October 16, 2014 | News | New Publication

High Income, Many Children

While Danish women tend to wait until they are well-established professionally and have a secure income before having children, the opposite is the case for German women. The family policies in each of these two countries appear to play an important role in this difference, according to the results of a new study in which researchers compared German and Danish register data on work and childbearing behavior.

Germany and Denmark are well-suited to an investigation into the influence of family policy measures on fertility. As recently as the beginning of the 1980s, both countries had low birth rates of around 1.5 children per woman. Then these two countries decided to pursue very different family policy directions. Germany kept supporting the male breadwinner model. Denmark expanded its child care system, supported flexible work schedule models, and introduced a parental-leave allowance designed to compensate for loss of income during employment breaks.

Thereafter the fertility gap between the two countries became increasingly large: in Denmark the birth rate rose, while in Germany it remained at 1.4 children per woman.

In order to understand which factors might lead a woman to decide for or against becoming a mother, it is not enough to look at the birth rate alone. “We have to look closely at the employment situation of the woman when she has her first, her second, and her third child,” MPIDR researcher Michaela Kreyenfeld said.

Demographer Gunnar Andersson of Stockholm University and Tatjana Mika of the Research Data Centre of the German Pension Fund joined forces to investigate precisely this issue. Their results now appear online in the Journal of Population Research. To get a clearer picture of the relationship between the employment situation of women and her decision to have children, the team of researchers decided to use the so-called “event history method” to examine data on individual women at different stages of their lives. In this case, the researchers looked at register data on the women’s births and their income histories before and after each birth.

They found that in Germany a woman with a high income was less likely to have a first child than a woman who was unemployed or who had a low income. This trend continued with the births of the second and third child: the likelihood that a woman would have a second or a third child was especially large if she was not in paid employment.

The picture in Denmark was very different: unlike in Germany, a woman in Denmark who was unemployed was less likely to decide to have a child. At the same time, a woman was especially likely to have a child if she had a high income—regardless of her age. “We can therefore assume that a Danish woman typically waits until her financial situation is secure before having children,” Michaela Kreyenfeld said. This trend was only slightly less pronounced in the decision to have a second child. It was not until the decision to have a third child that a reversal of this trend could be observed. “This might mean that it is still feasible to combine having two children with full-time employment, but that even in Denmark it is more difficult for a woman to continue working when a third child is born,” the researcher said.    

“We were able to show that a family policy framework that enables women to keep up paid work has a positive influence on the birth rate,” Michaela Kreyenfeld said in conclusion. 

More Information

Welfare state context, female labour-market attachment and childbearing in Germany and Denmark, Andersson G., Kreyenfeld M., Mika T., J Pop Research DOI 10.1007/s12546-014-9135-3 (Original article)

Web page of MPIDR researcher Michaela Kreyenfeld