Seeding the gender revolution: Women’s education and cohort fertility among the baby boom generations

Abstract

In Europe and the United States, women’s educational attainment started to increase around the middle of the twentieth century. The expected implication was fertility decline and postponement, whereas in fact the opposite occurred. We analyse trends in the quantum of cohort fertility among the baby boom generations in 15 countries and how these relate to women’s education. Over the 1901–45 cohorts, the proportion of parents with exactly two children rose steadily and homogeneity in family sizes increased. Progression to a third child and beyond declined in all the countries, continuing the ongoing trends of the fertility transition. In countries with a baby boom, and especially among women with post-primary education, this was compensated for by decreasing childlessness and increasing progression to a second child. These changes, linked to earlier stages of the fertility transition, laid the foundations for later fertility patterns associated with the gender revolution.

Keywords:

• baby boom
• cohort fertility
• childlessness
• education
• Europe
• United States

Notes

1 Please direct all correspondence to Jan Van Bavel, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven, Parkstraat 45 bus 3601, BE-3000 Leuven, Belgium; or by E-mail: [email protected]

2 The work on this paper by J. Van Bavel and M. Klesment was funded by a grant from the Research Council of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, grant number 3H130264). The work by E. Beaujouan, Z. Brzozowska, K. Zeman, and T. Sobotka was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant agreement No. 284238 (EURREP Project). A. Puur was supported by the Estonian Research Council (grant PRG71).