by the week rather than by the day, the vari-
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ance in unknown input is reduced on two counts: variance in hours per day and days per week. However, the utilization approach does not take into account seasonality. The unknown variation introduced by seasonality can be partly handled by asking questions on hours worked at different times in the year. For illiterate populations unused to strict accounting of time, this approach may be the best solution to the problems of measurement imposed by seasonal variation. For other groups, empirical testing may show a month by month or season by season accounting of work schedules to be sufficiently accurate. More research is needed to determine how accurate such accounting is. The effect upon fertility of seasonally varying work has not been studied extensively (to the author's knowledge, not at all) and is, moreover, difficult to predict on a theoretical basis. The underutilization by income and by mismatch touch upon problems of differences in productivity. While productivity is of minor importance in a microlevel analysis of the determinants of fertility and employment, it has important implications for employment policies whether or not they are combined with fertility policies on a national level. Measuring underutilization by income looks at productivity from the point of view of actual output, assuming a close correlation between the price of labor and wages and a constant level of capital input and of profits. Measuring underutilization by mismatch of education and income looks at productivity from the point of view of potential output, assuming a close relationship among ability, education, and work skills. Neither approach or both together give a measure of productivity, nor claim to. At the same time, they give much fuller information on the labor force from the point of view of productivity than the standard approach.
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Fong When focusing on the determinants of fertility or work on the individual level, however, labor utilization by income and by mismatch assumes another importance. Work for inadequate compensation or work not commensurate with a woman's training is likely to have a very different effect on her fertility than economically and psychologically rewarding employment. Her commitment to work is likely to be much weaker. The entire utilization approach becomes especially useful when relating the work of women to fertility. We hypothesize that, given a situation where work and child care are antithetical, the less fully utilized a woman is in the labor force the higher her fertility and vice versa. Whether employment is posited as the independent variable or as the dependent variable, the lower the utilization of the individual, the less keen the conflict between the work and family—regarded in terms of a conflict of roles or simply in terms of a conflict of time—and the higher the fertility. Thus, a negative relationship between work and fertility will occur only where labor utilization is high enough to cause a conflict between work and family. Similarly, the greater the utilization, the keener will the conflict between work and fertility become. The CAMS/ODA approach does not address unemployment and underemployment per se, but is used to identify subfields in the economy particularly plagued by low utilization. Work is classified along four main axes, in addition to the standard labor force/nonlabor force dichtotomy. They can also be combined with the labor utilization approach, to greater advantage than can the standard labor force approach. The four axes are: (1) agriculture/nonagriculture; (2) home/outside the home; (3) family/nonfamily enterprise; and (4) payment in cash/payment in kind.
Social Biology
A cross-tabulation on these axes or dimensions, in combination with either approach to measuring the work force, yields substantially fuller information on the activity of the population, the manpower supply, the employment needs, and the information required for planning development strategies than does a standard occupation and industry approach. When relating the work of women to fertility, this approach also becomes potentially very useful. Work in agriculture, for instance, is likely to have little or no impact on fertility compared to work outside agriculture. Similarly, work at home is less likely to limit fertility than work outside the home. Work for the family is also less likely to affect fertility than work for someone else. Payment in cash or in kind presents a less clear dichotomy with respect to effects on employment, but payment in cash would appear more likely to affect fertility than payment in kind. This is not necessarily a direct causal relationship, but more likely an indirect one through the involvement in a market rather than a subsistence economy, with concomitant implications of modernization. SUMMARY
Theoretical and logical considerations suggest that a better understanding of the relationship between fertility and work for women may be gained by taking into account the considerations outlined above, namely: (1) the ecological or individual level of analysis; (2) the life-cycle aspects of fertility and labor force participation, through the use of small age groups in the analysis, or cohort data, if available; (3) the matching of current or historical perspective on both work and fertility; (4) more complete measures of fertility, taking into account both the number and the spacing of children; (5) a new approach
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to measuring the labor force and labor force participation, as outlined in the CAMS and ODA approaches. Our main emphasis is not on the need for more data, although that is a part of the guidelines, but on the need for different data and different combinations of fertility and work data. The collection of labor force data, in particular, need to be approached differently than in the past. Both the gainful worker approach and the labor force approach were designed to measure the work of men in a Western setting. They were not designed, nor can they be expected to give useful service, for measuring the very different work of women in developing economies, much less in relating work to other variables, such as fertility. It is hardly surprising that the re-
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lationship between work and fertility is so elusive under these circumstances. Neither the labor force dimension, nor the other dimensions have been taken widely into account in studies of work and fertility in developing countries. The most frequently used dimension is the life-cycle dimension, which is partly taken into account by the use of fivt-year age groups. However, no study has been made using all the dimensions outlined here. We contend that the use of these dimensions is necessary to gain a full understanding of the relationship between female employment and fertility. Obviously, reality will provide the best test of their validity. We hope that this framework will be widely tested so that this outline can be built upon and refined, if the approach proves useful.
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