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ABSTRACT
This paper investigates to what extent variation in the distribution across occupational categories in the labour market affects women's demographic behaviour. It specifically explores which occupational categories are more beneficial for women in the transition to first, second and third birth in Spain. Event-history analyses are applied to retrospective data from the Spanish Fertility and Family Survey (1995). The results show that there are differences in women's fertility according to their occupational choice and demonstrate that health and teaching professionals show an advantage in harmonizing work and motherhood in Spain. This finding is consistent with the idea that not only the impact of occupational sex-segregation on women's fertility is explicable by each woman's specific attitudes towards motherhood and career but also by her employment conditions at the workplace. This effect is particularly strong in Spain due to the specific national context of combining family responsibilities and labour force participation.
Acknowledgements
This research is part of a project financed by the National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation of the Ministry of Education and Science (Ref. SEJ2006-03485/SOCI). I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and comments. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the Advisory Group of the FFS programme of comparative research for its permission to use the FFS data on Spain.
Notes
1In Spain, temporary employment increased from 10 percent of the salaried labour force in 1985 to 33.3 percent in 2005, the highest rate in the EU, and has been highly concentrated among young adults and women.
2For the analysis of first births, a time-varying variable for women's education attainment is used. However, most women conclude their studies before the first birth is born and adult education is more an exception than a rule in Spain so the educational level is a fixed covariate for the analysis of second and third births. It is taken as the highest level of education that the woman has successfully completed at the time of the interview.