Change of women's employment patterns in Spain - implications for fertility

Ryohei Mogi, Meiji University

Spain is known as one of the “lowest-low” fertility countries. Although among researchers there is no consensus why this fertility decline has been happening, many previous studies mentioned the relation between the change of women's employment pattern from work inside house to work outside house and the fertility decreasing. Comparing the proportion of women economically active population and TFR at macro level, it seems to be found the causal relationship between them. When we analyse the effect of women’s employment on their fertility, we need to know the change of employment rate by marital status. However, in the case of Spain, because of less studies about women's work separating marital status and difficulties of access the historical government statistics, it can't be said that the change of women's work patterns is clearly known. So this study describes when, why, and how the women's employment pattern changed in Spain from 20th century using Wave 3 of The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data conducted in 2009. To analyse which factors are related to the change of working pattern, I divided the life course by three stages, which is entry to job market in single, exit from job market at marriage, and re-entry to job market after marriage. The results show that (1)For the entry, newer birth cohort tends to work more than older one, even though 1930s and 1940s birth cohort are almost at same level. (2)For the exit, 1950s birth cohort has less probability than older cohorts. (3)1950s birth cohort has slightly higher probability to re-entry than older. (4)For the change of entry, the transition to democracy in 1975 and economical improvement from 1959 are the key factors, on the other hand, for the exit and re-entry, the transition to democracy influences to the change.