The Impact of Education on Childlessness in Europe: FFS Evidence

Citation: Beets, G., Dourleijn, E. The Impact of Education on Childlessness in Europe: FFS Evidence.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Impact of Education on Childlessness in Europe: FFS Evidence
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

This study evaluates the characteristics of women to determine which women decide to remain childless. The authors test whether younger birth cohorts, more educated women, and women without a partner will have higher rates of childlessness. Because it is difficult to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, data on total childlessness is used assuming that involuntary childlessness is spread evenly over all social groups. From this retrospective research, 23,660 women who were 35 years of age or older were selected from the Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) of 14 European countries and Canada held between 1988 and 1996. In the overall sample, approximately 11% of these women are childless, varying from 3% in Slovenia to 16% in the Netherlands and Poland. Logistic regressions are used to predict whether a woman will have a child or not. The independent variables included in the analysis were year of birth, educational level (measured in seven categories based on the International Standard Classification of Education), partner status, size of municipality at age 15, number of siblings, parental divorce, religious denomination, and church attendance. Women who were born later have a greater probability of remaining childless in Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Italy only. Because this effect was not significant for all countries, this means that postponement of childbearing does not necessarily lead to childlessness. However, it is possible that the cohorts used in this analysis are not young enough for the effects of delays in childbearing to become apparent. Educational level is a significant predictor of childlessness in Canada, Finland, France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland, but not in any of the other countries. Partner status is significant in all countries except Belgium, indicating that women without a partner more often have no children. When partner status was controlled, education remained significant in Canada, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. This indicates that higher educated women seems to abstain from having children, even if they have a partner, compared to lower educated women. In Italy, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries, the education effect was no longer significant once partner status was controlled, indicating that possibly the reason that higher educated women do not have children is because they do not have a partner. The authors conclude that there are no clear regional patterns in the data. The finding that education is significant combined with the fact that education levels are increasing implies that fertility will not soon rise and will therefore almost certainly remain below replacement levels for the time being.